Spiritual Disposition and Understanding Illness

Although Dull and Skokan (1995) proposed a cognitive model of the effect of religion on health, they neglected to clearly identify the multi-dimensional nature of religion as a cognitive schema. The present paper identifies various aspects of spiritual disposition (defined as personality and beliefs) that can play a role in an individual’s adaptation to illness. Specifically, this paper reviews the factors of religious doctrine and affiliation, spiritual beliefs, religious orientation, God locus of control, faith and hope as aspects of a spiritual disposition and explores how they can function as resources and/or negative factors in the process of adjustment to illness. Implications for clinical health care (e.g., pastoral counsellors) are drawn from this review.     

Engagement and arousal: optimism's effects during a brief stressor

Optimism is usually associated with better psychological and physiological adjustment to stressors, but some contradictory findings exist. The purpose of this study was to investigate how optimism could result in negative immunological changes following difficult stressors. Because optimists are likely to see positive outcomes as attainable, they may invest greater effort to achieve their goals. It is proposed that such engagement would be more physiologically demanding when pursuing difficult goals. Participants (N = 54) worked on 11 difficult or insoluble anagrams. Optimism when combined with high self-awareness increased time spent working on the anagrams and skin conductance and salivary cortisol during the recovery period. The results support the notion that the increased engagement that arises from optimism may lead to short-term physiological costs.     

Diversity in context: how organizational culture shapes reactions to workers with disabilities and others who are demographically different

Successfully integrating workers with disabilities into their organizations is both a challenge and an opportunity facing managers today. Despite laws and business practices prohibiting discrimination against those with disabilities, people with disabilities are consistently underutilized in organizations. This article applies theories of demographic diversity in organizations to assert that a richer understanding of organizational cultures and their implications for workers with disabilities may shed light on the question of how and why workers with disabilities may be excluded from mainstream work experiences and career progression. The article briefly reviews business arguments that support integration of workers with disabilities into organizations based on their contribution to the overall diversity within the organization, and reviews complications in the research on diversity to date that leave important questions of the potential gains or detriments from increasing this diversity unanswered. The article then goes on to introduce organizational culture as an underinvestigated but likely potent tool in explaining how and when workers who are demographically different, in general, and with disabilities, specifically, may be successfully integrated into an organization's work force. The article introduces three types of organizational culture: culture of differentiation, culture of unity, and culture of integration. Each is explained in terms of its content and its implications for managing diversity. A discussion of the implications of culture as a primary tool for managing the integration of workers with disabilities concludes the paper.     

Stress, Rewards, and Change in the Centrality of Women’s Family and Work Roles: Mastery as a Mediator

Although research suggests that stress and rewards experienced in a social role are associated with changes in the centrality (or personal importance) of that role over time, little attention has been given to the mechanisms that account for this relationship. This study was conducted to examine change in role mastery as a mediator in the relationship between changes in role experiences (stress and rewards) and changes in centrality among 195 women who simultaneously occupied the roles of parent care provider, mother, wife, and employee. Regression analyses indicated that increases in parent care, mother, and employee stress eroded mastery in those roles. In addition, increases in rewards were associated with a bolstered sense of mastery in each of the four roles. Mastery was found to be a mediating mechanism in the relationship between stress/rewards and centrality in one of the four roles examined, the employee role. However, changes in womens perceptions of mastery were unrelated to the extent to which women changed the importance of their three family roles. These findings extend prior research by demonstrating that mastery is a mechanism through which stress and rewards are associated with centrality in the employee role.     

Recipient-provider agreement on enacted support, perceived support, and provider personality

This study examined agreement between recipients and providers about social support and personality. One hundred daughter caregivers of a parent with Alzheimer's disease and each caregiver's most important support provider independently reported supportive behaviors provided to caregivers, the perceived supportiveness of the provider, and providers' personality traits. For all indices, agreement was higher for enacted support than for perceived support and personality, which were similar to each other for some, but not all, indices of agreement. These findings support the validity of measures of enacted and perceived support.     

Cognition at risk: Gestalt/feature-intensive processing,attention deficit,and substance abuse

Attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) is associated with elevated levels of substance abuse, but the cognitive linkages involved have been little explored. The present study builds upon earlier work showing that more gestalt, as opposed to feature-intensive, styles of processing are conductive to substance abuse, especially in those with ADHD symptoms. The work reported here indicates that a protective factor against substance abuse may lie in relatively efficient heuristic processing, especially synthetic or inferential heuristic processing, but further demonstrates that those with ADHD symptoms tend to have poorer abilities in this regard, even at the subclinical, nondiagnosed level. Results are discussed in terms of the gestalt/featureintensive processing theory of cognition.     

Affective images: relieving chronic pain and enhancing quality of life for older persons.

With increasing life expectancy, the incidence of chronic illness and chronic pain also increase. Chronic pain robs older people of their quality of life, and limits functional mobility and ambulation, which leads to muscle atrophy. Older people are often reluctant to request pain relief, attempting to endure pain as a "normal" part of ageing. Innovative non-pharmacological interventions in pain management are appealing. In this study, affective images and pictures were used in 15 elderly patients (12 female and three male) in chronic pain who needed to perform stretching and standing exercises in their physiotherapy sessions. Pain scores were measured by the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), and health-related quality of life was measured by the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 (SF-36). VAS and SF-36 were administered in weeks 1 and in 6. Pain scores were measured during physiotherapy session in the following weeks. There was a significant decreased in VAS from week 1 to week 6 (t = 3.607; df = 14; p < 0.05). Also, a significant decrease in VAS occurred when the patients were watching affective pictures while performing the physiotherapy exercise in weeks 2 and 3, but not in weeks 4 and 5. SF-36 increased in week 6, which indicated an increase in health-related quality of life, though not statistically significant. Affective images and pictures appear to be an effective non-pharmacological intervention in pain management for the older person.     

Forming a stable memory representation in the first year of life: why imitation is more than child's play

Although 9-month-old infants are capable of retaining temporally ordered information over long delays, this ability is relatively fragile. It may be possible to facilitate long-term retention by allowing infants to imitate event sequences immediately after their presentation. The effects of imitation on immediate and delayed recognition and on long-term recall were investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) and elicited imitation, respectively. Mnemonic facilitation resulting from the opportunity to imitate was apparent using both assessments. ERP assessments at immediate and delayed recognition tests suggested that infants who were allowed to imitate had stronger memory representations of familiar stimuli relative to infants who only viewed the presentation of the events. In addition, infants who were allowed to imitate evidenced higher levels of ordered recall after 1 month relative to infants who only watched the experimenter's demonstration. Therefore, imitation proved to have beneficial effects on explicit memory in 9(1/2)-month-olds, providing evidence of its effectiveness as a tool to augment mnemonic capabilities in infancy.     

Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory retrieval

Although the parietal lobe is not traditionally thought to support declarative memory, recent event-related fMRI studies of episodic retrieval have consistently revealed a range of memory-related influences on activation in lateral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and precuneus extending into posterior cingulate and retrosplenial cortex. This article surveys the fMRI literature on PPC activation during remembering, a literature that complements earlier electroencephalography data. We consider these recent memory-related fMRI responses within the context of classical ideas about parietal function that emphasize space-based attention and motor intention. We conclude by proposing three hypotheses concerning how parietal cortex might contribute to memory.     

An evaluation of carbon dioxide as a short acting anesthetic

The use of carbon dioxide (CO₂) as a quick-acting anesthetic of short duration was studied. Sixteen rats were exposed to a CO₂ atmosphere for 10 and15 sec on separate days. Records were taken of the time required for the administration of intramuscular and gavage injections as well as recovery of motor functions. Recovery following both exposure times was less than 2 min Data are presented that show that there are no prograde effects of CO₂: exposure on subsequent variable-interval (VI-15 sec) behavior.