The illness reframing process in an ethnic-majority population of older people with incurable cancer: variations of cultural- and existential meaning-making adjustments

Increasing numbers of older people in Western countries are living with incurable cancer as a chronic disease, receiving palliative care from specialised healthcare contexts. The study's aim was to understand variations of cultural- and existential meaning-making adjustments in a Norwegian majority population of older people with incurable cancer. Semi-structured interviews from 21 participants, aged 70–88, were analysed according to three identified types of belief frames: atheistic/humanistic, religious, and spiritual. Kleinman's medical anthropology cultural framework was adapted and applied deductively together with a reframing metaphor concept in a four-part analytic process. Independent of the differences among the types of belief frames and heterogeneous illness reframing processes, changes in the existential cultural dimension seemed to facilitate psychosocial adjustments in relation to illness, daily living, relationships, and surroundings. The results point to the need for collecting and assessing the function of this type of patient information for better understanding the patient's framework of interpretation, and for identifying treatment-planning resources.     

Good Enough for an Affair. Self‐Enhancement of Attractiveness,Interest in Potential Mates and Popularity as a Mate

Using data from the Berlin Speed Dating Study, we tested rival hypotheses concerning the effects of self‐enhancement of attractiveness on dating outcomes. Three hundred eighty‐two participants took part in one of the 17 speed‐dating sessions. After each speed‐dating interaction, participants indicated how interesting they found the respective person as a long‐term and short‐term partner. Using social relations analyses, we computed perceiver effects (being more or less choosy) and target effects (being rated as more or less interesting) of long‐term and short‐term partner ratings. Self‐enhancement was operationalized as the discrepancy between self‐rated attractiveness and four components of actual attractiveness (observer‐rated facial and vocal attractiveness, height and body mass index). Results indicated that self‐enhancers were less choosy with respect to their interest for short‐term partners, which was especially true for men, but more choosy with respect to long‐term partners. With regard to popularity as a mate, potential partners indicated that they found self‐enhancers more interesting as short‐term partners but not as long‐term partners. As self‐enhancement is a key component of narcissism, these results are consistent with findings that narcissists perceive many sexual affairs as an achievement, while preferring selected ‘trophy’ long‐term partners, and narcissists have a charming appeal for short‐term, but not lasting, social relationships. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

An application of the optic sphere theory in discrimination of slant with minimal information

In Johansson and Börjesson (1989), a new theory of visual space perception—the optic sphere theory—was presented in which the hemispheric shape of the retina is utilized for determination of slant of plane surfaces in wide-angle perception. The process of the optic sphere mechanism can be described as the projection of a translating distal line on the optic sphere, and an extrapolation of this projection to a great circle. The determination of the 3-D slant of the distal line is made by identification of points of no change on the great circle during its rotation. The main objective of the present study was to investigate this process as applied to central stimulation of the retina with reduced and minimal information of slant or horizontal orientation. Each stimulus pattern consisted of either two continuous lines or two pairs of dots in motion presented on a computer screen. The pairwise lines and the pairs of dots defined simulated 3-D slants (or horizontal orientations) of different magnitude within each pair, and the subjects' task was to discriminate between these simulated slants. It was shown that the simulations evoke percepts of 3-D slants, and of horizontal orientations, and that it is possible to discriminate between them even from minimal information (pairs of dots). Further, the empirical findings of Börjesson (1994) indicated that longer extrapolations of the projected arc to a point of no change yield less accurate discriminations of slant. We failed to replicate this in Experiment 4, in which case stimulus variables that covaried with extrapolation length were eliminated or minimized. It is suggested that this raises some doubt about discrimination accuracy as dependent on extrapolation length per se. The overall conclusion, however, is that the optic sphere theory represents a possible explanation of, or analogy to, the process utilized by the visual system for determination of the simulated 3-D slants and horizontal orientations in the present study.     

Gender differences in episodic memory

The relationship between gender and memory has been largely neglected by research, despite occasional studies reporting gender differences in episodic memory performance. The present study examined potential gender differences in episodic memory, semantic memory, primary memory, and priming. Five hundred thirty women and 470 men, randomly sampled from the city of Umeå, Sweden, 35–80 years of age, participated in the study. There were no differences between men and women with regard to age or education, or on a measure of global intellectual functioning. As has been demonstrated previously, men outperformed women on a visuospatial task and women outperformed men on tests of verbal fluency. In addition, the results demonstrated that women consistently performed at a higher level than did men on the episodic memory tasks, although there were no differences between men and women on the tasks assessing semantic memory, primary memory, or priming. The women’s higher level of performance on the episodic memory tasks could not be fully explained by their higher verbal ability.     

PET studies of encoding and retrieval: The HERA model

We review positron emission tomography (PET) studies whose results converge on the hemispheric encoding/retrieval asymmetry (HERA) model of the involvement of prefrontal cortical regions in the processes of human memory. The model holds that the left prefrontal cortex is differentially more involved in retrieval of information from semantic memory, and in simultaneously encoding novel aspects of the retrieved information into episodic memory, than is the right prefrontal cortex. The right prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is differentially more involved in episodic memory retrieval than is the left prefrontal cortex. This general pattern holds for different kinds of information (e.g., verbal materials, pictures, faces) and a variety of conditions of encoding and retrieval.     

A COMPARISON BETWEEN CHILDREN AND ADULTS IN A PRISONERS' DILEMMA GAME

S jöberg , L., B okander , I., D encik , L. & L indbom , K. A comparison between children and adults in a prisoner's dilemma game. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1969, 10 , 158–166.— A comparative study using three different stooge strategies. The game was played for a total of 67 trials. Children (4–6 years old) exhibited more cooperation than adults, and a stronger tendency to make a cooperative move after own defection, regardless of outcome. Both the frequency of cooperative moves and the state-conditioned propensities showed some stability over time and similar intercorrelations for adults and children.     

Recognition memory across the adult life span: The role of prior knowledge

Two experiments were performed to investigate the effects of prior knowledge on recognition memory in young adults, younger old adults, 76-year-olds, and 85-year-olds. In Experiment 1, we examined episodic recognition of dated and contemporary famous persons presented as faces, names, and faces plus names. In Experiment 2, four types of faces were presented for later recognition: dated familiar, contemporary familiar, old unfamiliar, and young unfamiliar. The results of both experiments showed that young adults performed better with contemporary than with dated famous persons, whereas the reverse was true for all groups of older adults. In addition, the data of Experiment 2 indicated that (1) young adults showed better recognition for young than for old unfamiliar faces, (2) younger old adults performed better with old than with young unfamiliar faces, and (3) the two oldest age groups showed no effect of age of face. These results suggest that the ability to utilize rich semantic knowledge to improve episodic memory is preserved in very old age, although the aging process may be associated with deficits in the ability to utilize prior knowledge to support memory when the underlying representation lacks semantic and contextual features. The overall data pattern was discussed in relation to the notion that, with increasing adult age, there is an increase in the level of cognitive support required to enhance episodic remembering.     

The effect of retrieval enactment on recall of subject-performed tasks and verbal tasks

The effect of retrieval enactment on memory for nouns (objects) or verbal phrases describing simple actions (e.g., “lift the box”) was addressed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the type of object involved in the actions was manipulated, with three different types of object being used (body parts, laboratory-related objects, and external objects). In Experiment 2, the integration between the verb-noun pairs was manipulated (well-integrated vs. poorly integrated). Results from both experiments showed that whereas encoding enactment (motor encoding and verbal test) substantially improved the memory performance compared with a verbal condition (verbal encoding and verbal test), retrieval enactment (verbal encoding and motor test) had no major impact on the number of recalled nouns or phrases. Moreover, there was no additional effect of dual enactment (motor encoding and motor test). The overall pattern of the results suggests that there is a fundamental difference between motor processing at encoding and motor processing at retrieval, and the lack of encoding specificity advantage for the motor modality contradicts the view that encoding enactment of verbal commands results in storage of motor representations.