Youth with Chronic Pain and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS): Treatment Mediators of Improvement in Functional Disability

Intensive pain rehabilitation programs are effective in increasing functioning for youth with chronic pain (CP). However, the utility of such programs for youth with CP and co-morbid postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is rarely examined. In addition, studies examining mediators of treatment for CP are sparse. This paper compares treatment outcomes for youth with CP (n?=?117) and youth with CP?+?POTS (n?=?118). Additionally, depression and pain catastrophizing were tested as potential mediators of treatment effects. Significant treatment improvements were found for functional disability, depression, pain catastrophizing, and perceived pain intensity but with no differences between groups. Improvements in depressed mood, pain catastrophizing (helplessness subscale), and pain severity partially mediated functioning improvement. Pain severity was not a significant mediator in the CP?+?POTS group. We concluded that depression and pain catastrophizing, especially the helplessness domain, can impact functioning improvement in adolescents with CP and POTS and are particularly important to target in treatment.     

When preschoolers follow their eyes and older children follow their noses: visuo‐olfactory social affective matching in childhood

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior that most often occurs in a multi‐sensory context. Affective matching tasks have been used across development to investigate how people integrate facial information with other senses. Given the relative affective strength of olfaction and its relevance in mediating social information since birth, we assessed olfactory–visual matching abilities in a group of 140 children between the ages of 3 and 11 years old. We presented one of three odor primes (rose, fish and no‐odor, rated as pleasant or unpleasant by individual children) before a facial choice task (happy vs. disgusted face). Children were instructed to select one of two faces. As expected, children of all ages tended to choose happy faces. Children younger than 5 years of age were biased towards choosing the happy face, irrespective of the odor smelled. After age 5, an affective matching strategy guided children's choices. Smelling a pleasant odor predicted the choice of happy faces, whereas smelling the unpleasant or fish odor predicted the choice of disgusted faces. The present study fills a gap in the developmental literature on olfactory‐visual affective strategies that affect decision‐making, and represents an important step towards understanding the underlying developmental processes that shape the typical social mind.     

Das Absetzen antiandrogener Medikation im ambulanten Setting

In the Forensic Therapeutic Outpatient department in Berlin a total of n?=?20 individually justified, therapeutically accompanied withdrawals from antiandrogenic treatment have been implemented. The sample was compared with n?=?20 patients under antiandrogenic treatment. Patients with withdrawal have been significantly older, than patients without withdrawal. No differences were found regarding their duration of further imprisonment and standardized risk-assessment (HCR-20, LSI-R, Static-99, Stable-2007, PCL-R). Firsts results of the monitoring of the withdrawals indicate, that the symptom-checklist SCL-90-R is not appropriate for that purpose. However, post-hoc both known sexual reoffendings could be identified by the Massachusetts General Hospital Sexual Functioning Questionnaire. By means of practical experience results are getting discussed.     

Synaesthesia in a logographic language: the colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings

Studies of linguistic synaesthesias in English have shown a range of fine-grained language mechanisms governing the associations between colours on the one hand, and graphemes, phonemes and words on the other. However, virtually nothing is known about how synaesthetic colouring might operate in non-alphabetic systems. The current study shows how synaesthetic speakers of Mandarin Chinese come to colour the logographic units of their language. Both native and non-native Chinese speakers experienced synaesthetic colours for characters, and for words spelled in the Chinese spelling systems of Pinyin and Bopomo. We assessed the influences of lexical tone and Pinyin/Bopomo spelling and showed that synaesthetic colours are assigned to Chinese words in a non-random fashion. Our data show that Chinese-speaking synaesthetes with very different native languages can exhibit both differences and similarities in the ways in which they come to colour their Chinese words.     

Becoming happier takes both a will and a proper way: an experimental longitudinal intervention to boost well-being

An 8-month-long experimental study examined the immediate and longer term effects of regularly practicing two assigned positive activities (expressing optimism and gratitude) on well-being. More important, this intervention allowed us to explore the impact of two metafactors that are likely to influence the success of any positive activity: whether one self-selects into the study knowing that it is about increasing happiness and whether one invests effort into the activity over time. Our results indicate that initial self-selection makes a difference, but only in the two positive activity conditions, not the control, and that continued effort also makes a difference, but, again, only in the treatment conditions. We conclude that happiness interventions are more than just placebos, but that they are most successful when participants know about, endorse, and commit to the intervention.     

The cognitive and hedonic costs of dwelling on achievement-related negative experiences: implications for enduring happiness and unhappiness

Increasing evidence suggests that multiple cognitive and motivational processes underlie individual differences in happiness (Lyubomirsky, 2001, 2008). One behavior that is associated with (un)happiness is self-reflection or dwelling. We hypothesized that unhappy individuals would be inclined to dwell about themselves, and that this behavior would have a variety of adverse consequences. Three studies tested the prediction that, unlike their happier peers, unhappy participants would be sensitive to unfavorable achievement feedback, likely to dwell about its implications and, hence, show impaired attention during important academic tasks. The results of Studies 1 and 2 showed that unhappy participants who had "failed" relative to peers subsequently displayed increased interfering thoughts; spent the most time performing a portion of the graduate record examination; and later demonstrated impaired reading comprehension. Study 3 experimentally induced versus inhibiting dwelling and found that the manipulation only impacted unhappy students. Implications of our results for the consequences of dwelling for work and social functioning, as well as for detracting from enduring happiness, are discussed.     

Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences

Sensory and cognitive mechanisms allow stimuli to be perceived with properties relating to sight, sound, touch, etc, and ensure, for example, that visual properties are perceived as visual experiences, rather than sounds, tastes, smells, etc. Theories of normal development can be informed by cases where this modularity breaks down, in a condition known as synaesthesia. Conventional wisdom has held that this occurs extremely rarely (0.05% of births) and affects women more than men. Here we present the first test of synaesthesia prevalence with sampling that does not rely on self-referral, and which uses objective tests to establish genuineness. We show that (a) the prevalence of synaesthesia is 88 times higher than previously assumed, (b) the most common variant is coloured days, (c) the most studied variant (grapheme-colour synaesthesia)--previously believed most common--is prevalent at 1%, and (d) there is no strong asymmetry in the distribution of synaesthesia across the sexes. Hence, we suggest that female biases reported earlier likely arose from (or were exaggerated by) sex differences in self-disclosure.     

Binding, relational memory, and recall of naturalistic events: a developmental perspective

This research was an investigation of children's performance on a task that requires memory binding. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults viewed complex pictures and were tested on memory for isolated parts in the pictures and on the part combinations (combination condition). The results suggested improvement in memory for the combinations between the ages of 4 and 6 years but not in memory for the isolated parts. In Experiments 2 and 3, the authors also examined the developmental relationship between performance in the combination condition and free recall of a naturalistic event, finding preliminary evidence that performance on a memory task that requires binding is positively related to performance in episodic memory.     

Midazolam amnesia and short-term/working memory processes

We examined whether midazolam impairs short-term/working memory processes. We hypothesize that prior dissociations in midazolam's effects on short-term/working memory tasks and episodic memory tasks arise because midazolam has a larger effect on episodic memory processes than on short-term/working memory processes. To examine these issues, .03 mg/kg of participant's bodyweight of midazolam was administered in a double-blind placebo-controlled within-participant design. Performance on the digit span and category generation/recall tasks was examined. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that: (1) midazolam impaired performance on the digit span task; (2) midazolam did not impair performance on the category generation task; (3) midazolam impaired performance on the category recall task; and (4) midazolam's effect on category recall was four times as large as its effect on digit span. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that midazolam did not impair digit span performance when the digit span task was administered at a later time. These results suggest that midazolam can impair short-term/working memory processes, but these effects are substantially smaller than midazolam's effect on episodic memory processes. Moreover, they demonstrate that conscious awareness of materials during study is not sufficient to produce episodic memory.