Mortality-Related Differences and Changes in Episodic Memory Among the Oldest Old: Evidence From a Population-Based Sample of Nonagenarians

We examined cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in episodic memory performance related to impending death among a group of very old people, aged 90–101 years. Participants were assessed at 3 measurement points across a 6-year interval. Three groups were identified: those who survived the entire follow-up period (n =40), those who died before the first follow-up (n =44), and those who died after the first follow-up (n =14). Participants completed a battery of episodic memory tasks consisting of face recognition, word recognition, word recall, and object recall with selective reminding. Those who survived performed better than those who were going to die in object recall at baseline. A Cox regression analysis, controlling age, revealed that object recall performance was significantly related to subsequent mortality status. Longitudinal analyses demonstrated significant 3-year decline for both face recognition and object recall, but no evidence of differential decline as a function of mortality group. Thus, longitudinal changes in memory preceding death were not as pronounced as the corresponding cross-sectional differences in this very old sample. In general, the results suggest that mortality-related memory deficits are present in extreme old age, although these deficits are relatively small and task-specific.     

The impact of accountability on teachers’ assessments of student performance: a social cognitive analysis

Research on teachers’ judgments of student performance has demonstrated that educational assessments may be biased or may more correctly take the achievements of students into account depending on teachers’ motivations while making the judgment. Building on research on social judgment formation the present investigation examined whether the accountability of teachers has an influence on judgment formation. We predicted that unaccountable teachers would activate social categories and use them for the assessment, whereas accountable teachers’ attention would be directed to individual attributes of students. Using secondary school teachers as participants, three studies investigating teachers’ assessments, inferences and memory for students’ attributes supported these hypotheses. Thus, accountability appears to be a moderator of social information processing and judgment formation in the domain of educational assessments.     

Remembering Numbers in Old Age: Mnemonic Training Versus Self-Generated Strategy Training

The effectiveness of two memory training programs designed to enhance four-digit number recall was examined in 90 healthy older adults. One group received instruction and training in the number-consonant mnemonic, whereas another group was instructed to adopt their own encoding and retrieval strategies to enhance number recall. Also, a control group receiving no training between testing occasions was included. The criterion task was administered according to the Buschke selective reminding procedure. Posttest performance was evaluated with and without cognitive support for remembering (i.e., verbal cues). Under unsupported conditions, the mnemonic group improved number recall following training and the self-generated strategy group showed a tendency in the same direction. When support was provided, group differences in favor of the two training groups increased. In addition, no training-related gains were observed in two verbal transfer tasks. The relatively similar patterns of gains in the two intervention groups were discussed in terms of advantages and disadvantages in the two training regimens balancing each other.     

Recall of Subject-Performed Tasks,Verbal Tasks,and Cognitive Activities Across the Adult Life Span: Parallel Age-Related Deficits

Motor activity during encoding of verbal information has been suggested to reduce age differences in episodic memory. Here we examined memory for sentences encoded with enactment (SPTs, subject-performed tasks) or without enactment (VTs, verbal tasks) in a population-based sample consisting of 10 groups ranging in age from 35 to 80 years (N = 1000). Memory performance was assessed by immediate free- and category-cued recall. Degree of clustering was measured by the adjusted ratio of clustering score. Recall of cognitive activities served as a complementary measure of memory for performed tasks. Sentence recall showed a gradual decline across age, of about the same magnitude for SPTs and VTs, in both free and cued recall. Clustering in free recall was higher for SPTs than for VTs, but there were no age differences in clustering. A pattern of gradual decline from age 35 was observed also in activity recall, regardless of whether the activities involved motor activity or not. Across the memory measures, differences in education accounted for all of the age-related variance in performance among the younger (35-55 years) but not the older groups (60-80 years), suggesting that genuine aging effects in these measures are more prominent in old age. Together, the results indicate that age differences in episodic memory, in line with most, if not all, types of encoding support, generalize across the performed/non-performed distinction.     

Birth Order Position and Prosocial Tendencies

This study investigated the relationship between psychological birth order position and different types and levels of prosocial tendencies. An ex postfacto, between-family research design was used. Data on prosocial tendencies were obtained from 888 college students (females = 80.4%, mean age = 20.94 yrs, SD = 2.83; males = 19.6%, mean age = 21.62 yrs, SD = 2.44). Participants completed a biographical questionnaire as well as the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (Carlo & Randall, 2002). Data were analysed to compare and contrast prosocial tendencies between demographics using parametric ANOVAs, t tests and the Mann-Whitney Test. Significant differences in prosocial tendency scores were only found between middle-borns and last-borns on altruism, with middle-borns scoring significantly higher in prosocial tendencies than last-borns. There is no evidence to suggest that a definitive link between prosocial tendencies and birth order exists in this study.     

Negative Life Events and Mental Ill-Health Among Women: A Prospective Study of the Main, Moderating and Mediating Effect of Sense of Coherence

Antonovsky’s original observations of mental health among women who had survived Nazi concentration camps became the start for the formulation of sense of coherence (SOC) and suggested that the experience of negative life events can be a risk-factor for, whilst SOC can be a protection-factor against, mental ill-health. In the present study, 1,012 women responded to a questionnaire at two points in time that measured mental ill-health, SOC and the experience of negative life events. The results showed that women who had recently experienced negative life events had higher levels of mental ill-health compared to women who had not recently experienced any negative life events. SOC was also found to have a main effect on mental ill-health but neither moderated nor mediated the relation between negative life events and mental ill-health. Suggestions for future research and practical implications are given.     

Evidence for the integration of audiovisual emotional information at the perceptual level of processing

The present aim was to investigate how emotional expressions presented on an unattended channel affect the recognition of the attended emotional expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, facial and vocal expressions were simultaneously presented as stimulus combinations. The emotions (happiness, anger, or emotional neutrality) expressed by the face and voice were either congruent or incongruent. Subjects were asked to attend either to the visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) channel and recognise the emotional expression. The result showed that the ignored emotional expressions significantly affected the processing of attended signals as measured by recognition accuracy and response speed. In general, attended signals were recognised more accurately and faster in congruent than in incongruent combinations. In Experiment 3, possibility for a perceptual-level integration was eliminated by presenting the response-relevant and response-irrelevant signals separated in time. In this situation, emotional information presented on the nonattended channel ceased to affect the processing of emotional signals on the attended channel. The present results are interpreted to provide evidence for the view that facial and vocal emotional signals are integrated at the perceptual level of information processing and not at the later response-selection stages.     

Second language learning in elementary and high school students

Abstract

A cross-sectional approach covering an age range of 10 years was used to compare the developmental changu in picture naming md number naming of 77 high scbool md 74 elementary students who came from Germany to Sweden. For the two different groups of students, length of residcoce in Swedcn was the main independent variable and reaction time on simple naming tasks of pictures and numbers in German and Swedish was the dependent variable. The results provide evidence that elementuy school students achieved a balanced form of bilingualism 2 years earlier than high school students on the picture naming task. Naming two-digit numbers was shown to be a relatively difficult task for elementary school children, as indiated by markedly prolonged response times. Despite this fact, after about 4 years of residence in Sweden, both groups of students reached language ballaced on this task in that they showed identical response times in both languages. The results on the picture naming task were taken as support for the optimal age hypothesis.     

Entwicklungstendenzen psychotherapeutischer Praxis und Forschung

This review presents an analysis of articles in the journal “Psychotherapeut” during the years 2000 and 2001 with the focus on new efforts in the field of psychotherapeutic practice and research. The main topics of the journal are the presentation of new therapeutic approaches, some of them integrating different theoretical orientations, and the emphasis on the therapeutic relationship as a specific contribution to the process and the results of psychotherapy. In addition, this article presents a survey of the various subjects in psychotherapeutic research including a) the application and testing of new questionnaires to measure the effectiveness and the process of psychotherapy and b) research in the epidemiology of selected forms of stress, their consequences and lasting effects.     

“You be Sure Now to be Honest in Your Assessment”: Teaching and Learning Self-Assessment

When taking part in the everyday practices of the school, the pupil ‘metalearns’ implicit institutional knowledge about educability and its proper criteria. The aim of this study was to examine one important school practice, self-assessment: How is self-assessment ‘taught’ to children, what is assessed through the self-assessment method, how is self-assessment introduced to children, and how do they perceive those situations? The ethnographic research focused on the classroom situations of one class of first-graders during one autumn term. The data were collected by means of regular observation, video recordings, short interviews, documents, and informal conversations with the teachers, pupils and parents. The findings indicated that the frequency of self-assessment episodes was particularly high in the domains of writing, mathematics, and social skills and behaviour; self-assessment situations were a ‘natural’ part of everyday teaching practices. According to our observations, the result of the self-assessment was considerably explicit. The teacher made sure that the pupils assessed their performance in the way she wanted. The teaching of self-assessment also teaches the child what assessment criteria the school regards as important and how well the child fulfils these criteria. According to our analysis, these important assessment criteria are objectiveness (compliance to standard), honesty, and individuality (a product that ‘looks like’ its author). The children practised self-assessment actively and were apparently capable of assessing their own performance. Our results suggest that ‘the self’ in self-assessment is paradoxical: you can assess yourself as long as you assess the right things in the right way.