TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS TRAINING WITH SOCIALLY ISOLATED,IMPAIRED NURSING HOME RESIDENTS

We evaluated the effectiveness of a comprehensive training program for enhancing the conversational skills of socially isolated, impaired elderly nursing home residents. A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to train four subjects (aged 87, 85, 68, and 66), on four content-related conversational components: (a) expressing common courtesies, (b) making positive self-disclosures, (c) asking questions, and (d) making interjections and acknowledgments. Training procedures included instructions, modeling, behavior rehearsal, feedback, and reinforcement. Results showed positive effects with all four subjects; in two cases, changes were significant enough to affect untrained observers' perceptions of the elders' conversational skills.     

A simple procedure for accurately manipulating face-voice synchrony when dubbing speech onto videotape

A system is described involving an audio-video tape recorder, a control device, and a delay timer that dubs speech sounds onto prerecorded lip movements on videotape. Accuracy of synchrony or measured asynchrony between the sound and lip movements is a few milliseconds.     

Remembering the message: the use of a reminder cue to increase condom use following a safer sex intervention.

Condom use interventions may be more powerful if they provide cues to recall safe-sex messages when sexual activity occurs. The authors tested this notion by assigning sexually active introductory psychology students (N = 196) to a standard safe-sex intervention, a safe-sex with reminder intervention, or a control (drinking and driving) intervention. Participants assigned to the reminder intervention were given a "friendship bracelet" to wear and were instructed to have the bracelet remind them of the intervention. In a follow-up session (5-7 weeks later), they were asked questions pertaining to condom use. Of the 125 participants who had engaged in sexual intercourse, condom use at last intercourse was higher in the bracelet condition (55%) than in the standard (27%) or control (36%) conditions. The authors also found that the bracelet remained effective, even when participants were under the influence of alcohol. These findings therefore imply that health intervention programs may be more efficacious if they include strategies such as reminder cues to increase the salience of health information in the appropriate contexts.     

How do health and biological age influence chronological age and sex differences in cognitive aging: moderating, mediating, or both?

Much research on cognitive competence in normal older adults has documented age and sex differences. The authors used new cross-sectional data from the Victoria Longitudinal Study (VLS) (n=386; age 61 to 95 years) to examine how health and biological age influence age and sex differences in cognitive aging. The authors found evidence for both moderating and mediating influences. Age differences were moderated by health status, such that the negative effects of age were most pronounced among participants of relatively better health. Sex differences were moderated by health and were more pronounced among participants reporting comparatively poorer health. Although health mediated a notable amount of age-related cognitive variation, BioAge mediated considerably more variance, even after statistical control for differences in health. A complex pattern emerged for the mediation of sex differences: Although BioAge accounted for sex-related variation in cognitive performance, health operated to suppress these differences. Overall, both health and BioAge predicted cognitive variation independently of chronological age.     

Age moderates the link between relationship desire and life satisfaction among singles

Higher desire for a romantic partner has been shown to be associated with lower life satisfaction for singles, but research has not considered whether the strength of this association might vary across age groups. We collected data from single participants (N = 3057) across a broad age range (18 to 75 years of age, mean = 36.12, standard deviation [SD] = 12.34) to examine age as a moderator of the relationship between desire for a partner and singles' life satisfaction. Our results suggest that having greater desire for a partner is associated with lower life satisfaction for older (1 SD above the mean or 48.46 years) versus younger (1 SD below the mean or 23.78 years) individuals. We also found some evidence that this age-dependent association was stronger for women than men. Further, this interaction effect remained largely unchanged controlling for participants' attachment anxiety or avoidance. This study highlights the importance of considering how singlehood may play out differently for individuals at different life stages.     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

Effects of diazepam on approach, self-reported fear and psychophysiological responses in snake phobics

The effects of diazepam was assessed on a number of measures of phobic anxiety. Snake-phobic subjects underwent two sessions on either diazepam or placebo in a crossover design. In addition to a habituation series, a slide with the phobic object was displayed as well as a live snake which subjects were asked to approach. The anxiolytic effect of diazepam was manifest in only one measure of fear, namely self-rated fear at the point of closest approach when it also attained the highest level. The result would indicate that diazepam has an anxiolytic only on high levels of subjective anxiety. The magnitude of the phasic cardiac reaction to the slide was highly and positively correlated with self-rated fear of the slide.     

MIRRORS, PORTALS, AND MULTIPLE REALITIES

Abstract. A biogenetic structural explanation is offered for the cross-culturally common mystical experience called portalling , the experience of moving from one reality to another via a tunnel, door, aperture, hole, or the like. The experience may be evoked in shamanistic and meditative practice by concentration upon a portalling device (mirror, mandala, labyrinth, skrying bowl, pool of water, etc.). Realization of the portalling experience is shown to be fundamental to the phenomenology underlying multiple reality cosmologies in traditional cultures and is explained in terms of radical re-entrainment of the neurological systems mediating experience in the brain. Phenomenological experiments with mirror portalling devices from both the Tibetan and the Tsimshian religious traditions are reported.