Cognitive Functioning,Behavior, and Quality of Life After Stroke in Childhood

Rationale: To provide a better understanding of cognitive functioning, motor outcome, behavior and quality of life after childhood stroke and to study the relationship between variables expected to influence rehabilitation and outcome (age at stroke, time elapsed since stroke, lateralization, location and size of lesion).

Methods: Children who suffered from stroke between birth and their eighteenth year of life underwent an assessment consisting of cognitive tests (WISC-III, WAIS-R, K-ABC, TAP, Rey-Figure, German Version of the CVLT) and questionnaires (Conner's Scales, KIDSCREEN).

Results: Twenty-one patients after stroke in childhood (15 males, mean 11;11 years, SD 4;3, range 6;10–21;2) participated in the study. Mean Intelligence Quotients (IQ) were situated within the normal range (mean Full Scale IQ 96.5, range IQ 79–129). However, significantly more patients showed deficits in various cognitive domains than expected from a healthy population (Performance IQ p?=?.000; Digit Span p?=?.000, Arithmetic's p?=?.007, Divided Attention p?=?.028, Alertness p?=?.002). Verbal IQ was significantly better than Performance IQ in 13 of 17 patients, independent of the hemispheric side of lesion. Symptoms of ADHD occurred more often in the patients' sample than in a healthy population (learning difficulties/inattention p?=?.000; impulsivity/hyperactivity p?=?.006; psychosomatics p?=?.006). Certain aspects of quality of life were reduced (autonomy p?=?.003; parents' relation p?=?.003; social acceptance p?=?.037). Three patients had a right-sided hemiparesis, mean values of motor functions of the other patients were slightly impaired (sequential finger movements p?=?.000, hand alternation p?=?.001, foot tapping p?=?.043). In patients without hemiparesis, there was no relation between the lateralization of lesion and motor outcome. Lesion that occurred in the midst of childhood (5–10 years) led to better cognitive outcome than lesion in the very early (0–5 years) or late childhood (10–18 years). Other variables such as presence of seizure, elapsed time since stroke and size of lesion had a small to no impact on prognosis.

Conclusion: Moderate cognitive and motor deficits, behavioral problems, and impairment in some aspects of quality of life frequently remain after stroke in childhood. Visuospatial functions are more often reduced than verbal functions, independent of the hemispheric side of lesion. This indicates a functional superiority of verbal skills compared to visuospatial skills in the process of recovery after brain injury. Compared to the cognitive outcome following stroke in adults, cognitive sequelae after childhood stroke do indicate neither the lateralization nor the location of the lesion focus. Age at stroke seems to be the only determining factor influencing cognitive outcome.     

The role of career values for work engagement during the transition to working life

The present longitudinal study examined the role of career values for work engagement across the transition from university education to working life. Finnish young adults reported on their career values (intrinsic, rewards, and security values) at the age of 23; and the degree of person–organization fit (value congruence, and congruence between one's education and the job), subjective income and economic stress two years later at the age of 25. Work engagement was assessed at both measurement points. Structural equation modeling results showed, first, that intrinsic but not rewards or security career values were related to work engagement. Second, value congruence and having a job which was related to young adults' educational field were positively associated with work engagement. Our findings suggest that along with person–organization fit, intrinsic career values are a significant factor in shaping and facilitating successful transitions from education to work.     

The application of psychodynamic ideas to professional dance training

Concern about the welfare of professional dance students is growing as it becomes clearer that the training is not producing emotionally healthy and mature young people. Psychodynamic ideas and concepts offer a means of analysing the problems of the training and indicating where change needs to be implemented. This paper looks first at the areas of adolescent development towards separation, autonomy, the creation of peer relationships and the development of sexual identity and awareness, and shows how traditional dance training fails to facilitate their growth. The paper then discusses envy and competition and argues that they need to be addressed within dance training if they are not to be so destructive. The paper then suggests that group theory could enable the better use of the dance class. Finally, the idea of the body storyline is used to show that dance training has the capacity to have a creative and remedial effect on students, if training institutions provide a sufficiently facilitating environment.     

Contractarianism and Secondary Direct Moral Standing for Marginal Humans and Animals

It is commonly thought that neo-Hobbesian contractarianism cannot yield direct moral standing for marginal humans and animals. However, it has been argued that marginal humans and animals can have a form of direct moral standing under neo-Hobbesian contractarianism: secondary moral standing. I will argue that, even if such standing is direct, this account is unsatisfactory because it is counterintuitive and fragile.     

Terrorism as Collective Communication: The Collective Communication Model of Terrorism (CCMT)

This paper proposes that the psychological and behavioral effects of terrorist threat can be understood as a collective communication process that occurs between terrorists and their potential victims. Based on classic communication theory, terrorists are regarded as the senders of a specific collective message (such as ‘stop oppressing our culture’); a terrorist incident as the collective message itself (through its performance, modality and targets); and the potential victims as its collective receivers (who interpret the intention of the attack as a function of their pre-existing attributes, such as traits or salient social identities). The perception of terrorism as a dynamic and interactive process between collective senders, messages and receivers opens new theoretical perspectives regarding whether (a) terrorism can be successful in reaching its collective aim; (b) if it is interpreted as rational or irrational; and (c) how to counteract the vicious, cyclical relationship between terrorism and counter-terrorism. Previous findings on the psychology of terrorism can be organized within this theoretical framework, and the psychological impact of varying attributes of the perpetrators (senders), incident (message), and the reactions of the potential victims (receivers) systematically investigated. A series of self-conducted studies are also reviewed and found to provide direct support for the collective communication model of terrorism.     

Fit of Political Skill to the Work Context: A Two‐Study Investigation

A two‐study investigation was designed to examine the role of job type (i.e. fit of political skill to work context) as a contextual moderator of the political skill–job performance relationship. Specifically, it was hypothesised that political skill operates most effectively in enterprising job contexts, and thus is most predictive of job performance in such contexts, but political skill would demonstrate no relationship with job performance in job contexts that did not emphasise interpersonal interaction and effectiveness. In Study 1, enterprising job demands interacted with political skill to affect job performance. That is, political skill positively and significantly predicted job performance in enterprising job contexts, as hypothesised. Study 2 selected one specific job context (i.e. insurance sales) high in enterprising job demands, and hypothesised that political skill would significantly predict objective measures of insurance sales (i.e. sales volume, performance‐based income, performance‐based commission rate, and performance‐based status). The results demonstrated significant predictive effects of political skill (i.e. beyond age, sex, education level, tenure on the job, and experience in sales) on all four measures of sales performance. Contributions and implications of this research, strengths and limitations, and directions for future study are discussed.     

Cognitive Performance as a Function of Sex and Handedness: An Evaluation of the Levy Hypothesis

Investigated incidence of left-handedness and non-right-handedness in a sample of 9th-grade students (n=313). In comparison, incidence among undergraduates is underestimated. Gitld were not significantly more right-handed than boys in the 9th grade sample but were significantly (p<01) more right-handed than boys in a sample of math students, grades 9-11 (n = 1097). Handedness did not affect math achievement (Test of Academic Progress), verbal (Quick Word Test) or spatial (Space Relations Test of the Differential Aptitude Test) performance in the 9th (n = 108) or 10th (n = 75) grade students, for 11th grade students (n = 98) a significant sex-by-handedness-by-measures (verbal-spatial) interaction was found (p<05). Results did not support the hypothesis of Levy's that left-handedness decreases spatial performance and benefits verbal performance, nor did the results support the further hypothesis that the cognitive pattern of higher verbal than spatial performance often considered characteristic of females can be attributed to more bilateral cerebral verbal function in females as in left-handers.     

Lexical leverage: category knowledge boosts real‐time novel word recognition in 2‐year‐olds

Recent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label–object mappings in real time. We initially identified categorical domains for which individual 24‐month‐old infants have relatively higher and lower levels of knowledge, irrespective of overall vocabulary size. Next, we taught infants novel words in these higher and lower knowledge domains and then asked if their subsequent real‐time recognition of these items varied as a function of their category knowledge. While our participants successfully acquired the novel label–object mappings in our task, there were important differences in the way infants recognized these words in real time. Namely, infants showed more robust recognition of high (vs. low) domain knowledge words. These findings suggest that dense semantic structure facilitates early word learning and real‐time novel word recognition.