Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for generalized anxiety disorder in older adults: a preliminary report

Some evidence suggests that acceptance-based approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may be well-suited to geriatric generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The primary goal of this project was to determine whether ACT was feasible for this population. Seven older primary-care patients with GAD received 12 individual sessions of ACT; another 9 were treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy. No patients dropped out of ACT, and worry and depression improved. Findings suggest that ACT may warrant a large-scale investigation with anxious older adults.     

Generating keywords improves metacomprehension and self-regulation in elementary and middle school children

The ability to monitor understanding of texts, usually referred to as metacomprehension accuracy, is typically quite poor in adult learners; however, recently interventions have been developed to improve accuracy. In two experiments, we evaluated whether generating delayed keywords prior to judging comprehension improved metacomprehension accuracy for children. For sixth and seventh graders, metacomprehension accuracy was greater when generating keywords. By contrast, for fourth graders, metacomprehension accuracy did not differ across conditions. Improved metacomprehension accuracy led to improved regulation of study. The delayed keyword effect in children reported here is discussed in terms of situation model activation.     

Cache protection strategies of a non-social food-caching corvid,Clark’s nutcracker (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Nucifraga</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">columbiana</Emphasis>)

Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana), a non-social corvid, cache much of their food in order to survive periods of resource uncertainty. These caches are at risk as they are subject to pilferage from other animals including conspecifics. Potentially, nutcrackers can ensure the safety of these caches by keeping track of whether they have been observed making a cache and subsequently engage in cache protection strategies—strategies that have been shown by other members of the corvid family (e.g., scrub-jays and ravens). Behaviors including creating more caches, eating a higher proportion of seeds, and re-caching existing compromised sites have been shown in laboratory settings with social corvids and have provided preliminary evidence of the complex cognitive abilities of corvids. In the present study, Clark’s nutcrackers are shown to engage in similar cache protection behaviors when observed by a conspecific. Furthermore, we show that these behaviors are a result of social, rather than associative, cues.     

Acute stress eliminates female advantage in detection of ambiguous negative affect

The human stress response evolved to maximize an individual's probability of survival when threatened. The present study addressed whether physical danger modulates perception of an unrelated ambiguous threat and, if so, to what extent this response is sex- specific. The authors utilized a first-time tandem skydive as a stressor, which had been previously validated as producing a highly-controlled, genuinely stressful environment. In a counter-balanced within-subjects design, participants wore a virtual reality helmet to complete an emotion-identification task during the plane's ascent (stress condition) and in the laboratory (control condition). Participants were presented static male faces morphed between 20-80% aggression, which gradually emerged from degraded images. Using a binary forced-choice design, participants identified each ambiguous face as aggressive or neutral. Results showed that participants characterized emotion more rapidly under stress versus control conditions. Unexpectedly, the results also show that while women were more sensitive to affect ambiguity than men under control conditions, they exhibited a marked decrease in sensitivity equivalent to men while under stress.     

Problematic standard errors and confidence intervals for skewness and kurtosis

Many statistics packages print skewness and kurtosis statistics with estimates of their standard errors. The function most often used for the standard errors (e.g., in SPSS) assumes that the data are drawn from a normal distribution, an unlikely situation. Some textbooks suggest that if the statistic is more than about 2 standard errors from the hypothesized value (i.e., an approximate value for the critical value from the t distribution for moderate or large sample sizes when α = 5%), the hypothesized value can be rejected. This is an inappropriate practice unless the standard error estimate is accurate and the sampling distribution is approximately normal. We show distributions where the traditional standard errors provided by the function underestimate the actual values, often being 5 times too small, and distributions where the function overestimates the true values. Bootstrap standard errors and confidence intervals are more accurate than the traditional approach, although still imperfect. The reasons for this are discussed. We recommend that if you are using skewness and kurtosis statistics based on the 3^rd and 4^th moments, bootstrapping should be used to calculate standard errors and confidence intervals, rather than using the traditional standard. Software in the freeware R for this article provides these estimates.     

Cognitive Effects of Cancer Chemotherapy in Adult Cancer Survivors: Cognitive-Behavioral Management

Problems of memory and attention following cancer chemotherapies have gained increasing research attention in the last 2 decades. The President’s Cancer Panel and the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship formally recognized the problem as a quality of life matter in the 1990s (Ferrell and Hassey in Oncology 11:565–576, 1997; President’s Cancer Panel in Cancer Care Issues in the United States: Quality of Care, Quality of Life, National Cancer Program, National Cancer Institute, 1999). In combination with an aging population, advances in biomedical technologies for detection and treatment of life-threatening cancers, more people than ever are living with cancer or have been diagnosed and treated for cancer. An estimated 10-million individuals living in the U.S. are considered to be in “cancer survivorship” (Institute of Medicine 2005). Given the potential large scope of the problem of cognitive effects of cancer chemotherapies, there is a strong demand to address this survivorship matter and develop methods to optimally manage it. This article will summarize the current knowledge of chemotherapy-related cognitive change and describe a developing cognitive-behavioral treatment that is being studied to aid survivors with chemotherapy-related cognitive problems.