History of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa: Occupational Therapy Pioneer in Neurology and Psychiatry in Spain

In this article the authors describe the program of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa (Spain) and its importance in the history of occupational therapy. It is believed to be the first hospital in the world to use occupations as therapy for psychiatric patients. Pinel knew about this new trend through a report by Iberti and wrote about it in his book Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation.     

Memory impairment and Benign Epilepsy with centrotemporal spike (BECTS): A growing suspicion

Benign Epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS) is considered a benign type of epilepsy; nevertheless a significant number of children present clear and heterogeneous cognitive deficits such as memory disturbances. Thus far, evidence about memory impairment has been less than conclusive. To clarify the quality of memory functioning in BECTS children, an analysis of existing findings has been conducted trying to identify the type of memory deficits and their underlying factors. Short- and long-term declarative memory are impaired in BECTS children, with both verbal and non-verbal material; co-occurrence of attentional, linguistic and behavioral disturbances is reported. In children with continuous spikes and waves during the slow-wave sleep pattern the normal downscaling of slow-wave activity is absent, disrupting plastic brain processes of sleep-related memory consolidation. In BECTS children, NREM sleep interictal epileptiform discharges (IED) may interfere in the dialogue between temporal and frontal cortex, causing declarative memory deficits: the role of NREM sleep IED acquires a special importance, leading to methodological guidance and suggesting aims for future researches in the field of childhood neuroscience.     

New Technologies,New Identities,and the Growth of Mass Opposition in the Arab Spring

The recent revolutions known as the Arab Spring have been characterized as the products of social media. However, there is an alternative view that revolution takes place on the street or the battlefield and that the role of social media has been overstated. We argue that some new technologies can serve to facilitate rapid social change when they provide ways to overcome restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association. In doing so, communication technologies enable the formation of new social identities that can challenge existing social orders by promoting the growth of a social movement that is positioned as loyal to the nation and its people but opposed to the government. Our analyses focus on the role of social media in spreading video images of dissent and the links between this video material, satellite television, and mobile telephones in Tunisia and Egypt.     

Overgeneral Autobiographical Memories: Gender Differences in Depression

Considering the higher prevalence of depression in women than in men, the study of the variables that underlie this gender difference becomes important for both the prevention and the treatment of depression. This study explores gender differences in the relationship between depressive symptoms, rumination, repressive coping, and overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) in a nonclinical population. There are 141 men and 148 women who completed the measures of depression, rumination, and repression, and the Autobiographical Memory Test to assess OGM. Women remembered a higher number of specific memories than men. Most importantly, results showed a different pattern of association between rumination, repression, depression, and OGM by gender. Depressive symptoms were associated with repressive coping and OGM in women. However, depressive symptomatology was related to repressive coping but not to OGM in men. These results suggest that the role of OGM in depression may be less important in men than in women. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceiving stimulus displacements across saccades

The visual world appears stable despite frequent retinal image movements caused by saccades. Many theories of visual stability assume that extraretinal eye position information is used to spatially adjust perceived locations across saccades, whereas others have proposed that visual stability depends upon coding of the relative positions of objects. McConkie and Currie (1996) proposed a refined combination of these views (called the Saccade Target Object Theory) in which the perception of stability across saccades relies on a local evaluation process centred on the saccade target object rather than on a remapping of the entire scene, with some contribution from memory for the relative positions of objects as well. Three experiments investigated the saccade target object theory, along with an alternative hypothesis that proposes that multiple objects are updated across saccades, but with variable resolution, with the saccade target object (by virtue of being the focus of attention before the saccade and residing near the fovea after the saccade) having priority in the perception of displacement. Although support was found for the saccade target object theory in Experiment 1, the results of Experiments 2 and 3 found that multiple objects are updated across saccades and that their positions are evaluated to determine perceived stability. There is an advantage for detecting displacements of the saccade target, most likely because of visual acuity or attentional focus being better near the fovea, but it is not the saccade target alone that determines the perception of stability and of displacements across saccades. Rather, multiple sources of information appear to contribute.     

Exploring the everyday retail experience: The discourses of style and design

In contrast to earlier studies focusing on spectacular retail store environments, this study concentrates on examining ordinary retail stores and everyday retail experiences. The article explores how different sorts of retail environments influence consumers' experience and behaviour. The research uses a comparative case study and employs the theoretical framework of geosemiotics. Investigating three different stores from the perspective of architectural style reveals that cultural meanings are firmly attached to interior style design, and these can be traced in customers' retail experiences. Our findings suggest, firstly, that stores' focusing solely on functional aspects such as the efficient use of space, standardization and self‐service rather than also considering aesthetic issues leads to rather neutral and uninteresting retail experiences. Secondly, they show that the retail store environment affects the social relationships that consumers establish in commercial locations. Thirdly, the study indicates that customers' overall retail experience is linked to their perceptions of the store's social and environmental responsibility and moral values. On the whole, this research advances our theoretical understanding of everyday consumption experiences. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward Increasing Fairness in Score Scale Calibrations Employed in International Large-Scale Assessments

In this article, we investigate the creation of comparable score scales across countries in international assessments. We examine potential improvements to current score scale calibration procedures used in international large-scale assessments. Our approach seeks to improve fairness in scoring international large-scale assessments, which often ignore item misfit in score scale calibrations. We also seek to obtain improved model-data fit estimates when calibrating international score scales. To this end, we examine the use of two alternative score scale calibration procedures: (a) a language-based score scale and (b) a more parsimonious international scale wherein a large proportion of international parameters are used with a subset of country-based parameters for items that misfit in the international scale. In our analyses, we used data from all 40 countries participating in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Our findings revealed that current score scale calibration procedures yield large numbers of misfitting items (higher than 25% for some countries). Our proposed approach diminished the effects of proportion of item misfit on score scale calibrations and also yielded enhanced model-data fit estimates. These results lead to enhancing confidence in measurements obtained from international large-scale assessments.     

Family Cohesion and Health-Related Quality of Life of Children with Type 1 Diabetes: The Mediating Role of Parental Adjustment

Despite the increasing number of studies on the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of children with type 1 diabetes (T1D), little is known about the influence of family and parental factors on this outcome. This study aimed to explore whether family cohesion and children’s HRQOL were connected through three indicators of parental psychological adjustment (parenting stress, depressive symptoms, and anxious symptoms) as well as whether these links varied according to the child’s age. Levels of family cohesion, parenting stress, and depression/anxiety symptoms of parents of children with T1D and parents of healthy children were compared. The sample included 88 child–parent dyads composed of children/adolescents (8–18 years old) with T1D and one of their parents and 121 dyads composed of healthy children/adolescents and one of their parents. The parents completed self-report measures of family cohesion, parenting stress, and emotional adjustment, and the children completed measures of HRQOL. Testing of the hypothesized moderated mediational model showed that higher HRQOL ratings in children were associated with higher levels of cohesion through lower levels of parental stress, regardless of the child’s age. Parents of children with T1D perceived less cohesion and felt more anxiety and stress about parenting tasks compared to parents of healthy children. Our findings suggest that parents of children with T1D are at an increased risk of psychological maladjustment. Moreover, this study highlights the interrelation between family/parental functioning and child adjustment and makes an innovative contribution by identifying a mechanism that may account for the link between family and child variables.     

Aging and response interference across sensory modalities

Advancing age is associated with decrements in selective attention. It was recently hypothesized that age-related differences in selective attention depend on sensory modality. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction, using a response interference task. To this end, 16 younger (mean age = 23.1 years) and 24 older (mean age = 65.3 years) adults performed four response interference tasks, involving all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors. The results showed that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in age-related distractibility by irrelevant spatial information.