Recurrence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Late Life: A Cognitive Aging Perspective

Clinical experience with older adults shows that many will experience PTSD symptoms in older adulthood because of trauma exposure early in life. Some of these patients struggled with PTSD in the distant past and remained symptomfree for decades only to have a recurrence of PTSD in late life. This paper outlines a cognitive aging explanation for the recurrence of PTSD. It is proposed that the age-related decreases in attention make the intrusion of trauma-related memories more likely. The increase in intrusive memories, combined with age-related decreases in working memory, explicit memory, and prospective memory, increases the subjective distress associated with the memories and results in a recurrence of PTSD.     

RECONSIDERING RESEARCH ON DIVORCE, FAMILY LIFE CYCLE, AND THE MEANING OF FAMILY

This article analyzes functionalist and normative assumptions about marriage, divorce, family, and gender in developmental models of family life cycle. An interdisciplinary review of the literature in family development, family sociology, and family therapy reveals how a deficit comparison model implicitly informs the discourse in the study of single-parent families, women who are alone, and the adjustment of women and children to divorce. A feminist critique of family life cycle as the prevailing conceptual model in family development and therapy is presented, and postmodern definitions that deconstruct the concept of family are discussed. Future perspectives for research on family life and form are considered in terms of new action theory that considers divorce as a mode of resistance and change for women and families.     

Some aspects of perceptual coding of duration in visual duration discrimination

Data are presented which indicate two major differences between duration discrimination performance and discrimination performance usually observed in other psychophysical tasks. A decrement in duration discrimination performance with increasing temporal delays between the presentation of two successive stimuli was not found, and the usual difference in level of performance between forced-choice and single-stimulus tasks was not observed. The time-order error in duration discrimination is also discussed.     

Shame,guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability

Shame and guilt are closely related self-conscious emotions of negative affect that give rise to divergent self-regulatory and motivational behaviours. While guilt-proneness has demonstrated positive relationships with self-report measures of empathy and adaptive interpersonal functioning, shame-proneness tends to be unrelated or inversely related to empathy and is associated with interpersonal difficulties. At present, no research has examined relationships between shame and guilt-proneness with facial emotion recognition ability. Participants (N?=?363) completed measures of shame and guilt-proneness along with a facial emotion recognition task which assessed the ability to identify displays of anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, and shame. Guilt-proneness was consistently positively associated with facial emotion recognition ability. In contrast, shame-proneness was unrelated to capacity for facial emotion recognition. Findings provide support for theory arguing that guilt and empathy operate synergistically and may also help explain the inverse relationship between guilt-proneness and propensity for aggressive behaviour.     

Visual perspective in remembering and episodic future thought

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, remembering and episodic future thinking are supported by a common set of constructive processes. In the present study, we directly addressed this assertion in the context of third-person perspectives that arise during remembering and episodic future thought. Specifically, we examined the frequency with which participants remembered past events or imagined future events from third-person perspectives. We also examined the different viewpoints from which third-person perspective events were remembered or imagined. Although future events were somewhat more likely to be imagined from a third-person perspective, the spatial viewpoint distributions of third-person perspectives characterizing remembered and imagined events were highly similar. These results suggest that a similar constructive mechanism may be at work when people remember events from a perspective that could not have been experienced in the past and when they imagine events from a perspective that could not be experienced in the future. The findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with—and as extensions of—the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.