Perceptions of another person's heavy drinking as a function of one's relationship to the drinker a pilot study

Of 301 participants in a telephone survey, 201 could identify a problem drinker within their social networks. In 67 cases the drinker was a partner, in 45 another family member, in 61 a friend, and in 28 a work colleague. Another person's heavy drinking was reported as most disrupting to one's life when that person was a partner or other family member or if one was living in the same residence as the drinker. The exception to this was that reported disruption to respondents' work life was greatest when the drinker was a work colleague. While there appear to be problems for friends and work colleagues, partners and other family members appear to report the most disruption so providing services to family members seems appropriate.     

The effects of adult aging and induced positive and negative mood on planning

Changes in executive functions have been found in older adults and also in young adults experiencing positive or negative mood states. The current study investigated the hypothesis that older adults would show greater executive function impairment following mood induction than young adults. Ninety-six participants (half aged 19-37, half aged 53-80) completed a neutral, positive, or negative mood induction procedure, followed by the Tower of London planning task. Significant interactions were found between age and mood such that older adults showed greater planning impairment than young adults in both the positive and negative mood conditions. Emotionally salient events occurring before testing may interfere with executive function in older adults.     

Gender, gender relations, and the social dynamics of children's conversations

The authors investigated the effects of gender on the social dynamics and outcomes of conversations involving 120 children (mean age = 8 years 7 months). Children were taught particular values for different shaped counters and placed in same-gender or mixed-gender pairs with children who were taught different values. Pairs were asked to add the counters together to make a total of 100. Conversations were coded in terms of communication acts and simultaneous speech acts. Boys used more controlling acts overall and more negative interruptions in mixed-gender pairs. Girls used more affiliating acts. All children used more collaborative communication in same-gender pairings. Children whose perspective dominated used more controlling and comparatively fewer affiliating acts. When children reached a compromise, conversations were more collaborative.     

Production of graphic symbol sentences by individuals with aphasia: efficacy of a computer-based augmentative and alternative communication intervention

The study employed a single-subject multiple baseline design to examine the ability of 9 individuals with severe Broca's aphasia or global aphasia to produce graphic symbol sentences of varying syntactical complexity using a software program that turns a computer into a speech output communication device. The sentences ranged in complexity from simple two-word phrases to those with morphological inflections, transformations, and relative clauses. Overall, results indicated that individuals with aphasia are able to access, manipulate, and combine graphic symbols to produce phrases and sentences of varying degrees of syntactical complexity. The findings are discussed in terms of the clinical and public policy implications.     

Cognitive defusion and self-relevant negative thoughts: examining the impact of a ninety year old technique

Cognitive defusion techniques are designed to reduce the functions of thoughts by altering the context in which they occur, rather than the attempting to alter the form, frequency, or situational sensitivity of the thoughts themselves. Applied technologies designed to produce cognitive defusion seem to lead to reductions in the believability of negative thoughts, but defusion techniques are generally only parts of complex packages and the role of defusion techniques per se is note yet known. The present study examined the impact of a cognitive defusion technique first described by Titchener nearly 90 years ago: rapidly repeating a single word. In series of eight single-case alternating treatment designs, this defusion technique was compared to a distraction task, and to a thought control task on reductions in the discomfort and believability of self-relevant negative thoughts. The cognitive defusion technique reduced both discomfort and believability more so than the comparison approaches. Control studies showed that the effect was probably not due to demand characteristics.     

A meta-analytic review of prospective memory and aging

A meta-analysis of prospective memory (PM) studies revealed that in laboratory settings younger participants outperform older participants on tests of both time- and event-based PM (rs=-.39 and -.34, respectively). Event-based PM tasks that impose higher levels of controlled strategic demand are associated with significantly larger age effects than event-based PM tasks that are supported by relatively more automatic processes (rs=-.40 vs. -.14, respectively). However, contrary to the prevailing view in the literature, retrospective memory as measured by free recall is associated with significantly greater age-related decline (r=-.52) than PM, and older participants perform substantially better than their younger counterparts in naturalistic PM studies (rs=.35 and.52 for event- and time-based PM, respectively).     

Braking reaching movements: a test of the constant tau-dot strategy under different viewing conditions

Following F. Zaal and R. J. Bootsma (1995), the authors studied whether the decelerative phase of a reaching movement could be modeled as a constant tau-dot strategy resulting in a soft collision with the object. Specifically, they investigated whether that strategy is sustained over different viewing conditions. Participants (N = 11) were required to reach for 15- and 50-mm objects at 2 different distances under 3 conditions in which visual availability of the immediate environment and of the reaching hand were varied. Tau-dot estimates and goodness-of-fit were highly similar across the 3 conditions. Only within-participant variability of tau-dot estimates was increased when environmental cues were removed. That finding suggests that the motor system uses a tau-dot strategy involving the intermodal (i.e., visual, proprioceptive, or both) specification of information to regulate the decelerative phase of reaching under restricted viewing conditions. The authors provide recommendations for improving the derivation of tau;(x) estimates and stress the need for further research on how time-to-contact information is used in the regulation of the dynamics of actions such as reaching.     

Size of the neocerebellar vermis is associated with cognition in healthy elderly men

Cerebellar volumes show small positive correlations with cognitive ability in young adults, but no studies have examined this relationship in older adults. Furthermore, no studies have examined relationships between sizes of subareas of the cerebellum and cognitive ability. We hypothesized that size of the two areas of the neocerebellar vermis would correlate with a battery of eight cognitive tests in 50 men aged 65-70. Size of the neocerebellar areas of the vermis correlated positively with several cognitive tests (r's=.29-.37, p<.05), whilst sizes of other parts of the vermis did not correlate with any cognitive tests. Total cerebellar volumes correlated significantly with a test of nonverbal reasoning (r=.030, p=.42). These findings suggest a specific association of neocerebellar vermis size with variations in cognitive ability in older adults.