Exploitation in Older Adults: Personal Competence Correlates of Social Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

Clinical assessment of older people at heightened risk of financial exploitation (also termed social vulnerability) is a difficult task. There are a number of previously untested domains of personal competence which could influence social vulnerability in later life. In this study, intellectual, cognitive, and social-cognitive functioning was assessed in a combined sample of dementia patients (n = 31) and neurologically healthy individuals (n = 68) aged 50 years or over. Informants provided assessments of participants' social functioning, personality, and social vulnerability. In the combined sample, multiple regression analyses revealed significant relationships between each personal competence domain and (lower) social vulnerability, apart from personality which was non-significant. General cognitive functioning and, in particular, executive functioning showed significant overlap with social vulnerability after controlling for memory and age. Social measures were also important correlates of vulnerability, indicating that both neurocognitive and social cognitive deficits may contribute to financial exploitation in later life.     

Gender Now

This paper offers a synthesizing position statement on gender now. Gender has been socially transformed; cultural orders and symbolic meanings have evolved. Gender theory has changed considerably. Kinship as it informs gender has been reconsidered. The binary masculine–feminine complementary relationship between gender and sexuality has been deconstructed. Gender development has been recast in a frame that is both more attuned to social transformations and more fine-tuned to the relational excess that is early human life. Gendered embodiment and fantastic experience is being thought in accord with our recognition of the anxious force of normative regulation. The intricate latticework of gender coherence, bodily coherence, and psychic equilibrium is now open to question. Clinical technique, as one listens to gender now, must also be reframed.     

When Trust Fails: The Relation Between Children’s Trust Beliefs in Peers and their Peer Interactions in a Natural Setting

One hundred and forty-nine 8–11 year-old children (86 males; M?=?9 years - 4 months and SD?=?7 months) from the UK were administered the Trust Beliefs in Peers scale and were observed in the playground over one school year. Quadratic relations were found between trust beliefs in peers and peer interaction, which varied by gender. Compared to girls with the middle range of trust beliefs, girls with very low beliefs and those with very high beliefs (a) were less accepted/more rejected by the peer group (i.e., lower group interaction, and greater negatively received bids), (b) showed greater indirect aggression (engaged in and received), (c) showed greater non-engagement (i.e., being alone), and (d) showed greater concomitant distress. Compared to children with the middle range of trust beliefs, children with those extreme trust beliefs in peers demonstrated greater direct aggression (engaged in and received) and showed passive behavior (for boys only). The findings supported the conclusion that children, primarily girls, who trust peers too little and those who trust too much are at risk for psychosocial maladjustment.     

Assessing Omitted Confounder Bias in Multilevel Mediation Models

To draw valid inference about an indirect effect in a mediation model, there must be no omitted confounders. No omitted confounders means that there are no common causes of hypothesized causal relationships. When the no-omitted-confounder assumption is violated, inference about indirect effects can be severely biased and the results potentially misleading. Despite the increasing attention to address confounder bias in single-level mediation, this topic has received little attention in the growing area of multilevel mediation analysis. A formidable challenge is that the no-omitted-confounder assumption is untestable. To address this challenge, we first analytically examined the biasing effects of potential violations of this critical assumption in a two-level mediation model with random intercepts and slopes, in which all the variables are measured at Level 1. Our analytic results show that omitting a Level 1 confounder can yield misleading results about key quantities of interest, such as Level 1 and Level 2 indirect effects. Second, we proposed a sensitivity analysis technique to assess the extent to which potential violation of the no-omitted-confounder assumption might invalidate or alter the conclusions about the indirect effects observed. We illustrated the methods using an empirical study and provided computer code so that researchers can implement the methods discussed.     

Angle illusion in a straight road

We report a new angle illusion observed when viewing a real scene involving a straight road. The scene portrays two white lines which outline a traffic lane on a road and converge to a vanishing point. In experiment 1, observers estimated the angle created by these converging lines in this scene or in its image projected onto a screen. Results showed strong underestimation of the angle, ie over 50% for observations of both the real scene and its projected image. Experiment 2 assessed how depth cues in projected images influence the angle illusion. Results showed that this angle illusion disappeared when scene information surrounding convergent lines was removed. In addition, the illusion was attenuated with projection of an inverted scene image. These findings are interpreted in terms of a misadoption of depth information in the processing of angle perception in a flat image; in turn, this induces a massive angle illusion.     

SenseCam: a wearable camera that stimulates and rehabilitates autobiographical memory

SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that captures an electronic record of the wearer's day. It does this by automatically recording a series of still images through its wide-angle lens, and simultaneously capturing a log of data from a number of built-in electronic sensors. Subsequently reviewing a sequence of images appears to provide a powerful autobiographical memory cue. A preliminary evaluation of SenseCam with a patient diagnosed with severe memory impairment was extremely positive; periodic review of images of events recorded by SenseCam resulted in significant recall of those events. Following this, a great deal of work has been undertaken to explore this phenomenon and there are early indications that SenseCam technology may be beneficial to a variety of patients with physical and mental health problems, and is valuable as a tool for investigating normal memory through behavioural and neuroimaging means. Elsewhere, it is becoming clear that judicious use of SenseCam could significantly impact the study of human behaviour. Meanwhile, research and development of the technology itself continues with the aim of providing robust hardware and software tools to meet the needs of clinicians, patients, carers, and researchers. In this paper we describe the history of SenseCam, and the design and operation of the SenseCam device and the associated viewing software, and we discuss some of the ongoing research questions being addressed with the help of SenseCam.     

SenseCam improves memory for recent events and quality of life in a patient with memory retrieval difficulties

A wearable camera that takes pictures automatically, SenseCam, was used to generate images for rehearsal, promoting consolidation and retrieval of memories for significant events in a patient with memory retrieval deficits. SenseCam images of recent events were systematically reviewed over a 2-week period. Memory for these events was assessed throughout and longer-term recall was tested up to 6 months later. A written diary control condition followed the same procedure. The SenseCam review procedure resulted in significantly more details of an event being recalled, with twice as many details recalled at 6 months follow up compared to the written diary method. Self-report measures suggested autobiographical recollection was triggered by the SenseCam condition but not by reviewing the written diary. Emotional and social wellbeing questionnaires indicated improved confidence and decreased anxiety as a result of memory rehearsal using SenseCam images. We propose that SenseCam images provide a powerful boost to autobiographical recall, with secondary benefits for quality of life.     

Integrating conceptual knowledge within and across representational modalities

Research suggests that concepts are distributed across brain regions specialized for processing information from different sensorimotor modalities. Multimodal semantic models fall into one of two broad classes differentiated by the assumed hierarchy of convergence zones over which information is integrated. In shallow models, communication within- and between-modality is accomplished using either direct connectivity, or a central semantic hub. In deep models, modalities are connected via cascading integration sites with successively wider receptive fields. Four experiments provide the first direct behavioral tests of these models using speeded tasks involving feature inference and concept activation. Shallow models predict no within-modal versus cross-modal difference in either task, whereas deep models predict a within-modal advantage for feature inference, but a cross-modal advantage for concept activation. Experiments 1 and 2 used relatedness judgments to tap participants’ knowledge of relations for within- and cross-modal feature pairs. Experiments 3 and 4 used a dual-feature verification task. The pattern of decision latencies across Experiments 1–4 is consistent with a deep integration hierarchy.