Effect of Perceived Social Support on Self-care Agency and Loneliness Among Elderly Muslim People

Journal of Religion and Health - This study was conducted to investigate the effect of perceived social support on self-care agency and loneliness among elderly Muslim people. This study...     

Assessing Violence Risk: A Review and Clinical Recommendations

Guidance to identify and manage clients with a perceived high risk for future violence is of great importance for mental health professionals. In the past decade, several structured instruments have been developed to assess risk of future violence. Awareness of the limits and abilities of such instruments is required. This article reviews the most well‐known risk assessment tools and provides recommendations for how to approach the area of violence risk assessment.     

Staying in or moving away from structured activities: Explanations involving parents and peers

Adolescent participation in structured activities, meaning those with adult leaders, regular meetings, and skill-building activities, is related to good adjustment. Participation in unstructured, unsupervised, peer-oriented activities is related to poor adjustment. Structured activity participation is high in early adolescence and then declines, raising the question of why youths leave structured activities. The authors examined explanations involving parents and peers. They used longitudinal data from 861 youths (ages 13-17 years). Results showed that, compared with youths who stayed in structured activities, those who switched to hanging out on the streets were less likely to have peers in structured activities and had less positive feelings about the home context and more negative interactions with parents. In addition, delinquency predicted switching to hanging out in the streets and never joining structured activities in the first place. The results concerning parents support a theoretical explanation of how parents might unintentionally affect youths' leisure choices. Furthermore, the authors found some indications that positive feelings at home might protect youths who switch from structured activities to hanging out on the streets from increases in delinquency.     

Parent-child relationships, partner relationships, and emotional adjustment: a birth-to-maturity prospective study

This study examined whether detrimental childhood relationships with parents were related to partner relationship quality and emotional adjustment in adulthood. The authors tested a theoretical model in which (a) low-quality parent-child relationships were related to conflict and low-quality communication with parents in adolescence, (b) parent-adolescent conflict and low-quality communication were linked to low-quality partner relationships in young adulthood, and (c) low-quality partner relationships in young adulthood were predictive of low-quality partner relationships as well as depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with life at midlife. Multi-informant data were used from 212 Swedish individuals who were followed from birth into adulthood. Results demonstrated that, as hypothesized, negative parent-child bonds were indirectly related to low-quality partner relationships and dissatisfaction with life in adulthood (but not anxiety and depression) through conflictual parent-adolescent communication and low-quality partner relationships in young adulthood.     

Electrical stimulation of the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus in freely moving awake rats: time- and site-specific effects on two-way active avoidance conditioning

The pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus (PPTg) is involved in the regulation of thalamocortical transmission and of several functions related to ventral and dorsal striatal circuits. Stimulation of the PPTg in anesthetized animals increases cortical arousal, cortical acetylcholine release, bursting activity of mesopontine dopaminergic cells, and striatal dopamine release. It was hypothetized that PPTg stimulation could improve learning by enhancing cortical arousal and optimizing the activity of striatal circuits. We tested whether electrical stimulation (ES) of the PPTg, applied to freely-moving awake rats previously implanted with a chronic electrode, would improve the acquisition and/or the retention of two-way active avoidance conditioning, and whether this effect would depend on the specific PPTg region stimulated (anterior vs posterior) and on the time of ES: just before (pre-training) or after (post-training) each of three training sessions. The treatment consisted of 20 min of ES (0.2 ms pulses at 100 Hz; current intensity: 40-80 microA). The results showed that (1) this stimulation did not induce either any signs of distress nor abnormal behaviors, apart from some motor stereotyped behaviors that disappeared when current intensity was lowered; (2) pre-training ES applied to the anterior PPTg improved the acquisition of two-way active avoidance, (3) no learning improvement was found after either post-training ES of the anterior PPTg, or pre- and post-training ES of the posterior PPTg. The results give support to a role of PPTg in learning-related processes, and point to the existence of functional PPTg regions.     

Weight as an Embodiment of Importance

ABSTRACT— Four studies show that the abstract concept of importance is grounded in bodily experiences of weight. Participants provided judgments of importance while they held either a heavy or a light clipboard. Holding a heavy clipboard increased judgments of monetary value (Study 1) and made participants consider fair decision-making procedures to be more important (Study 2). It also caused more elaborate thinking, as indicated by higher consistency between related judgments (Study 3) and by greater polarization of agreement ratings for strong versus weak arguments (Study 4). In line with an embodied perspective on cognition, these findings suggest that, much as weight makes people invest more physical effort in dealing with concrete objects, it also makes people invest more cognitive effort in dealing with abstract issues.     

"I've also experienced loss and fear": Effects of prior similar experience on empathy

Although it is frequently argued that empathy is increased by similar experiences, this idea has rarely been tested. This study investigated the relationship between empathy and prior similar experience. Participants read four different stories and rated the degree of empathy they felt. They also reported the extent to which they had prior similar experience of the events in the stories. We found that these self-reports of prior similar experience increased empathy for the persons in the stories. Similar experience may be an important situational antecedent for feeling empathy for another person. Pointing out similarities among experiences may be a fruitful means of training empathy.     

Why is a truth-predicate like a pronoun?

I begin with an exposition of the two main variants of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT), those of Dorothy Grover et al. and Robert Brandom. Three main types of criticisms are then put forward: (1) material criticisms to the effect that (PT) does not adequately explain the linguistic data, (2) an objection to the effect that no variant of (PT) gives a properly unified account of the various occurrences of “true” in English, and, most importantly, (3) a charge that the comparison with proforms is explanatorily idle. The last objection is that, given a complete semantic account of pronouns, proadjectives, antecedents, etc., together with a complete (PT), the essential semantic character of “true” could be deduced, but then, the idleness of the comparison with pronouns would be apparent. It turns out that objections (2) and (3) are related in the following way: the prosentential terminology is held to conceal the lack of unity in (PT), by describing the different data in the same terms (“proform”, “antecedent”, etc.). But this, I argue, is only a way of truly describing, rather than explaining, the data, these being certain relations of equivalence and consequence between sentences. I consider a language for which (PT) would be not only true, but also explanatory, but note that this language is very different from English. I end by showing that Robert Brandom’s case that “is true” is not a predicate fails, and that his motivation for saying so is based on fallacious reasoning (namely, Boghossian’s argument against deflationism).     

A deflationary theory of reference

The article first rehearses three deflationary theories of reference, (1) disquotationalism, (2) propositionalism (Horwich), and (3) the anaphoric theory (Brandom), and raises a number of objections against them. It turns out that each corresponds to a closely related theory of truth, and that these are subject to analogous criticisms to a surprisingly high extent. I then present a theory of my own, according to which the schema “That S(t) is about t” and the biconditional “S refers to x iff S says something about x” are exhaustive of the notions of aboutness and reference. An account of the usefulness of “about” is then given, which, I argue, is superior to that of Horwich. I close with a few considerations about how the advertised theory relates to well-known issues of reference, the conclusions of which is (1) that the issues concern reference and aboutness only insofar as the words “about” and “refer” serve to generalise over the claims that are really at issue, (2) that the theory of reference will not settle the issues, and (3) that it follows from (2) that the issues do not concern the nature of aboutness or reference.     

Self-controlled concurrent feedback and the education of attention towards perceptual invariants

The present study investigates the effects of different types of concurrent feedback on the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. Twenty participants walked through virtual corridors in which rhythmically opening and closing sliding doors were placed. The participants aimed to adjust their walking speed so as to cross the doors when the doors were close to their maximal aperture width. The highest level of performance was achieved by learners who practiced the task with unambiguous self-controlled concurrent feedback, which is to say, by learners who could request that feedback at wish. Practice with imposed rather than self-controlled feedback and practice without concurrent feedback were shown to be less effective. Finally, the way in which the self-controlled concurrent feedback was presented was also found to be of paramount importance; if the feedback is ambiguous, it may even prevent participants from learning the task. Clearly, unambiguous self-controlled feedback can give rise to higher levels of performance than other feedback conditions (compared to imposed schedule) but, depending on the way it is presented, the feedback can also prevent the participants from learning the task.In the discussion it is argued that unambiguous self-controlled concurrent feedback allows learners to more rapidly educate their attention towards more useful perceptual invariants and to calibrate the relation between perceptual invariants and action parameters.