Divorce in the Kibbutz: Determinants of emotional adjustment

About two-thirds of a representative sample of kibbutz divorced subjects reached a satisfactory emotional and functioning level of adjustment with a high degree of cooperation between the exspouses by the second postseparation year. This outcome appears to be positively influenced both by a process of habituation and desensitization determined by the continuous physical proximity of the former spouses and by the neutralization of parenting and economic issues as subjects for dispute and litigation.     

Children's self-selection into prevention programs: Evaluation of an innovative recruitment strategy for children of alcoholics

Systematically evaluated the efficacy of a self-selection strategy to recruit elementary-aged children into a school-based prevention program for children of alcoholics. Recruitment involved: a film about parental alcoholism, a follow-up meeting, and an invitation to participate in a prevention program. Of the 844 4th-6th graders exposed to recruitment, 67% showed no interest in the program, 26% attended the follow-up meeting, and 11% obtained parental permission. Analyses focused on group differences according to selection classification on measures of symptomatology and resources available to the child. Significant differences were noted on level of concern about parents' drinking, depression, conduct disorder, and self-worth. Children interested in the program tended to score higher on measures of symptomatology. The potential of a self-selection model for identifying children at risk and areas for future research are discussed.     

IMPROVING DIETARY PRACTICES OF ELDERLY INDIVIDUALS: THE POWER OF PROMPTING,FEEDBACK, AND SOCIAL REINFORCEMENT

Three intervention packages consisting of (a) enhanced prompts, feedback, and social reinforcement; (b) a lottery; and (c) serving as a confederate were added and removed in sequence as adjacent conditions in an extended withdrawal design to assess their effects on the dietary choices of elderly persons. Participants were 3 elderly residents of an independent living facility who were identified as making consistently poor dietary choices and who had medical conditions that necessitated changes in their eating habits. All 3 participants demonstrated a marked increase in healthy choices of food items in response to the package of enhanced prompts, feedback, and social reinforcement. No additional increase occurred with the introduction of the lottery and serving as a confederate. Food-choice data indicated that most of these improvements could be attributed to healthier entree and dessert choices. Group data for all residents suggested small improvements in dietary practices during the three intervention conditions, with the largest proportion of the group's healthy choices occurring when the lottery was added to enhanced prompts, feedback, and social reinforcement. Food-choice data indicated that most of these improvements could be attributed to healthier dessert choices alone.     

Chain of Care for Patients with Intentional Self‐Harm: An Effective Strategy to Reduce Suicide Rates?

Chain of care for patients with intentional self‐harm was important in the Norwegian national action plan to prevent suicide. In this study there were two aims: (1) to calculate the potential effects of chain of care on reducing suicide rates, and (2) to assess whether suicide rates decreased more in areas where chain of care had been implemented than in other areas. We observed no differences in changes in suicide rates between areas with and without the intervention. The calculated potential effects of chain of care on national suicide rates were very small, even under unrealistically favorable conditions.     

Utilization of Hospital-Based Chaplain Services Among Newly Diagnosed Male Veterans Affairs Colorectal Cancer Patients

The aim of the study was to examine utilization of chaplain services among Veterans Affairs patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). In 2009, the Cancer Care Assessment and Responsive Evaluation Studies questionnaire was mailed to VA CRC patients diagnosed in 2008 (67 % response rate). Multivariable logistic regression examined factors associated with chaplain utilization. Of 918 male respondents, 36 % reported utilizing chaplains. Chaplain services were more likely to be utilized by patients with higher pain levels (OR = 1.017; 95 % CI = 0.999–1.035), younger age (age OR = 0.979; 95 % CI = 0.964–0.996), and later cancer stage (early stage OR = 0.743; 95 % CI = 0.559–0.985). Chaplain services are most utilized by younger, sicker patients.     

Discriminating Semantic from Episodic Relatedness in Young and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

The ability of young (aged 18–30) and older (aged 60–80) adults to discriminate pre-experimental (semantic) from experimental (episodic) associations was examined. Participants studied a list containing semantically related and unrelated word pairs and then made either associative recognition (Experiments 1a and b) or semantic relatedness (Experiment 2) judgments at various response deadlines. For associative recognition judgments, both young and older adults benefited from semantic relatedness, leading to more hits for related than unrelated pairs, and at the long response deadline, older adults' performance on those pairs matched that of young participants. Also, both young and older adults demonstrated superior discrimination for unrelated lures whose members had originally been studied in related pairs – evidence for recall-to-reject processing in both age groups. In making semantic relatedness judgments, both young and older adults showed an episodic priming effect. When older adults can rely on long-standing associations, their performance resembles that of young adults – both in associative recognition and in episodic priming.     

The role of tone duration in dichotic temporal order judgment

Over the past two decades, a number of studies have been based on the dichotic temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm, to compare auditory temporal processing in various subpopulations to that of young, normal controls. The reported estimates of dichotic TOJ thresholds, expressed as the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) for 75 % accuracy among the controls, have varied. In the present study, we examined the influence of tone duration, within the 10- to 40-msec range, on dichotic TOJ accuracy and threshold. The results indicated that increases in either ISI or tone duration increased dichotic TOJ accuracy similarly, implying that changes in tone duration may affect dichotic TOJs simply by adding to the delay between onset of the tone at the lead ear and onset of the tone at the lag ear. The dichotic TOJ thresholds from three published studies that had used tones as stimuli and the dichotic thresholds from the present study all fell within 0.5 standard deviations from the theoretical line of a 10-msec reduction in threshold for every 10-msec increase in tone duration. When the dichotic TOJ threshold data from the present study and from the published studies were converted to stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and plotted as a function of tone duration, they fell very close to or on a zero-slope line, indicating that when ISI and duration are summed to yield an SOA, dichotic TOJ thresholds are invariant to tone duration within the range of 10–40 msec.     

Synesthesia Affects Verification of Simple Arithmetic Equations

To investigate the effects of color–digit synesthesia on numerical representation, we presented a synesthete, called SE, in the present study, and controls with mathematical equations for verification. In Experiment 1, SE verified addition equations made up of digits that either matched or mismatched her color–digit photisms or were in black. In Experiment 2A, the addends were presented in the different color conditions and the solution was presented in black, whereas in Experiment 2B the addends were presented in black and the solutions were presented in the different color conditions. In Experiment 3, multiplication and division equations were presented in the same color conditions as in Experiment 1. SE responded significantly faster to equations that matched her photisms than to those that did not; controls did not show this effect. These results suggest that photisms influence the processing of digits in arithmetic verification, replicating and extending previous findings.     

Depression and pain in night time and daytime functioning of individuals with lupus

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of pain and depression in night time and daytime functioning of individuals with lupus. A cross-sectional research design was used. Participants were recruited via a mail-out to members of the Lupus Australia Foundation and the Lupus Association of New South Wales. One hundred and fifty-four participants completed a questionnaire package consisting of a Lupus Medical and Symptoms Questionnaire designed by the researchers, the Cardiac Depression Scale and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that pain principally predicted levels of sleep disturbance, whilst depression and pain (to a lesser extent) together predicted daytime dysfunction. The present results suggested the need for more adequate pain management, particularly at night and psychological interventions to decrease levels of depression that interfere with daily functioning in individuals with lupus.     

An Exploratory Investigation of Three Self-Other Orientation Measures

A new non-verbal, multidimensional approach to self-concept measurement (SOO tasks) was compared to one representative of the traditional verbal measurement approach. Both self-concept measures and an anxiety measure were administered to 25 boys and 23 girls. Correlations between the measures were generally disappointing but typically more positive for the girls. The question of methods variance overshadowing any trait variance common to the self-concept measures was viewed as needing further study, since a non-verbal approach to self-concept measurement could avoid the problems of response set. Some tentative hypotheses regarding the SOO tasks and sex differences in self-concept were discussed.