The relationship between acceptance,fatigue, and subjective cognitive impairment in hematologic cancer survivors

Background/Objective: Cancer and its treatment can have a detrimental impact on psychological well-being. Acceptance as the basis of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has shown beneficial effects on depression and anxiety. However, its relationship to fatigue and cognitive impairment has not been investigated. A protective effect of acceptance may open up a new target for psychological intervention.Method: A cross-sectional postal survey was undertaken. 922 hematological cancer survivors (≥ 2.5 years post diagnosis) were recruited through two regional cancer registries in Germany. Acceptance (AAQ-II), fatigue (BFI) and subjective cognitive impairment (AFI) were assessed.Results: Higher levels of acceptance were negatively associated with fatigue and subjective cognitive impairment (R²= .34 and R²= .26, respectively). The relationship between fatigue and fatigue-related impairment of daily life was weaker for survivors with high acceptance.Conclusions: Acceptance is strongly associated with fatigue and subjective cognitive impairment. ACT may be useful to reduce symptoms of fatigue and subjective cognitive impairment in cancer survivors.     

Specifying the boundary conditions of the multimedia effect: The influence of content and its distribution between text and pictures

It was investigated whether the beneficial effect of picture presentation might be influenced by the content conveyed through text and pictures and the way information is distributed between them. Ninety‐nine students learnt in five between‐subjects learning conditions (i.e., text with spatial contents plus pictures, text with visual contents plus pictures, only text with spatial contents, only text with visual contents, only picture) about a tourist centre and a holiday farm. Results showed that pictures (i.e., maps) were beneficial for learning if spatial knowledge had to be acquired, but did not support learning when non‐spatial, visual knowledge had to be acquired. Furthermore, a high overlap of spatial information in text and picture was helpful, which can be explained by the assumption that learning is a text‐guided process. On the other hand, regarding non‐spatial visual information, a high text‐picture overlap did not influence learning, probably because text alone was sufficient for acquiring visual knowledge. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Thought suppression enhances memory bias for threat material

The current study examined the impact of thought suppression on indices of anxiety, including memory indices (implicit and explicit memory biases) and physiological indices (heart rate). The participants, 81 undergraduates scoring in the top quartile of a self-report measure of trait anxiety, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups: thought suppression (TS), thought concentration (TC), and thought wandering (TW). The TC and TW groups were included to control for the effects of effortful processing and exposure to stimuli, respectively. One block of threat words and one block of neutral words were presented under conditions of cognitive load, and participants' physiological responses and memory biases were measured. The thought suppression group exhibited an enhanced overall memory bias for threat words, driven by an elevated explicit memory bias, relative to the other two groups, a result that has implications for ironic processes theory and may inform information-processing models of anxiety.     

Optimizing inhibitory learning during exposure therapy

Prevailing models of exposure therapy for phobias and anxiety disorders construe level of fear throughout exposure trials as an index of corrective learning. However, the evidence, reviewed herein, indicates that neither the degree by which fear reduces nor the ending fear level predict therapeutic outcome. Developments in the theory and science of fear extinction, and learning and memory, indicate that 'performance during training' is not commensurate with learning at the process level. Inhibitory learning is recognized as being central to extinction and access to secondary inhibitory associations is subject to influences such as context and time, rather than fear during extinction training. Strategies for enhancing inhibitory learning, and its retrieval over time and context, are reviewed along with their clinical implications for exposure therapy and directions for future research.     

Training parents to help their children read: A randomized control trial

Background . Low levels of literacy and high levels of behaviour problems in middle childhood often co‐occur. These persistent difficulties pose a risk to academic and social development, leading to social exclusion in adulthood. Although parent‐training programmes have been shown to be effective in enabling parents to support their children's development, very few parent interventions offer a combination of behavioural and literacy training. Aims . This paper (1) reports on a prevention programme which aimed to tackle behaviour and literacy problems in children at the beginning of school, and (2) presents the effects of the intervention on children's literacy. Sample . One hundred and four 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children selected from eight schools in an inner city disadvantaged community in London participated in the intervention. Methods . This is a randomized control trial with pre‐ and post‐measurements designed to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention. The behavioural intervention consisted of the ‘Incredible Years’ group parenting programme combined with a new programme designed to train parents to support their children's reading at home. Results . Analyses demonstrated a significant effect of the intervention on children's word reading and writing skills, as well as parents' use of reading strategies with their children. Conclusion . A structured multicomponent preventive package delivered with attention to fidelity can enable parents to support their children's reading at home and increase their literacy skills. Together with the improvement in child behaviour, these changes could improve the life chances of children in disadvantaged communities.     

Grasp cueing shows obligatory attention to action goals

To understand the grounding of cognitive mechanisms in perception and action, we used a simple detection task to determine how long it takes to predict an action goal from the perception of grasp postures and whether this prediction is under strategic control. Healthy observers detected visual probes over small or large objects after seeing either a precision grip or a power grip posture. Although the posture was uninformative it induced attention shifts to the grasp-congruent object within 350 ms. When the posture predicted target appearance over the grasp-incongruent object, observers' initial strategic allocation of attention was overruled by the congruency between grasp and object. These results might help to characterize the human mirror neuron system and reveal how joint attention tunes early perceptual processes toward action prediction.     

Unemployment, Social Capital, and Subjective Well-Being

It has been shown in past research that unemployment has a large negative impact on subjective well-being of individuals. In this paper, I explore whether and to what extent people with more social capital are sheltered from the harmful effects of unemployment. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984–2004, I find that social capital is an important predictor of well-being levels, but there is no evidence that it moderates the effect of unemployment on well-being. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research given. This paper was written while I was visiting scholar at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, MI. I am grateful to the Institute for its hospitality, to Andrew Clark, Andrew Oswald and three anonymous referees for valuable comments, and to the German Socio Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin, for providing the data.     

Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.     

Should the probabilities count?

When facing a choice between saving one person and saving many, some people have argued that fairness requires us to decide without aggregating numbers; rather we should decide by coin toss or some form of lottery, or alternatively we should straightforwardly save the greater number but justify this in a non-aggregating contractualist way. This paper expands the debate beyond well-known number cases to previously under-considered probability cases, in which not (only) the numbers of people, but (also) the probabilities of success for saving people vary. It is shown that, in these latter cases, both the coin toss and the lottery lead to what is called an awkward conclusion, which makes probabilities count in a problematic way. Attempts to avoid this conclusion are shown to lead into difficulties as well. Finally, it is shown that while the greater number method cannot be justified on contractualist grounds for probability cases, it may be replaced by another decision method which is so justified. This decision method is extensionally equivalent to maximising expected value and seems to be the least problematic way of dealing with probability cases in a non-aggregating manner.