Evaluation of a Brief Mindfulness Program for People with Multiple Sclerosis Delivered in the Community Over Five Years

This study evaluated the effectiveness, change mechanisms, and sustainability of a brief mindfulness intervention for people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) delivered in the community through a frontline service over five years. Participants were 126 PwMS. A single intervention condition design was used with pre-intervention, post-intervention and 2-month follow-up assessments. The primary outcome was distress. Secondary outcomes were perceived stress, quality of life (QoL) and fatigue, and the proposed change mechanisms: mindfulness, self-compassion, psychological inflexibility. Intention-to-treat analyses showed the primary outcome, distress (Cohen’s d = .25), and all secondary outcomes improved: perceived stress (d = .38), mental health QoL (d = .39), physical health QoL (d = .47), fatigue (d = .30), mindfulness (d = .29), self-compassion (d = .37), psychological flexibility (d = .44). Distress, stress and perceived stress continued to improve post-intervention to follow-up. Mindfulness emerged as a temporal mediator of perceived stress (BCa 95% CI). Self-compassion mediated concurrent improvements in distress, perceived stress, fatigue and physical health QoL, while greater psychological flexibility mediated concurrent reductions in distress (BCa 95% CI). Mindfulness home practice was unrelated to improvements on all outcomes except a marginal association with mindfulness. Of the socio-demographic and illness factors, lower disease severity predicted improvements in physical health QoL (p = .046). Improvements in outcomes were supported by qualitative feedback and participant satisfaction ratings. Twenty-one groups were offered with good participant engagement and wide geographical reach, suggesting sustained feasibility of the Mindfulness for MS program over five years. Findings support the delivery of the Mindfulness for MS program through a community-based service in partnership with a local university.

     

Early communicative gestures and play as predictors of language development in children born with and without family risk for dyslexia

The present study investigated early communicative gestures, play, and language skills in children born with family risk for dyslexia (FR) and a control group of children without this inheritable risk at ages 12, 15, 18, and 24 months. Participants were drawn from the Tromsø Longitudinal study of Dyslexia (TLD) which follows children's cognitive and language development from age 12 months through Grade 2 in order to identify early markers of developmental dyslexia. Results showed that symbolic play and parent reported play at age 12 months and communicative gestures at age 15 months explained 61% of the variance in productive language at 24 months in the FR group. These early nonlinguistic measures seem to be potentially interesting markers of later language development in children born at risk for dyslexia.     

Model-Implied Instrumental Variable—Generalized Method of Moments (MIIV-GMM) Estimators for Latent Variable Models

The common maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for structural equation models (SEMs) has optimal asymptotic properties under ideal conditions (e.g., correct structure, no excess kurtosis, etc.) that are rarely met in practice. This paper proposes model-implied instrumental variable – generalized method of moments (MIIV-GMM) estimators for latent variable SEMs that are more robust than ML to violations of both the model structure and distributional assumptions. Under less demanding assumptions, the MIIV-GMM estimators are consistent, asymptotically unbiased, asymptotically normal, and have an asymptotic covariance matrix. They are “distribution-free,” robust to heteroscedasticity, and have overidentification goodness-of-fit J-tests with asymptotic chi-square distributions. In addition, MIIV-GMM estimators are “scalable” in that they can estimate and test the full model or any subset of equations, and hence allow better pinpointing of those parts of the model that fit and do not fit the data. An empirical example illustrates MIIV-GMM estimators. Two simulation studies explore their finite sample properties and find that they perform well across a range of sample sizes.     

Behavioral and Emotional Problems on the Teacher’s Report Form: A Cross-National,Cross-Clinic Comparative Analysis of Gender Dysphoric Children and Adolescents

For gender dysphoric children and adolescents, the school environment may be challenging due to peer social ostracism and rejection. To date, information on the psychological functioning and the quality of peer relations in gender dysphoric children and adolescents has been studied via parental report, peer sociometric methods, and social interactions in laboratory play groups. The present study was the first cross-national investigation that assessed behavior and emotional problems and the quality of peer relations, both measured by the Teacher’s Report Form (TRF), in a sample of 728 gender dysphoric patients (554 children, 174 adolescents), who were referred to specialized gender identity clinics in the Netherlands and Canada. The gender dysphoric adolescents had significantly more teacher-reported emotional and behavioral problems than the gender dysphoric children. In both countries, gender dysphoric natal boys had poorer peer relations and more internalizing than externalizing problems compared to the gender dysphoric natal girls. Furthermore, there were significant between-clinic differences: both the children and the adolescents from Canada had more emotional and behavioral problems and a poorer quality of peer relations than the children and adolescents from the Netherlands. In conclusion, gender dysphoric children and adolescents showed the same pattern of emotional and behavioral problems in both countries. The extent of behavior and emotional problems was, however, higher in Canada than in the Netherlands, which appeared, in part, an effect of a poorer quality of peer relations. Per Bronfenbrenner’s (American Psychologist, 32, 513–531, 1977) ecological model of human development and well-being, we consider various interpretations of the cross-national, cross-clinic differences on TRF behavior problems at the level of the family, the peer group, and the culture at large.     

In Defense of Mainstream Conservatism: A Response to Crouse and Stalker

This article provides a response to Crouse and Stalker's reply to my commentary (Thomas, 2013) on their article titled “Do Right‐Wing Authoritarian Beliefs Originate from Psychological Conflict?” (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24, 25–44). The authors' critical remarks regarding my commentary are addressed, and recommendations are offered for a more cautious use of psychoanalytic theory and results derived from The Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1998) for labeling persons with mainstream conservative political beliefs as being “psychopathological” or “right‐wing authoritarians.” Such assertions regarding the personality characteristics of political conservatives are particularly troubling, since the authors' conclusions were purely speculative, and they collected neither clinical nor empirical data on patients or research subjects with so‐called right‐wing authoritarian personalities to support their speculations.     

Making Common Sense of Vaccines: An Example of Discussing the Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine with the Public

Researchers have iterated that the future of synthetic biology and biotechnology lies in novel consumer applications of crossing biology with engineering. However, if the new biology’s future is to be sustainable, early and serious efforts must be made towards social sustainability. Therefore, the crux of new applications of synthetic biology and biotechnology is public understanding and acceptance. The RASVaccine is a novel recombinant design not found in nature that re-engineers a common bacteria (Salmonella) to produce a strong immune response in humans. Synthesis of the RASVaccine has the potential to improve public health as an inexpensive, non-injectable product. But how can scientists move forward to create a dialogue of creating a ‘common sense’ of this new technology in order to promote social sustainability? This paper delves into public issues raised around these novel technologies and uses the RASVaccine as an example of meeting the public with a common sense of its possibilities and limitations.     

Hand selection for object grasping is influenced by recent motor history

Action selection processes such as those that underlie decisions about which hand to use for upcoming actions are fundamental to adaptive motor behavior. Previous research has shown that people grasp objects in ways that reflect anticipated task demands, as well as recent movement experience. However, very few studies have addressed the possible influence of recent motor history on hand selection. In the present study, participants grasped and placed objects using either their left or right hand. The results showed shorter response times to initiate successive actions when hand was repeated, even when those actions involved distinct grasp postures and object placement movements to distinct locations. Conversely, no such planning advantage was observed for repeated grasps for successive actions made with opposite hands. The findings are consistent with the idea that choices about which hand to use in the present are influenced by which hand was used in the recent past. When the same hand can be used for successive actions, planning is made more efficient, presumably because the motor parameters that specify which hand to use can be recalled from recent memory rather than formulated anew. The findings indicate that hand selection is sensitive to recent movement experience and provide novel support for computational efficiency accounts of motor history effects.     

Book reviews

In order to test Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in relation to religion, the present study describes the development and initial psychometric validation work on the “Motivation for Religious Behaviour Questionnaire”. Data confirm the reliability and social validity of the new measure. Subsequently, scores on the “Motivation for Religious Behaviour Questionnaire” were correlated with scores on a measure of Maslow's Hierarchy. Contrary to expectations, no significant association was found between the measures. It is proposed that future empirical work should seek to examine Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in relation to other aspects of religion (i.e., religious attitude, beliefs and practice).     

Testing visual short-term memory of pigeons (Columba livia) and a rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) with a location change detection task

Change detection is commonly used to assess capacity (number of objects) of human visual short-term memory (VSTM). Comparisons with the performance of non-human animals completing similar tasks have shown similarities and differences in object-based VSTM, which is only one aspect (“what”) of memory. Another important aspect of memory, which has received less attention, is spatial short-term memory for “where” an object is in space. In this article, we show for the first time that a monkey and pigeons can be accurately trained to identify location changes, much as humans do, in change detection tasks similar to those used to test object capacity of VSTM. The subject’s task was to identify (touch/peck) an item that changed location across a brief delay. Both the monkey and pigeons showed transfer to delays longer than the training delay, to greater and smaller distance changes than in training, and to novel colors. These results are the first to demonstrate location-change detection in any non-human species and encourage comparative investigations into the nature of spatial and visual short-term memory.