Family well-being is valued more than personal well-being: A four-country study

Well-being is recognized as a fundamental human goal and a universal human aspiration. However, some cross-country studies suggest that the desirability of the most often studied concept of well-being—personal life satisfaction—varies across countries, and we know little about the desirability of other types of well-being. Extending this novel area of research, we argue that focusing on the family (as compared to the individual) as the subject of well-being may be another important distinction in how well-being is conceptualized and valued. With data collected in four countries that tend to occupy different positions in rankings of personal life satisfaction (i.e., Canada, Colombia, Japan, and Poland), we document that, irrespective of cultural context, family well-being is valued over personal well-being. These findings suggest that policy makers and scientists may need to pay more attention to family well-being than they currently do.

     

Psychometric Properties of a Spanish Translation of the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale – Parent Version

The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale – Parent Version (RCADS-P) is a parent-report questionnaire that assesses dimensions of DSM anxiety and depressive disorders in youths. Previous studies have found that the RCADS-P possesses clinical utility and strong psychometric properties in both clinic- and school-based populations. To increase applicability of the measure to a greater proportion of the individuals accessing mental health services, the present study sought to develop and examine the psychometric properties of a Spanish version of the RCADS-P. As completed by parents of 85 publicly referred children and adolescents, the RCADS-P demonstrated good internal consistency and convergent, discriminant, and divergent validity. Confirmatory factor analysis also supported a six-factor model consistent with the measure’s six subscales: separation anxiety disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder. A secondary aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of a shortened, 25-item version of the Spanish translation of the RCADS-P, which also evidenced favorable psychometric properties. Findings provide support for the Spanish version of the RCADS-P as an efficient and informative parent-report measure of youths' internalizing behaviors.     

Differences in memory functioning between children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and/or focal epilepsy

Prior research has shown that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and epilepsy are frequently comorbid and that both disorders are associated with various attention and memory problems. Nonetheless, limited research has been conducted comparing the two disorders in one sample to determine unique versus shared deficits. Hence, we investigated differences in working memory (WM) and short-term and delayed recall between children with ADHD, focal epilepsy of mixed foci, comorbid ADHD/epilepsy and controls. Participants were compared on the Core subtests and the Picture Locations subtest of the Children’s Memory Scale (CMS). Results indicated that children with ADHD displayed intact verbal WM and long-term memory (LTM), as well as intact performance on most aspects of short-term memory (STM). They performed worse than controls on Numbers Forward and Picture Locations, suggesting problems with focused attention and simple span for visual-spatial material. Conversely, children with epilepsy displayed poor focused attention and STM regardless of the modality assessed, which affected encoding into LTM. The only loss over time was found for passages (Stories). WM was intact. Children with comorbid ADHD/epilepsy displayed focused attention and STM/LTM problems consistent with both disorders, having the lowest scores across the four groups. Hence, focused attention and visual-spatial span appear to be affected in both disorders, whereas additional STM/encoding problems are specific to epilepsy. Children with comorbid ADHD/epilepsy have deficits consistent with both disorders, with slight additive effects. This study suggests that attention and memory testing should be a regular part of the evaluation of children with epilepsy and ADHD.     

Trait Socio-Cognitive Mindfulness is Related to Affective and Cognitive Empathy

Research regarding the relationship between empathy and mindfulness is sparse. Within the social scientific literature, there are two major branches of mindfulness research: meditative mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn in Gen Hosp Psychiatry 4(1):33–47, 1982) and non-meditative, socio-cognitive mindfulness (Langer and Moldoveanu in J Soc Issues 56(1):1–9, 2000). Meditative mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention non-judgmentally to the present moment whereas socio-cognitive mindfulness is the process of drawing novel distinctions leading to greater attention to the present moment and sensitivity to context. We hypothesized that the two types of mindfulness would correlate with each other and with empathy broadly defined but that there would be divergence in these relationships given their conceptual distinctions. Four hundred and eighty-four participants from Mechanical Turk completed tasks of socio-cognitive mindfulness, meditative mindfulness, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and social desirability. Socio-cognitive mindfulness correlated with both affective and cognitive empathy as well as with meditative mindfulness. Meditative mindfulness correlated with only affective empathy but not with cognitive empathy. These findings suggested that, in contrast to meditative mindfulness, socio-cognitive mindfulness involves cognitive processes (e.g., perspective-taking, flexibility) potentially amenable to experimental manipulation aimed at increasing empathy more generally.     

Against Mathematical Convenientism

Indispensablists argue that when our belief system conflicts with our experiences, we can negate a mathematical belief but we do not because if we do, we would have to make an excessive revision of our belief system. Thus, we retain a mathematical belief not because we have good evidence for it but because it is convenient to do so. I call this view ‘mathematical convenientism.’ I argue that mathematical convenientism commits the consequential fallacy and that it demolishes the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument and Baker’s enhanced indispensability argument.     

Ask and ye shall receive: behavioural specificity in the accuracy of subjective memory complaints

A cross‐sectional sample of adults completed an extensive set of cognitive tasks and a set of questionnaires measuring depressive affect, memory complaint, and other variables. During an interview about their prescribed medications, the participants also reported whether they were having problems remembering to take the medication as prescribed (an everyday prospective memory problem). Their medication adherence at home was then monitored for one month using pill bottles which microelectronic caps. Cognitive tasks correlated with memory complaints, as measured by the Memory Functioning Questionnaire, but not with problems in remembering to take medications. The highest correlations were with a free recall task. Conversely, reported problems with medication adherence during the interview had good predictive validity for subsequent adherence problems, but not for cognitive tasks, including a measure of prospective memory. Depressive affect was related to both the questionnaire and the interview complaints about medication adherence, but a structural equation model showed that the relationships of cognition and medication adherence to the different memory complaints were independent of depressive affect. The results are interpreted in terms of a behavioural specificity hypothesis, which states that adults' self‐reports of memory problems are valid when they focus directly on specific memory‐related behaviours in everyday contexts. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using intraverbal training to increase symbolic play in children with autism spectrum disorder

We evaluated the effects of an intraverbal training procedure on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of object‐substitution symbolic play in three 6‐year‐old Korean boys with autism spectrum disorder. A multiple probe across four behaviors design was used. All children acquired target symbolic play behavior, and novel responses emerged in training and follow‐up conditions. Generalization of object substitutions to untaught objects occurred in all three children. Free play observations indicated that symbolic play emerged in one child, and functional play increased in all three children.     

Young and Old Adults' Concerns About Morality and Competence

Two experiments were conducted to examine people's sensitivity to person information from the morality domain (relation-oriented) and the competence domain (task & achievement-oriented). In a lexical decision paradigm, the findings from Experiment 1 showed that younger adults were faster to identify person cues (trait words) from the morality than from the competence domain, especially cues that were related to immorality. Experiment 2 compared the responses of younger and older adults. Despite the slower responses of the older adults, the findings indicated that all participants were faster at identifying cues from the morality domain than from the competence domain, with no age interactions. The results from Experiment 2 also suggested that disparate findings in the literature regarding reaction times to morality/competence cues and valence (positive or negative) were a function of word frequency effects. The findings are discussed in terms of people's chronic concern with the moral aspects of others as invariant across the lifespan, given that the morality domain is where interpersonal costs and threats are most likely to be signaled.     

Implementation Intentions and Facilitation of Prospective Memory

Forming detailed implementation intentions for a future behavior can increase the probability that the behavior is actually completed. We investigated whether this intention effect could be used to improve prospective memory in older adults. As expected, participants who formed an implementation intention were more than twice as likely to self-initiate the intended behavior (writing down the day of the week on every sheet of paper received during the experiment) compared with participants who either were merely instructed to do so or actively rehearsed the instruction. Forming an implementation intention, however, did not improve performance on a task that required a response to salient cues. We conclude that detailed implementation intentions facilitate prospective memory on tasks that lack salient cues and require self-initiation.     

Memory for two types of spatial location: effects of instructions, age, and format

Three experiments, with old persons (59-80 years) and college students (17-30 years) in Experiments 1 and 2 and with college students (17-24 years) in Experiment 3, investigated the differences between two types of spatial location memory: memory for the location of individual items in an array and memory for occupied, as opposed to unoccupied, locations in an array. Young persons performed better than old persons on both measures of location memory. However, an effect of instructions (intentional vs. incidental for spatial location) was consistently obtained for memory for occupied, as opposed to unoccupied, locations, whereas no effect of instructions was obtained for memory for individual item locations. In addition, item location memory was superior for objects as opposed to matched words (Experiment 2), whereas occupied location memory was not affected by presentation format (Experiments 2 and 3). These differences indicate that spatial memory is a complex process whose properties are affected by variations in stimulus characteristics and task demands. It was concluded that the distinction of Hasher and Zacks (1979) between automatic and effortful processes is not adequate for understanding spatial memory. A recognition of the complex nature of spatial processing suggests a resolution of discrepancies in the literature based upon differences in stimulus characteristics, task demands, and the effectiveness of task-appropriate mnemonic strategies.