Parents of Adolescents with Mental Disorders: Improving Their Caregiving Experience

Several studies have demonstrated that the family members of adolescents with mental diseases experience distress, anxiety and depression, as well as economic strain, all of which contribute to physical and psychological caregiver morbidity. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of intervention to improve the caregiving experience of the parents of mentally ill adolescents. The parents of 20 patients were assessed with the Experience of Caregiving Inventory (ECI) and the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI), while patients’ functioning and psychopathology were evaluated with the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale and the Child Behavior Check List (CBCL), respectively. Assessments were conducted over 9 months, comparing the experimental group receiving the intervention with a control group that received “standard” care. While there were no significant differences in the patients’ psychopathologies, the caregivers in the experimental group had better ECI and WAI scores. Intervention focusing on the parents seemed to improve the caregivers’ understanding of the disease’s impact on their lives irrespective of the severity of their children’s condition. This finding may be useful in developing adequate measures for the parents of adolescents with severe mental diseases to help contain their psychological distress.     

A cross-cultural study of relationships between daily social interaction and the five-factor model of personality

Two studies, one in the United States (N = 130) and another in Germany (N = 100), examined relationships between daily social interaction and the traits of the Five-Factor Model. In both studies, student participants described their social interactions for 2 weeks using the Rochester Interaction Record. In both countries, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were positively related to reactions to social interaction, whereas Neuroticism was unrelated to reactions to interactions. In the United States, Extraversion and Openness were positively related to reactions to interactions, whereas these factors were not related to reactions to interactions in Germany. In the United States, Extraversion was positively related to how socially active participants were, whereas none of the FFM traits was related to amount of social interaction in the German sample. In both countries, Extraversion was positively related to percent of interactions involving friends. The results highlight the importance of taking into account the sociocultural milieus within which personality unfolds.     

Rehabilitation of executive deficits in closed head injury and anterior communicating artery aneurysm patients

This paper reports a study that was aimed to rehabilitate executive functions in closed head injury (CHI) and anterior communicating artery (ACoA) aneurysm patients. The groups tested comprised 10 CHI patients, 9 ACoA aneurysm patients and 19 controls. We employed a dual-task paradigm that is known to tap the ability to co-ordinate two actions. The treatment consisted of five experimental sessions, in which the dual-task paradigm was used. In the CHI study, the dual-task cost was measured before the treatment (assessment), immediately after the treatment (retest), and 3 months after the treatment (follow-up). In the ACoA aneurysm study, the dual-task cost was also assessed 12 months after the treatment. A significant reduction of the dual-task cost from assessment to retest was found. This reduction remained stable in the follow-up sessions. The results are discussed with reference to the absence of spontaneous recovery of this specific executive function and to the possibility that the beneficial effect of the treatment generalises to other executive functions and/or daily living activities. Received: 31 March 1999 / Accepted: 23 July 1999     

Consciousness and emotion: ERP modulation and attentive vs. pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expressions by backward masking

Facial stimulus processing is an important topic to explain how people comprehend affective disposition in others. The effect of attentive and pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expression was explored in the present research by using backward masking procedure. Specifically, unconscious mental process of emotion comprehension was analyzed: pictures presenting a happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised expressions were submitted to 21 subjects in both attentive and pre-attentive conditions and event-related potentials (ERPs) were registered in the two conditions. The two processes, attentive and pre-attentive, seem to be similar in their nature, since they are marked by analogous ERP deflections. In fact, two ERP effects were found, a positive (P300) deflection, maximally distributed on the parietal regions, and a negative (N200) deflection, more localized on the frontal sites. Nevertheless, some differences between the two conditions were found in terms of quantitative modulations of the two peaks. The N200 effect, ampler in attentive condition, may be considered such as an index of conscious processing of emotional faces, whereas the P3 (P3a) effect, higher in pre-attentive condition, was considered a specific marker of the automatic, unconscious process during the emotional face comprehension.     

On the conceptual link between mass customisation and experiential consumption: an explosion of subjectivity

Marketing managers currently face an explosion of subjectivity. A glance at the business world reveals new solutions developed to offer customised products. Mass customisation is stressed by academicians in different ways. For example, relationship marketing emphasises the role of the relationship between a vendor and its customer, with particular reference to the importance of personal involvement and trust. Reading such phenomena as manifesting an explosion of subjectivity in consumption suggests an enhanced opportunity for applying the experiential view of consumer behaviour. This paper invites marketing managers, as well as marketing and consumer researchers, to recognise the changing environment more proactively and to embrace the increasingly well‐established conceptions of the consumption experience more enthusiastically. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Attentional Resources Measured by Reaction Times Highlight Differences Within Pleasant and Unpleasant,High Arousing Stimuli

Simple reaction times (RTs) to acoustic tones were recorded during picture viewing in order to investigate attentional resource allocation to threat stimuli compared with pleasant (sport/adventure) and neutral (household objects) contents. Stimuli were selected as equally arousing according to standardized subjective ratings. In the late stage of picture processing threat pictures showed shorter RTs compared with neutral and pleasant ones. In a second study, a choice-RT task was employed, and a wider range of both pleasant and unpleasant contents was shown. Results indicated slower RTs when blood/injury and erotic couples were presented, compared with other threat, and with other positive (sport/adventure) scenes. Specifically, erotic couples require a greater amount of attentional resources compared with sport/adventure; the same is true for blood/injury stimuli as compared with threat. Remarkable differences were thus shown in attentional deployment to specific stimulus contents within the same valence category. These differences should be taken into account when using such stimuli to investigate emotional processing.     

An ERP study on facial expression of emotion: comparison of linguistic and visual semantic decoding

The present research compared the semantic information processing of linguistic stimuli with semantic elaboration of nonlinguistic facial stimuli. To explore brain potentials (ERPs, event-related potentials) related to decoding facial expressions and the effect of semantic valence of the stimulus, we analyzed data for 20 normal subjects (M age = 23.6 yr., SD = 0.2). Faces with three basic emotional expressions (fear, happiness, and sadness from the 1976 Ekman and Friesen database), with three semantically anomalous expressions (with respect to their emotional content), and the neutral stimuli (face without an emotional content) were presented in a random order. Differences in peak amplitude of ERP were observed later for anomalous expressions compared with congruous expressions. In fact, the results demonstrated that the emotional anomalous faces elicited a higher negative peak at about 360 msec., distributed mainly over the posterior sites. The observed electrophysiological activity may represent specific cognitive processing underlying the comprehension of facial expressions in detection of semantic anomaly. The evidence is in favour of comparability of this negative deflection with the N400 ERP effect elicited by linguistic anomalies.     

Topological Aspects of Branching-Time Semantics

The aim of this paper is to present a new perspective under which branching-time semantics can be viewed. The set of histories (maximal linearly ordered sets) in a tree structure can be endowed in a natural way with a topological structure. Properties of trees and of bundled trees can be expressed in topological terms. In particular, we can consider the new notion of topological validity for Ockhamist temporal formulae. It will be proved that this notion of validity is equivalent to validity with respect to bundled trees.     

Action observation network in childhood: a comparative fMRI study with adults

Very little is known about the action observation network and the mirror neuron system (AON/MNS) in children and its age‐related properties compared with those observed in adults. In the present fMRI study we explored the activation of areas belonging to the AON/MNS in children and adults during observation of complex hand‐grasping actions, as compared to observation of simple grasping acts executed with the left and the right hand, seen from a first person perspective. The results indicate that during the action observation tasks in children there was activation of a cortical network similar to that found in adults, including the premotor cortex, the posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal lobe. However, the activation in children was more widespread and showed a higher inter‐subject variability compared with adults. Furthermore, the activated network seems more lateralized to the left hemisphere in adults and more bilateral in children, with a linear growth of lateralization index as a function of age. Finally, in children the activation in the anterior intraparietal cortex (AIP) of each hemisphere was higher during observation of the contralateral hand (hand identity effect) and during the observation of complex actions relative to simple grasping acts, confirming the role of AIP for action‐related hand identity previously described in adults. These results support the assumption that structure and size of action representations are sensitive to mechanisms of development and show physiological plasticity. These properties of the AON/MNS could constitute a powerful tool for spontaneous reorganization and recovery of motor deficits after brain injury in children and in adults, as well as for specific rehabilitation programmes.