Association of Stress Management Skills and Perceived Stress with Physical and Emotional Well-Being Among Advanced Prostrate Cancer Survivors Following Androgen Deprivation Treatment

Advanced prostate cancer (APC) is associated with disruptions that compromise health related quality of life (HRQOL). Treatment often includes androgendeprivation therapy (ADT), which results in a range of side effects (e.g., fatigue, urinary dysfunction) that further impact HRQOL. Despite these challenges, there are limited evaluations of the impact of stress and stress management skills on HRQOL among APC survivors on ADT. This study evaluated relationships among stress, stress management skills, and HRQOL, and it was hypothesized that better stress management skills would relate to greater physical and emotional well-being by mitigating perceived stress levels. Participants (N = 77) were 69.7 years old (SD = 9.8), 18.6 months post-treatment (SD = 17.5), and ethnically diverse (65 % Non-Hispanic White, 13 % Hispanic, 21 % African-American). Measures included the Measure of Current Status for stress management skills, the Perceived Stress Scale for perceived stress, and the Medical Outcomes Study—Short Form (MOS SF-36; physical functioning and emotional well-being subscales) for HRQOL. Direct effects and mediation models were evaluated to determine the relationships between perceived stress, stress management skills, and HRQOL domains, controlling for relevant covariates. Stress management skills and perceived stress were significantly associated with physical functioning (β = .24, p < .05 and β = ?.43, p < .01, respectively) and emotional well-being (β = .35, p < .01 and β = ?.64, p < .01, respectively). Regression analyses supported the hypothesis that reduced perceived stress mediated the relationship between stress management skills and both physical functioning and emotional well-being. These results demonstrate that one way stress management skills may impact HRQOL is by lessening ongoing perceptions of stress.     

Brand image and brand loyalty: Do they show the same deviations from a common underlying pattern?

The aim of the paper is to investigate whether deviations from the double jeopardy pattern observed in brand buying (panel) data such as niche brands (brands with few users, but high levels of brand loyalty) and change‐of‐pace brands (brands with many users, but low levels of brand loyalty) correspond with deviations from the same pattern in brand image data (i.e. brand image associations gathered through consumer surveys). The analysis of a unique data set in three product categories including brand purchases and brand image associations from the same consumers and for the same brands shows that such deviations in brand buying data and in brand image data seldom correspond. Moreover, deviations from the double jeopardy pattern in brand image data are rare and imply the existence of an underlying impact of a brand's associative rate (i.e. the average number of associations a brand obtains in a brand image consumer survey) on brand loyalty (measured as the frequency of brand buying). These findings provide contribution to buyer behaviour theory and have practical implications for branding strategies. For instance, to obtain any impact on brand loyalty, marketers may need to develop branding strategies aimed at increasing a brand's associative rate, whilst maintaining or enlarging its level of market penetration. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Belief,credence, and norms

There are currently two robust traditions in philosophy dealing with doxastic attitudes: the tradition that is concerned primarily with all-or-nothing belief, and the tradition that is concerned primarily with degree of belief or credence. This paper concerns the relationship between belief and credence for a rational agent, and is directed at those who may have hoped that the notion of belief can either be reduced to credence or eliminated altogether when characterizing the norms governing ideally rational agents. It presents a puzzle which lends support to two theses. First, that there is no formal reduction of a rational agent’s beliefs to her credences, because belief and credence are each responsive to different features of a body of evidence. Second, that if our traditional understanding of our practices of holding each other responsible is correct, then belief has a distinctive role to play, even for ideally rational agents, that cannot be played by credence. The question of which avenues remain for the credence-only theorist is considered.     

Words translated in sentence contexts produce repetition priming in visual word comprehension and spoken word production

Previous research with words read in context at encoding showed little if any long-term repetition priming. In Experiment 1, 96 Spanish–English bilinguals translated words in isolation or in sentence contexts at encoding. At test, they translated words or named pictures corresponding to words produced at encoding and control words not previously presented. Repetition priming was reliable in all conditions, but priming effects were generally smaller for contextualized than for isolated words. Repetition priming in picture naming indicated priming from production in context. A componential analysis indicated priming from comprehension in context, but only in the less fluent language. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1 with auditory presentation of the words and sentences to be translated. Repetition priming was reliable in all conditions, but priming effects were again smaller for contextualized than for isolated words. Priming in picture naming indicated priming from production in context, but the componential analysis indicated no detectable priming for auditory comprehension. The results of the two experiments taken together suggest that repetition priming reflects the long-term learning that occurs with comprehension and production exposures to words in the context of natural language.     

The Effects of Magnitude-Based Differential Reinforcement on the Skill Acquisition of Children with Autism

A common recommendation for teaching skills to children with autism is to apply differential reinforcement by reserving high-quality reinforcement for unprompted responses (Sundberg and Partington in Teaching language to children with autism or other developmental disabilities, Behavior Analysts Inc., Pleasant Hill, 1998). Earlier research focuses primarily on schedules or quality of reinforcement, rather than magnitude of reinforcement, when evaluating the use of differential reinforcement in practice. The utility of magnitude-based differential reinforcement may be dependent upon evidence that a learner responds differentially to large and small amounts of reinforcement such that he or she selects the large amount of reinforcement over the small amount of reinforcement and engages in more responses that produce the relatively larger magnitude reinforcement. Three individuals with autism participated in a treatment comparison of differential reinforcement. The manipulation of magnitude of differential reinforcement in a skill acquisition program did not have an appreciable effect on the rate of acquisition for any of the three participants.     

Technical Brokering of Immigrant Adolescents in Switzerland: A Developmental-Acculturative Perspective

Journal of Child and Family Studies - In the present digital age, intrafamilial dynamics and adolescents’ support of their parents in media use (technical brokering, Katz, 2010) are...     

Longitudinal Relationships Between Positive Affect,Loneliness, and Suicide Ideation: Age‐Specific Factors in a General Population

The aims of this study were to analyze whether positive and negative affect, social support, and loneliness are factors longitudinally related to suicide ideation in the general population in different age groups. A total of 2,392 individuals from a nationally representative sample of the Spanish general population were evaluated in 2011–2012 and in 2014–2015. After including relevant control variables in the analyses, lower positive affect was prospectively related to ideation in 18‐ to 59‐year‐old individuals, whereas feelings of loneliness were related to ideation in 60‐year‐and‐older individuals. Social support was not associated with suicide ideation in any age group. These results are in line with the need for age‐tailored suicide prevention programs. The present findings might also suggest that health care professionals should consider feelings of loneliness rather than social support to assess the presence of suicide ideation in older people.     

Assessing the Role of Active Student Response During Error Correction in Discrete Trial Instruction

Research generally supports the use of error-correction procedures that require active student responses (ASRs). However, some recent research suggests that requiring ASRs after errors is not always advantageous for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined acquisition in a receptive identification task for two learners with ASD under three error-correction conditions: required ASRs, model, and modified model that minimized spontaneous ASR. In the model condition, both individuals emitted spontaneous responses to the model even though none was required, extending previous research to the receptive domain. For both learners, the model error-correction was effective; however, minimizing the spontaneous ASR in the modified model condition impacted its efficacy compared to the required ASR condition for one learner. For the other learner, error-correction procedures that required ASRs were not effective. Results are discussed in terms of empirical evaluation of error-correction procedures and suggest that imitative behavior (e.g., emitting an ASR when none is required) might function as a prerequisite skill that predicts the efficacy of model-based error-correction procedures for learners with ASD.