Preventive behaviour and health status among the elderly

Abstract

The research describes the range of preventive health behaviours undertaken by the elderly, investigates the dimensionality of preventive health behaviour, and explores the relationship between preventive health behaviour, self-assessed and medically assessed health status. Previous research has relied mainly on self-reports of health status. Data from medical examinations and interviews with 115 elderly individuals (aged 65–75) indicated that most elderly persons performed some intentional preventive health practices, as well as a broad range of normative preventive health practices. Particular clusters of preventive health behaviour emerged when the data were subjected to cluster analysis. A short index consisting of five personal preventive health behaviours found in other studies to have a protective effect on long-term health was found to have a low to moderate correlation with the medical and self-assessments of health status employed in the study. These findings indicate particular types of preventive health behaviour of importance for health promotion programmes with the elderly.     

Threat-related processing supports prospective memory retrieval for people with obsessive tendencies

Obsessive-compulsive disorder can result in a variety of deficits to cognitive performance, including negative consequences for attention and memory performance. The question addressed in the current study concerned whether this disorder influenced performance in an event-based prospective memory task. The results from a subclinical population indicated that, relative to non-anxious controls and mildly depressed controls, people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies (washing compulsions) incur decrements in remembering to respond to cues related to a neutral intention (respond to animals). This deficit was ameliorated by giving the subclinical group an intention about a threat-related category (respond to bodily fluids) and cueing them with concepts that they had previously rated as particularly disturbing to them. Thus, their normal attentional bias for extended processing of threat-related information overcame their natural deficit in event-based prospective memory.     

The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail...     

A case series of attention modification in clinically anxious youths

Research in the last fifteen years suggests that anxious individuals selectively attend towards threatening information. Attention modification interventions for internalizing adults have been developed to target cognition at this basic level; these programs have demonstrated initial efficacy in attention bias and anxiety symptom reduction. To date, there have been no published studies of attention modification in youths with clinical levels of anxiety. The current case series examined the initial efficacy of a four-week (12 sessions) attention modification program (AMP) designed to train attention away from threat in 16 children and adolescents (ages 10 to 17) diagnosed with DSM-IV anxiety disorders. Overall, youths experienced a significant decrease in anxiety and depression symptoms, and 12 of 16 youths no longer met criteria for any anxiety diagnosis at post-treatment. AMP was feasible with youths, and all youths and parents deemed the program acceptable. These findings provide support for further research on the use of cognitive bias modification interventions with clinically anxious youths.     

Developmental and dyadic perspectives on commitment in adult romantic relationships

We tested hypotheses concerning the developmental roots of becoming the "weak-link" (less committed) partner in adult romantic relationships and the associations between partners' absolute and relative levels of commitment and dyadic outcomes. We examined 78 target 20- to 21-year-olds who were involved in a romantic relationship and who had been studied since birth. As predicted, people who received lower-quality support from caregivers in toddlerhood or who were less able to resolve conflicts with a best friend in midadolescence were more likely to become the weak-link partner in a romantic relationship at age 20 to 21. Furthermore, lower commitment on the part of the weak-link partner coupled with greater discrepancy in commitment between partners predicted a greater likelihood that the couple would display hostility (rated by observers) during a videotaped conflict-resolution task when they were 20 to 21 years old. These findings are discussed from developmental and dyadic perspectives.     

Understanding standing: permission to deflect reasons

Standing is a peculiar norm, allowing for deflecting that is rejecting offhand and without deliberation interventions such as directives. Directives are speech acts that aim to give directive-reasons, which are reason to do as the directive directs because of the directive. Standing norms, therefore, provide for deflecting directives regardless of validity (i.e., regardless of whether or not a directive succeeds in giving a directive-reason) or the normative weight of the rejected directive. The logic of the normativity of standing is, therefore, not the logic of invalidating directives or of competing with directive-reasons but of ‘exclusionary permission’. That is, standing norms provide for permission to exclude from practical deliberation directive-reasons if given without the requisite standing, regardless of their normative weight. As such, standing is a type of second-order norm. Numerous everyday practices involve the deflection of directives, such as pervasive practices of deflecting hypocritical and officious directives. Of various possible models, the one that best captures the normative structure of these practices of deflection is the standing model. Accordingly, the normativity of standing is pervasive in our everyday practices. Establishing that standing, although a neglected philosophical idea, is a significant and independent normative concept.     

Automatic avoidance tendencies in individuals with contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms

We used an approach-avoidance task (AAT) to examine response to threatening stimuli in 20 individuals high in contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms (HCs) and 21 individuals low in contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms (LCs). Participants were instructed to respond to contamination-related and neutral pictures by pulling a joystick towards themselves or by pushing it away from themselves. Moving the joystick changed the size of the image to simulate approaching or distancing oneself from the object. Consistent with our hypothesis, the HC group was significantly slower in pulling contamination-related pictures than in pulling neutral pictures, whereas in the LC group there was no difference between speed of pulling contamination-related pictures and neutral pictures. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find support for faster pushing away of contamination-related pictures than neutral pictures by the HC group. Moreover, the degree of avoidance of contamination-related stimuli when pulling - but not when pushing - was significantly correlated with self-reported contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms. These results suggest a biased behavioral response for threatening objects in individuals high in contamination fears only when inhibiting the prepotent response to avoid threatening stimuli and not when performing a practiced avoidance response. Thus, our results validate the use of the AAT as a measure of inhibited and uninhibited automatic avoidance reactions to emotional information in individuals with contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms.