Sympathetic reactivity in late pregnancy is related to labour onset in women

Stress regulation during pregnancy is considered to be connected to the timing of labour initiation. Although increasing knowledge is emerging on the regulation of parturition, there is currently no way to predict the start of spontaneous labour in women. The main aim of this study was to assess pain threshold and the sympathetic nervous system response to cold pain in relation to the onset of labour in healthy pregnant women. Ninety-three pregnant women were recruited and assessed for skin conductance (SC) activity during a cold pressor test in gestational week 38. Pain threshold and cold endurance were also measured and the results were compared with data obtained from hospital records. Seventy-four women had a spontaneous labour onset and a valid SC measurement. SC activity during the cold pressor test decreased significantly with the number of days left to spontaneous parturition. This may indicate a gradual decrease in sympathetic autonomic nervous system reactivity even during the last weeks of pregnancy. Measuring SC activity during mild stress provocation is a rapid and non-invasive means to study variation in sympathetic reactivity during pregnancy, and may be useful in research on stress regulation in pregnancy and its relation to labour initiation.     

Rumination, Inhibition and Stress: The Construction of A New Scale for Assessing Emotional Style

Emotional rumination and inhibition were identified in the Emotion Control Questionnaire (ECQ—Roger and Nesshoever 1987; Roger and Najarian 1989) as two relatively independent dimensions of emotional style, and the two measures have subsequently been shown to be important moderator variables in a range of health and forensic settings. Two other dimensions that emerged in the ECQ, labelled aggression control and benign control, have been shown to form part of the extraversion constellation, and the present paper describes the construction and validation of a new scale focusing exclusively on rumination and inhibition. Revised and expanded item pools for the scales were subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which endorsed the two-factor structure. The new scales were validated concurrently against related scales in different samples, and were shown to be systematically related to two independent indices of health status.     

Assessing adolescent mindfulness: validation of an adapted Mindful Attention Awareness Scale in adolescent normative and psychiatric populations

Interest in mindfulness-based interventions for children and adolescents is burgeoning, bringing with it the need for validated instruments to assess mindfulness in youths. The present studies were designed to validate among adolescents a measure of mindfulness previously validated for adults (e.g., Brown & Ryan, 2003), which we herein call the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent (MAAS-A). In 2 large samples of healthy 14- to 18-year-olds (N = 595), Study 1 supported a single-factor MAAS-A structure, along with acceptably high internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and both concurrent and incremental validity. In Study 2, with a sample of 102 psychiatric outpatient adolescents age 14-18 years, participants randomized to a mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention showed significant increases in MAAS-A scores from baseline to 3-month follow-up, relative to nonsignificant score changes among treatment-as-usual participants. Increases in MAAS-A scores among mindfulness-based stress reduction participants were significantly related to beneficial changes in numerous mental health indicators. The findings support the reliability and validity of the MAAS-A in normative and mixed psychiatric adolescent populations and suggest that the MAAS-A has utility in mindfulness intervention research.     

Attending to social vulnerability when rationing pandemic resources

Pandemic plans are increasingly attending to groups experiencing health disparities and other social vulnerabilities. Although some pandemic guidance is silent on the issue, guidance that attends to socially vulnerable groups ranges widely, some procedural (often calling for public engagement), and some substantive. Public engagement objectives vary from merely educational to seeking reflective input into the ethical commitments that should guide pandemic planning and response. Some plans that concern rationing during a severe pandemic recommend ways to protect socially vulnerable groups without prioritizing access to scarce resources based on social vulnerability per se. The Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project (MPEP), a public engagement project on rationing scarce health resources during a severe influenza pandemic, agrees and recommends an integrated set of ways to attend to the needs of socially vulnerable people and avoid exacerbation of health disparities during a severe influenza pandemic. Among other things, MPEP recommends: 1. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to clarify unique needs and effective strategies; 2. Engaging socially vulnerable populations to elicit ethical values and perspectives on rationing; 3. Rejecting rationing based on race, socioeconomic class, citizenship, quality of life, length of life-extension and first-come, first-served; 4. Prioritizing those in the general population for access to resources based on combinations of risk (of death or severe complications from influenza, exposure to influenza, transmitting influenza to vulnerable groups) and the likelihood of responding well to the resource in question. 5. Protecting critical infrastructures on which vulnerable populations and the general public rely; 6. Identifying and removing access barriers during pandemic planning and response; and 7. Collecting and promptly analyzing data during the pandemic to identify groups at disproportionate risk of influenza-related mortality and serious morbidity and to optimize the distribution of resources.     

Health researchers' ancillary care obligations in low-resource settings: how can we tell what is morally required?

Health researchers working in low-resource settings often encounter serious unmet health needs among participants. What is the nature and extent of researchers' obligations to respond to such needs? Competing accounts have been proposed, but there is no independent standard by which to assess them or to guide future inquiry. I propose an independent standard and demonstrate its use. In conclusion I recommend two areas of focus for future inquiry: what makes an account of researchers' obligations reasonable from the standpoint of both participants and researchers and how general duties of rescue apply to researchers' resource-allocation decision making in low-resource settings.     

Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands

We examine semantic conditioning in a consumer context. We subliminally paired neutral ideographs with attributes. In experiment 1, the ideographs served as primes during a lexical decision task and slowed down response times to target words with the opposite semantic meaning. In experiment 2, the ideographs served as brand names of beverages, and attitudinal responses to them were less favorable when the associated attributes were incongruent with existing schemas. These results showed that semantic conditioning (1) can occur unconsciously, (2) can have significant and meaningful consequences for brand evaluation, and (3) influences subsequent attitudinal responses via conceptual disfluency processes.     

On the validity of remember-know judgments: evidence from think aloud protocols

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence (i.e., sure–probably) judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study (87%), but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments (72%). Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection (62%), but still included recollection from the study context (33%). Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details.     

Short-term effects of a multi-disciplinary cardiac rehabilitation programme on psychological well-being, exercise capacity and weight in a sample of obese in-patients with coronary heart disease: a practice-level study

Given that many patients referred to cardiac rehabilitation (CR) are obese, diet therapy, exercise training, nutritional and psychological counselling for both obesity and psychological distress should be included as important components in all CR programmes. In this practice-level, observational study we evaluated the short-term within-group effects of a four-week multi-factorial inpatient CR programme specifically addressed to weight loss, fitness improvement and psychological health increase on 176 obese in-patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Outcome measures were exercise capacity measured with estimated metabolic equivalents (METs), body mass index (BMI) and psychological well-being (PGWBI). Results show statistically significant improvements in all the PGWBI sub-scales and total score, except in general health (p = 0.393). No moderation effects were found for BMI class, age, diabetes and ejection fraction (EF). METs significantly increased by 30.3% (p < 0.001) and BMI decreased by 1.37 points (p < 0.001). Significant correlations were found between BMI and weight reductions with PGWBI anxiety and total score improvements. This multi-disciplinary CR programme including diet therapy, exercise training and psychological counselling provides indication for short-term within-group effectiveness on functional exercise capacity, BMI and PGWBI in a sample of obese in-patients with CHD. However, controlled studies are needed to corroborate the results we found.     

Spiritual well-being and spiritual practices in elderly depressed psychiatric inpatients

This study's aims were to describe the spirituality of depressed elderly psychiatric inpatients and to examine associations among spirituality, depression, and quality of life (QOL). Forty-five persons participated. Most reported frequent, stable spiritual practices and experiencing spiritual comfort and guidance. Some reported spiritual distress and changes in spirituality. During hospitalization, participants demonstrated increased spiritual well-being (SWB) and peacefulness, and reduced hopelessness, worthlessness, and guilt. Positive associations were found between SWB and QOL and negative associations between SWB and depression.