Serial reaction time performance following right parietal lobe damage

The serial reaction time task (SRT) is used to assess implicit sequence learning. Neuroimaging studies implicate parietal involvement; however, the necessity of this area is unclear. We tested six unilateral right parietal patients and compared their performance to matched controls. Both groups showed similar levels of learning and explicit awareness. Two patients with the largest lesions extending into either frontal or cerebellar regions showed no learning. These data suggest that implicit sequence learning can occur despite damage to the right parietal lobe.     

The Problematization of Sexuality among Women Living with HIV and a New Feminist Approach for Understanding and Enhancing Women’s Sexual Lives

In the context of HIV, women’s sexual rights and sexual autonomy are important but frequently overlooked and violated. Guided by community voices, feminist theories, and qualitative empirical research, we reviewed two decades of global quantitative research on sexuality among women living with HIV. In the 32 studies we found, conducted in 25 countries and composed mostly of cis-gender heterosexual women, sexuality was narrowly constructed as sexual behaviours involving risk (namely, penetration) and physiological dysfunctions relating to HIV illness, with far less attention given to the fullness of sexual lives in context, including more positive and rewarding experiences such as satisfaction and pleasure. Findings suggest that women experience declines in sexual activity, function, satisfaction, and pleasure following HIV diagnosis, at least for some period. The extent of such declines, however, is varied, with numerous contextual forces shaping women’s sexual well-being. Clinical markers of HIV (e.g., viral load, CD4 cell count) poorly predicted sexual outcomes, interrupting widely held assumptions about sexuality for women with HIV. Instead, the effects of HIV-related stigma intersecting with inequities related to trauma, violence, intimate relations, substance use, poverty, aging, and other social and cultural conditions primarily influenced the ways in which women experienced and enacted their sexuality. However, studies framed through a medical lens tended to pathologize outcomes as individual “problems,” whereas others driven by a public health agenda remained primarily preoccupied with protecting the public from HIV. In light of these findings, we present a new feminist approach for research, policy, and practice toward understanding and enhancing women’s sexual lives—one that affirms sexual diversity; engages deeply with society, politics, and history; and is grounded in women’s sexual rights.     

Building and sustaining work engagement – a participatory action intervention to increase work engagement in nursing staff

This study evaluated whether a participatory action research intervention with nursing staff on acute care older people National Health Service wards in the United Kingdom was effective for increasing work engagement. Mediation analyses between job resources (social support, influence in decision-making), job demands, work-related needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), and work engagement explored the presumed psychological mechanisms underlying the intervention. A non-randomized, matched control group, pretest, post-test design involved three intervention and five control wards. A significant decrease in relatedness, and a borderline significant decrease in competence, was observed in the intervention group compared to the control group, with no effect on work engagement (N = 45). Work-related needs mediated between resources and work engagement, supporting the job demands-resources model and self-determination theory as an underlying explanatory theory. Intervention implementation was difficult, highlighting the need for participant and organizational readiness for change, and strong management support. This is the first known study to apply participatory techniques to increase work engagement in nursing staff and explore the underlying explanatory psychological mechanisms, offering a novel means of taking work engagement research forward. Crucially, it highlights the challenges involved in intervention research and the importance of including evaluations of intervention implementation alongside statistical evaluations to avoid erroneous conclusions.     

Experimental manipulation of infant temperament affects amygdala functional connectivity

In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we examined neural processing of infant faces associated with a happy or a sad temperament in nulliparous women. We experimentally manipulated adult perception of infant temperament in a probabilistic learning task. In this task, participants learned about an infant's temperament through repeated pairing of the infant face with positive or negative facial expressions and vocalizations. At the end of the task, participants were able to differentiate between “mostly sad” infants who cried often and “mostly happy” infants who laughed often. Afterwards, brain responses to neutral faces of infants with a happy or a sad temperament were measured with fMRI and compared to brain responses to neutral infants with no temperament association. Our findings show that a brief experimental manipulation of temperament can change brain responses to infant signals. We found increased amygdala connectivity with frontal regions and the visual cortex, including the occipital fusiform gyrus, during the perception of infants with a happy temperament. In addition, amygdala connectivity was positively related to the post-manipulation ratings of infant temperament, indicating that amygdala connectivity is involved in the encoding of the rewarding value of an infant with a happy temperament.     

Relations between emotion,memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop,lexical decision,and immediate memory tasks

This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition. The second effect is superior recall of taboo words in surprise memory tests following color naming. The third effect is better recognition memory for colors consistently associated with taboo words rather than with neutral words. None of these effects was due to retrieval factors, attentional disengagement processes, response inhibition, or strategic attention shifts. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that taboo words impair immediate recall of the preceding and succeeding words in rapidly presented lists but do not impair lexical decision times. We argue that taboo words trigger specific emotional reactions that facilitate the binding of taboo word meaning to salient contextual aspects, such as occurrence in a task and font color in taboo Stroop tasks.     

A cross-cultural, long-term outcome evaluation of the ISTAR Comprehensive Stuttering Program across Dutch and Canadian adults who stutter

There is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of stuttering treatment programs delivered in domestic and international contexts and to determine if treatment delivered internationally is culturally sensitive. Evaluation of the effectiveness of the ISTAR Comprehensive Stuttering Program (CSP) within and across client groups from the Netherlands and Canada revealed generally positive results. At 2 years post-treatment both groups were maintaining statistically significant reductions in stuttering frequency and improvements in attitudes, confidence, and perceptions as measured by the Revised Communication Attitude Inventory (S24), Perceptions of Stuttering Inventory (PSI), and the approach scale of the Self-Efficacy Scaling by Adult Stutterers (SESAS). Data pooled across the groups on these measures gave evidence of a global treatment effect with standardized effect sizes ranging from typical to larger than typical in the behavioural sciences. Only two differences between the groups emerged: differences in speech rate and perception of self. Given that these groups represent two distinct cultures, differences were discussed in terms of whether they could be due to cultural, methodological, or other variables. Overall, results suggest that, the CSP appears to be similarly effective in both cultures and thus, sufficiently sensitive to the culture of Dutch adults who stutter.

Educational objectives: The reader will be able to (a) describe a methodology that can be used in a clinical setting to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of stuttering treatment with adults, (b) describe some of the challenges in developing a model of clinically meaningful outcome, (c) explain the rationale for the need for cross-cultural investigations of treatment outcome, and (d) summarize speech and self-report results of the cross-cultural evaluation of an integrated stuttering treatment program.     

Less is more: meta-analyses of sensitivity and attachment interventions in early childhood

Is early preventive intervention effective in enhancing parental sensitivity and infant attachment security, and if so, what type of intervention is most successful? Seventy studies were traced, producing 88 intervention effects on sensitivity (n = 7,636) and/or attachment (n = 1,503). Randomized interventions appeared rather effective in changing insensitive parenting (d = 0.33) and infant attachment insecurity (d = 0.20). The most effective interventions used a moderate number of sessions and a clear-cut behavioral focus in families with, as well as without, multiple problems. Interventions that were more effective in enhancing parental sensitivity were also more effective in enhancing attachment security, which supports the notion of a causal role of sensitivity in shaping attachment.     

Continuity of parenting practices across generations in an at-risk sample: a prospective comparison of direct and mediated associations

A prospective model of parenting and externalizing behavior spanning 3 generations (G1, G2, and G3) was examined for young men from an at-risk sample of young adult men (G2) who were in approximately the youngest one third of their cohort to become fathers. It was first predicted that the young men in G2 who had children the earliest would show high levels of antisocial behavior. Second, it was predicted that G1 poor parenting practices would show both a direct association with the G2 son's subsequent parenting and a mediated effect via his development of antisocial and delinquent behavior by adolescence. The young fathers had more arrests and were less likely to have graduated from high school than the other young men in the sample. Findings were most consistent with the interpretation that there was some direct effect of parenting from G1 to G2 and some mediated effect via antisocial behavior in G2.     

Portraits of Life: Patterns of Events Over the Lifespan

This explorative content-analytic study completes earlier studies on the lifespan distributions of number and affect of past and future life-events, collected by means of the Life-line Interview Method (LIM), for three age groups of men and women (young, middle and late adulthood). LIM events were classified into 40 subcategories divided over 9 categories: Relations, School, Work, Health, Growth, Home, Birth, Death and Other. Compression of the full data set by age group, gender, affect, decade, and time perspective, disclosed various patterns of events underlying the human life-course, e.g., the 'bump,' 'rosy view' and 'gender phase contrast' patterns. The compressed data set provided detailed material for the composition of three written group portraits of life, reflecting the modal life story of young, middle-aged and older men and women. Patterns and portraits show a content shift of past memories and future expectations over the lifespan, supporting a more dynamic view on the human life-course.     

What underlies the neuropsychological pattern of irregular > regular past-tense verb production?

The disadvantage in producing the past tense of regular relative to irregular verbs shown by some patients with non-fluent aphasia has been alternatively attributed (a) to the failure of a specific rule-based morphological mechanism, or (b) to a more generalised phonological impairment that penalises regular verbs more than irregular owing to the on-average greater phonological complexity of regular past-tense forms. Guided by the second of these two accounts, the current study was designed to identify more specific aspects of phonological deficit that might be associated with the pattern of irregular > regular past-tense production. Non-fluent aphasic patients (N = 8) were tested on past-tense verb production tasks and assessed with regard to the impact of three main manipulations in other word-production tasks: (i) insertion of a delay between stimulus and response in repetition; (ii) presence/number of consonant clusters in a target word in repetition; (iii) position of stress within a bi-syllabic word in repetition and picture naming. The performance of all patients deteriorated in delayed repetition; but the patients with the largest discrepancy between regular and irregular past-tense production showed greater sensitivity to the other two manipulations. The phonological nature of the factors that correlated with verb-inflection performance emphasises the role of a phonological deficit in the observed pattern of irregular > regular.