Prevalence and Significant Determinants of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in a Large Sample of Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Chronic and life-threatening neurodegenerative diseases may be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Therefore, the current study was an investigation of the prevalence of PTSD in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, and identification of significant determinants of PTSD. Two hundred thirty-two MS patients were consecutively recruited and screened for the presence of PTSD with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised, corroborated by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. Furthermore, participants were administered the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the Fatigue Severity Scale. Twelve patients (12/232, i.e. 5.17 %) were diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. Levels of education, anxiety and depression were significant determinants of the presence of PTSD. The role played by the levels of education, anxiety and depression in determining the presence of PTSD has been discussed. Further research on the psychological features of neurodegenerative diseases is urgently needed in order to plan appropriate treatments and improve patients’ quality of life.     

Personality and the response to predation risk: effects of information quantity and quality

Within aquatic ecosystems, chemosensory cues provide valuable public information regarding the form and degree of risk, allowing prey to make informed behavioural decisions. Such cues, however, may vary in both relative concentration detected (i.e. ‘quantity’) and reliability of the information available (i.e. ‘quality’), leading to varying response patterns. Moreover, prey species are also known to exhibit consistent behavioural tactics towards managing risk (i.e. personality), possibly shaping their use of public information. Here, we present two experiments examining the potential interacting effects of personality and the quantity (Experiment 1) or quality (Experiment 2) of public information on the short-term predator avoidance responses of wild-caught Trinidadian guppies under semi-natural conditions. Our first experiment demonstrated that personality shaped responses to a high concentration of alarm cues (high risk), with shyer guppies exhibiting stronger antipredator responses than bolder guppies. When exposed to either low risk or stream water controls, personality had no effect on the intensity of response. Our second experiment demonstrated that personality again shaped the response to high concentrations of alarm cues (a known risk) but not to a novel chemosensory cue (tilapia odour). When exposed to the unknown novel cue, guppies exhibited a relatively high intensity antipredator response, regardless of personality. Combined, our results suggest that individual risk-taking tactics shape the use of public information in a context-dependent fashion.     

Disturbance cues function as a background risk cue but not as an associative learning cue in tadpoles

Animal Cognition - Chemical information has an important role in the sensory ecology of aquatic species. For aquatic prey, chemical cues are a vital source of information related to predator...     

Career Adapt-Abilities Scale-Italian Form: Psychometric proprieties with Italian preadolescents

During preadolescence children start to give attention to the future, to formulate thoughts, and to wonder about what they want. They also acquire knowledge and experiment with strategies to assist them in designing their future career. Among the constructs that can now play a relevant role in life designing, the four resources of career adaptability have a prominent role. This article reports the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale-International Form 2.0 for a group of middle school students. Two different studies involving Italian preadolescents were conducted. The first study tests the instrument's multidimensional structure, internal consistency and discriminant validity. The second one verifies the factorial structure's across-gender invariance and the test–retest reliability. Results provide strong psychometric support for the CAAS-Italian Form with preadolescents as a valid measure for analyzing their career adaptability and for using it in career counseling and education.     

A cross-modal effect of noise: the disappearance of the alarm reaction of a freshwater fish

Anthropogenic noise pollution is recognized as a major global stressor of animals. While many studies have assessed the unimodal impacts of noise pollution with a focus on intraspecific acoustic communication, little is known about noise pollution on the perception of visual and chemical information. The ‘distracted prey hypothesis’ posits that processing noise interferes with processing other information in the brain. Here, we found evidence for such a cross-modal effect of noise on the antipredator behaviour of a freshwater prey fish, the fathead minnow, Pimephales promelas. In laboratory trials, exposure to noise from a motorboat caused the total absence of the classical fright reaction of minnows to conspecific alarm cues, whereas an ambient noise control had no such impact. In natural habitats, the impairment of such antipredator behaviour due to noise pollution could have major fitness consequences. We discuss how our findings translate to animal ecology and the need for future studies that target specific management decisions regarding noise pollution.     

Delaying Disposing: Examining the Relationship between Procrastination and Clutter across Generations

We explored how two types of procrastination (indecision and behavioral), contribute to problems with clutter across three adult U.S. samples differing as generational cohorts. An online survey was administered to college students (mean age = 21) and younger adults recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk; mean age = 31), plus older adults recruited with help from the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (mean age = 54) (http://challengingdisorganization.org). Hierarchical linear regression revealed that behavioral procrastination contributed significantly to an increasingly larger percentage of explained variance in clutter problems across the generational cohorts in a series of separate analyses. The addition of indecision as a variable led to a significant incremental increase in explained variance for the younger and older adult samples, but not for the student sample. Clutter problems led to a significant decrease in satisfaction with life among older adults. Findings suggest that general procrastination tendencies may enable a lifelong pattern of responses to one’s environment that become increasingly maladaptive throughout the life cycle - simultaneously delaying disposal decisions.