Effect of a behavioral self-regulation intervention on patient adherence in hemodialysis.

The present study examined the efficacy of a behavioral intervention designed to increase adherence to fluid-intake restrictions among hemodialysis patients. Twenty intervention-group patients were compared with 20 matched control patients on an indicator of fluid-intake adherence at 3 time points. The Group x Time interaction was significant, indicating that patients in the 2 groups exhibited a differential pattern of change in fluid-intake adherence across the follow-up period. The intervention and control groups did not differ significantly in terms of adherence at the initial postintervention period but did differ at the 8-week follow-up. The observed group differences were, in part, due to a trend toward increasingly better adherence in the intervention group and poorer adherence in the control group across the follow-up period.     

Patient Adherence With Medical Treatment Regimens: An Interactive Approach

Inadequate patient adherence to treatment regimens is a ubiquitous problem in health care and carries a profound personal, societal, and economic cost. This article illustrates a general theoretical framework we believe to be useful for the interpretation, conception, and design of adherence research. The core tenet of this framework is that factors that influence adherence can be better understood by considering the interactive effects of patients' characteristics, type of adherence intervention, and characteristics of the illness and medical treatment context. This framework represents an extension and application of previous theory and research from personality, social, and clinical psychology concerning the value of an interactionalist perspective. We illustrate the framework using some of our past work involving treatment adherence among patients with chronic renal failure.     

Creative Fixation is No Laughing Matter: The Effects of Funny and Unfunny Examples on Humor Production

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get “stuck” on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants’ own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.     

Young Children Choose to Inform Previously Knowledgeable Others

Children recognize that people who know more are better informants than those who know less. How does an individual’s prior knowledge affect children’s decisions about whom to inform? In 3 experiments, 3- to 6-year-old children were invited to share a novel piece of information with 1 of 2 potential recipients who differed in their recent history of knowledge. Children tended to inform the previously knowledgeable person rather than the previously ignorant person. This same effect was observed in a 4th experiment when the knowledgeable person stated that she already knew the information the participant had to share. In no case was the opposite pattern observed: Children never chose to inform the person who had known less. These results seem to conflict with equity considerations and may reflect a preference to affiliate with competent social partners.     

Recalling a floor routine: the effects of skill and age on memory for order

Two studies were conducted to examine gymnasts' memory capabilities in relation to skill level (high and low) and age level (6–8 years and 14–16 years). The first experiment consisted of two trials performed 7 days apart. In the first trial, gymnasts were briefly exposed to a twelve‐element floor routine, and were then required to perform the routine in the same serial order. One week later they were again briefly presented the same sequence, but with the fifth and seventh elements missing. The task was to perform the sequence in order, including the missing elements. The second study involved three trials that were conducted on the same day. A ten‐element sequence was briefly presented on the first trial followed by an immediate test of that sequence. One hour later, participants were asked to perform the sequence again (delayed test). An hour following that, the sequence was again presented with two elements missing. The sequence had to be performed with the missing elements. The results indicate that serial position accuracy of a gymnastic floor routine improves with both age and experience, and that the older experienced gymnasts outperformed all the other gymnasts on all phases of the experiments. These results are interpreted within the Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) theory of Long‐term Working Memory. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A replication of the response‐restriction preference assessment

We replicated the response‐restriction (RR) preference assessment and compared results in terms of preference hierarchies to those from free‐operant and multiple stimulus without replacement (MSWO) formats with six children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We also assessed social validity of each format with teachers and clinicians who work with children with ASDs. Complete hierarchies were produced in four of 18 assessments and with MSWO and RR formats only. Results of the social validity assessment varied across raters, with each preference assessment format receiving the highest rating from at least one rater. Results are discussed in terms of practical recommendations and relative to the preference assessment literature as a whole.