Cochlear implants in young children

The cochlear implant is best characterized as a device that provides access to the sound environment. The device enables the hearing pathway to respond to environmental and speech sounds, providing informational cues from the surroundings and from others that may escape visual detection. As the developmental effects of a profound hearing loss are multiple, cochlear implants have been applied to ever younger children in an attempt to promote a more normal level of developmental learning through audition. In deafness, transducer elements of the inner ear fail to trigger auditory nerve afferent nerves in the presence of sound input. However, large reserves of afferent fibers exist even in the auditory nerve of a profoundly deaf patient. Furthermore, these nerve fibers retain the ability to respond to prosthetic activation. Through developmental learning in the early, formative years, auditory centers of the brain appear capable of processing information from the implant to provide speech comprehension and oral language development. Multichannel implants have replaced original single channel designs. multichannel devices enable larger percentages of recipients to recognize the spoken word without visual cues because they provide spectral information in addition to temporal and intensity cues. Testing under conditions of auditory (implant)-only input reveals significant open-set speech understanding capabilities in more than 75% of children after three years of device use. The benefit provided by implants may vary with a number of conditions including: hearing history, age of deafness onset, age at implantation, etiology of deafness, linguistic abilities, and the presence of a motivated system of support of oral language development. Patient variables should be given individual consideration in judging candidacy for a cochlear implant and in planning rehabilitative and education services after surgery and activation of the device.     

Timing variability in circle drawing and tapping: probing the relationship between event and emergent timing

R. Ivry, R. M. Spencer, H. N. Zelaznik, and J. Diedrichsen (2002) have proposed a distinction between timed movements in which a temporal representation is part of the task goal (event timing) and those in which timing properties are emergent. The issue addressed in the present experiment was how timing in conditions conducive to emergent timing becomes established. According to what the authors term the transformation hypothesis, timing initially requires an event-based representation when the temporal goal is defined externally (e.g., by a metronome), but over the first few movement cycles, control processes become established that allow timing to become emergent. Different groups of participants (N = 84) executed either 1 timed interval, 4 timed intervals, or 2 timed intervals separated by a pause. They produced the intervals by either circle drawing, a task associated with emergent timing, or tapping, a task associated with event timing. Analyses of movement variability suggested that similar timing processes were used in the 2 tasks only during the 1st interval. Those results are consistent with the transformation hypothesis and lead to the inference that the transition from event-based control to emergent timing can occur rapidly during continuous movements.     

Emotional intelligence and relationship quality among couples

To assess whether emotional intelligence (EI) is related to self‐assessed relationship quality, an ability test of EI and measures of relationship quality were administered to 86 heterosexual couples in a university setting. Results indicated that female partners were significantly higher in EI than male partners and that EI scores were uncorrelated within couples. Two 2 × 2 multiple analyses of variance (performed separately for positive and negative outcomes) assessed how relationship quality measures differed across four different types of couples (high‐EI female/high‐EI male, low‐EI female/low‐EI male, etc.). As predicted, couples with both partners low on EI tended to have the lowest scores on depth, support, and positive relationship quality and the highest scores on conflict and negative relationship quality. Counter to our hypotheses, couples with both partners high on EI did not consistently have higher scores on positive outcomes and lower scores on negative outcomes than couples with one high‐EI partner.     

Traumatic stress, perceived global stress, and life events: prospectively predicting quality of life in breast cancer patients.

The authors investigated the relationship between stress at initial cancer diagnosis and treatment and subsequent quality of life (QoL). Women (n = 112) randomized to the assessment-only arm of a clinical trial were initially assessed after breast cancer diagnosis and surgery and then reassessed at 4 months (during adjuvant treatment) and 12 months (postadjuvant treatment). There were 3 types of stress measured: number of stressful life events (K. A. Matthews et al., 1997), cancer-related traumatic stress symptoms (M. J. Horowitz, N. Wilner, & W. Alvarez, 1979), and perceived global stress (S. Cohen, T. Kamarck, & R. Mermelstein, 1983). Using hierarchical multiple regressions, the authors found that stress predicted both psychological and physical QoL (J. E. Ware, K. K. Snow, & M. Kosinski, 2000) at the follow-ups (all ps < .03). These findings substantiate the relationship between initial stress and later QoL and underscore the need for timely psychological intervention.     

Perception of visual speed while moving

During self-motion, the world normally appears stationary. In part, this may be due to reductions in visual motion signals during self-motion. In 8 experiments, the authors used magnitude estimation to characterize changes in visual speed perception as a result of biomechanical self-motion alone (treadmill walking), physical translation alone (passive transport), and both biomechanical self-motion and physical translation together (walking). Their results show that each factor alone produces subtractive reductions in visual speed but that subtraction is greatest with both factors together, approximating the sum of the 2 separately. The similarity of results for biomechanical and passive self-motion support H. B. Barlow's (1990) inhibition theory of sensory correlation as a mechanism for implementing H. Wallach's (1987) compensation for self-motion.     

Mentoring and Peer-led Interventions to Improve Quality of Life Outcomes among Adolescents with Chronic Illnesses

Advancing adolescent medicine has resulted in increased survival rates for life-limiting health conditions that are now considered chronic conditions. Due to the increased rates of chronic illnesses, the broad outcomes of community-based programs for adolescents with these illnesses need to be examined. Therefore, the present study seeks to examine community-based, mentoring and peer-led programs that have a social support component to increase quality of life outcomes for adolescents with chronic illnesses. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify articles that included a social support component to increase quality of life outcomes for adolescents with chronic illnesses. Six articles were included in the narrative analysis. Programs were divided into two types of interventions: mentoring/coaching (n?=?3) and peer-led interventions (n?=?3). A summary of each study was developed and main themes from each intervention were identified by the research team. This review found six community-based peer-led and mentoring interventions that incorporated a social support component to improve the quality of life of adolescents with chronic illnesses. Critical components for a peer-led or mentoring intervention should include social support components such as health coaching and mentoring by peers or adults. Since the nature of chronic illnesses is lengthy in duration, social support research translated into practice may offer adolescents who have any of these illnesses a means to improve their psychosocial outcomes. The interventions outlined in this present review have yielded promising results. Recommendations for future studies are included.     

Using morphs of familiar objects to examine how shape discriminability influences view sensitivity

We investigated how the difficulty of detecting a shape change influenced the achievement of object constancy across depth rotations for object identification and categorization tasks. In three sequential matching experiments, people saw pictures of morphs between two everyday, nameable objects (e.g., bath-sink morphs, along a continuum between "bath" and "sink" end-point shapes). In each experiment, both view changes and shape changes influenced performance. Furthermore, the deleterious effects of view changes were strongest when shape discrimination was hardest. In our earlier research, using morphs of novel objects, we found a similar interaction between view sensitivity and shape sensitivity (Lawson, 2004b; Lawson & Bülthoff, 2006; Lawson, Bülthoff, & Dumbell, 2003). The present results extend these findings to familiar-object morphs. They suggest that recognition remains view-sensitive at the basic level of identification for everyday, nameable objects, and that the difficulty of shape discrimination plays a critical role in determining the degree of this view sensitivity.     

Is there really a dissociative taxon on the dissociative experiences scale?

The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) and MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940) were administered to 1,237 college students to evaluate MMPI differences for nonpathological (n = 90) or pathological dissociators (n = 111) and nondissociative controls (n = 476). MMPIs of both dissociation groups had multiple clinical elevations with a mean 8-9 code. People classified in the pathological dissociation group had MMPI scores remarkably similar to those in the normal dissociation group. The DES and DES-Taxon (DES-T; Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) were also highly correlated. Our findings strongly suggest the DES-T does not uniquely identify categorical dissociation.     

Using performance feedback to enhance implementation fidelity of the problem-solving team process

Implementation integrity is a potentially critical issue for problem-solving teams (PST) and most response-to-intervention models. The current study hypothesized that providing performance feedback, which has consistently been shown to increase implementation integrity, to PSTs would enhance the procedural integrity of the process. The PSTs for three elementary schools were provided performance feedback with a 20-item checklist created from the literature. A multiple-baseline design across schools revealed an immediate change in level after providing performance feedback. The resulting percentages of non-overlapping data were 90.9%, 90.0%, and 100%. However, PSTs still did not monitor student progress, assess the effectiveness of the intervention, or measure the integrity with which the intervention was implemented even after receiving feedback. Thus, providing performance feedback could be a method to increase the fidelity with which critical components of data-based problem-solving are implemented, but these data suggest the need for additional research.