Development and validation of a brief self-report measure of agitation: the Brief Agitation Measure

Emerging evidence indicates that agitation is an ominous precursor to imminent death by suicide, yet measures of it are few, and to our knowledge, no self-report measure of agitation exists. To fill this gap, we have developed the Brief Agitation Measure (BAM), which is designed as a brief measure to assess agitation. In this article, we provide preliminary evidence from 2 studies examining the reliability and validity of the BAM in an undergraduate sample as well as a clinical sample. We close with a discussion of the limitations of the studies and implications of our findings.     

The Role of Existential Beliefs Within the Relation of Centenarians’ Health and Well-Being

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of existential beliefs in mediating the influence of health on centenarians’ well-being. A total of 80 centenarians (mean age 101.1; SD = 1.3; 81.3 % women) with no/minor cognitive impairment were included. The OARS questionnaire for diseases and functional capacity (ADL, IADL), the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the existential beliefs subscale were used for data collection. The findings suggest that existential resources are a crucial element for mitigating the impact of health constraints in subjective well-being in this population. Appropriate models of intervention for very old age that recognize the importance of religion, spirituality, and meaning of life are to be considered.     

Ego Development and Psychosocial Functioning in Young Adults With and Without Psychiatric History

Ego development has been associated with positive outcomes, namely, with a better psychosocial adjustment and establishment of satisfactory relationships. However, ego development and psychosocial functioning are independent domains and a developed ego does not guarantee successful adaptation. Moreover, it is not clear whether ego development differentially influences psychosocial functioning in clinical and normative samples. The present study investigated the impact of ego development on the psychosocial functioning of young adults with (high-risk) and without (normative) psychiatric history. Results show an association between those two variables, especially strong for the high-risk group. High-risk individuals with successful psychosocial functioning exhibited levels of ego development more similar to those of normative young adults than to those of the remaining high-risk individuals. Moreover, as predicted, ego development mediated the relationship between psychiatric history and psychosocial functioning. Further support was found for the protective role of ego development, especially for individuals with psychiatric history.     

Cultivating the Senses and Giving in to the Sacred: Notes on Body and Experience among Pentecostal Women in Salvador,Brazil

The article deals with the religious experience of poor Pentecostal women from the city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil. In centering the discussion of this experience on bodily engagement in place—and on the body's attunement to place—this article seeks to capture the social and existential dimensions of the sensibilities which women develop as members of the religious community and thus to address the question of how the sense experiences, which are awakened and cultivated in this religious setting, help shape embodied forms of attention to oneself, to others, and to context. We contend that concrete embodied experience of divine power fostered in ritual favors training attention to context in search of signs of divine presence and helps give shape to a disposition which extends, to other people and places, the power that flows from Pentecostal women's bodies.     

Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach

This study focuses on how the emergence of innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., his or her usual way of understanding and experiencing), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. IMs challenge a person’s current framework of understanding and experiencing, generating uncertainty. When uncertainty is excessively threatening, a semiotic strategy to deal with it often emerges: attenuation of novelty’s meanings and implications by a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organizes one’s current self-narrative) and a non-dominant or innovative voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation, mutual in-feeding, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and non-dominant voices evolves from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes: (1) escalation of the innovative voice(s) thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) dominant and innovative voices negotiating and engaging in joint action.     

Near-term fetuses process temporal features of speech

The perception of speech and music requires processing of variations in spectra and amplitude over different time intervals. Near-term fetuses can discriminate acoustic features, such as frequencies and spectra, but whether they can process complex auditory streams, such as speech sequences and more specifically their temporal variations, fast or relatively slow acoustic variations, is unclear. We recorded the cardiac activity of 82 near-term fetuses (38 weeks GA) in quiet sleep during a silent control condition and four 15 s streams presented at 90 dB SPL Leq: two piano melodies with opposite contours, a natural Icelandic sentence and a chimera of the sentence--all its spectral information was replaced with broadband noise, leaving its specific temporal variations in amplitude intact without any phonological information. All stimuli elicited a heart rate deceleration. The response patterns to the melodies were the same and differed significantly from those observed with the Icelandic sentence and its chimera, which did not differ. The melodies elicited a monophasic heart rate deceleration, indicating a stimulus orienting reflex while the Icelandic and its chimera evoked a sustained lower magnitude response, indicating a sustained attentional response or more focused information processing. A conservative interpretation of the data is that near-term fetuses can perceive sound streams and the rapid temporal variations in amplitude that are specific to speech sounds with no spectral variations at all.     

Effects of an Online Stimulus Equivalence Teaching Procedure on Research Design Open-Ended Questions Performance of International Undergraduate Students

The Psychological Record - The purpose of the present study was to assess if training in matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks would yield not only new MTS performance but also written topography-based...     

Development and Validation of a Brief Self-Report Measure of Agitation: The Brief Agitation Measure

Emerging evidence indicates that agitation is an ominous precursor to imminent death by suicide, yet measures of it are few, and to our knowledge, no self-report measure of agitation exists. To fill this gap, we have developed the Brief Agitation Measure (BAM), which is designed as a brief measure to assess agitation. In this article, we provide preliminary evidence from 2 studies examining the reliability and validity of the BAM in an undergraduate sample as well as a clinical sample. We close with a discussion of the limitations of the studies and implications of our findings.