Psychosocial and socioeconomic factors associated with glycated hemoglobin in nondiabetic middle-aged men and women.

The authors tested associations between glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c; an index of glucose homeostasis and an indicator of cardiovascular disease risk in nondiabetic populations) and socioeconomic status (defined by grade of employment) and psychosocial factors in 234 British civil servants. HbA1c concentration was inversely related to grade of employment. Higher HbA1c was associated with greater waist-hip ratio, lower control at work, lower internal locus of control, lower active coping, and lower social support. Control at work, internal and chance locus of control, and active coping were also related to socioeconomic status. The association of social support but not other psychosocial factors with HbA1c was independent of socioeconomic status. HbA1c may complement measures of the metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance in studies of psychosocial factors in cardiovascular disease risk.     

Concepts dissolve artificial boundaries in the study of emotion and cognition,uniting body,brain, and mind

ABSTRACT

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development.     

Suicidal persons and their partners: individual and interpersonal dynamics

The individual and interpersonal dynamics of 21 suicidal persons (15 females and 6 males) and their partners were investigated. Each couple was interviewed at the time of the suicidal person's psychiatric hospitalization following a recent episode of suicidal behavior or serious suicidal ideation. Each partner was administered two tests of individual functioning and one test of interpersonal functioning. The results revealed that the dynamics of these couples were characterized by complementarity at the level of overt individual functioning, and similarity at the level of covert individual functioning. Both partners in a couple tended to describe the suicidal partner as psychologically disabled and the nonsuicidal partner as well-functioning. However, the suicidal patients and their partners were similar in terms of covert individual functioning both showing a tendency toward anclitic, dependent object relations. The communication between the partners was found to be disturbed in a large majority of the couples. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of an integrative model of individual and interpersonal dynamics.     

The competition–compensation account of developmental language disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection in novel contexts leads the inflection to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved through a compensatory behavior that involves producing a more accessible alternative: in English, the bare form. We formalize this hypothesis within a probabilistic model that trades off context-dependent versus independent processing. Results show an over-reliance on preceding stem contexts when retrieving the inflection in a model that has difficulty with processing novel inflected forms. We further show that following the introduction of a bias to store and retrieve forms with preceding contexts, generalization in the typically developing (TD) models remains more or less stable, while the same bias in the DLD models exaggerates difficulties with generalization. Together, the results suggest that inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes by children with DLD could stem from inferences they make on the basis of data containing fewer novel inflected forms. Our account extends these findings to suggest that problems with detecting a form in novel contexts combined with a bias to rely on familiar contexts when retrieving a form could explain sequential planning difficulties in children with DLD.

Research Highlights

• Generalization difficulties with inflectional morphemes in children with Developmental Language Disorder arise from these children's limited experience with novel inflected forms.
• Limited experience with a form in novel contexts could lead to a storage bias where retrieving a form often requires relying on familiar preceding stems.
• While generalization in typically developing models remains stable across a range of model parameters, certain parameter values in the impaired models exaggerate difficulties with generalization.
• Children with DLD compensate for these retrieval difficulties through accessibility-driven language production: they produce the most accessible form among the alternatives.