A narrative evaluation of a psychoeducation and a therapeutic alliance intervention for parents of persons with a severe mental illness

Most attempts to study the impact of psychosocial interventions on parents of persons with severe mental illness (SMI) are quantitative. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the subjective experience of parents of persons with SMI who participated in either a psychoeducational intervention which emphasized providing information on the illness and support, or a therapeutic alliance focused intervention (TAFI) which emphasized the alliance between the group members and group leaders. Ninety-three parents, who participated in either one of these two interventions, were interviewed using the Narrative Evaluation of Intervention Interview. Results show that participants found both interventions to be beneficial with no statistical differences in the level of perceived change. Themes describing change in relating to illness were significantly more frequently mentioned by participants in the TAFI group, whereas significantly more participants in the family psychoeducation interventions reported that implementation and information provided contributed to positive change. Also participants in the TAFI reported significantly more often that group regulation contributed to change. As both interventions were perceived as contributing, the findings support the relationship orientation to psychosocial interventions, which stresses the quality of the social support and interpersonal interaction as the source of positive outcomes of intervention.     

The social signal value of emotions

Human interactions are replete with emotional exchanges. In these exchanges information about the emotional state of the interaction partners is only one type of information conveyed. In addition, emotion displays provide information about the interaction partners' disposition and the situation as such. That is, emotions serve as social signals. Acknowledging this role of emotions, this special section brings together research that illustrates how both person perception and situational understanding can be derived from emotional displays and the modulation of this process through context. Three contributions focus on information about expressers and their intentions. An additional article focuses on the informative value of emotional expressions for an observer's construal of social situations and another article exemplifies the way context determines the social impact of emotions. Finally, the last article presents the dynamic nature of mutual influence of emotions. In an attempt to integrate these contributions and offer lenses for future research, this editorial offers a contextualised model of social perception which attempts to systematise not only the types of information that emotion expressions can convey, but also to elaborate the notion of context.     

Event-related potentials, semantic processes, and expectancy factors in word recognition

Electrophysiological activity was recorded at 16 scalp locations during a word recognition task in order to investigate the effect of expectancy factors on ERPs. In each of 160 trials two stimuli (S1 and S2) were presented with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 1500 msec. There were four experimental conditions. In the word-antonym (W-A) and the word-nonantonym (W-NA) conditions, both S1 and S2 were words. The subjects' task was to think of the antonym to S1 and respond as fast as possible after the presentation of S2 by pressing a "YES" button if S2 was an antonym to S1 (in the W-A trials), or a "NO" button if S2 was not an antonym to S1 (in the W-NA trials). In the nonword-word (NW-W) and nonword-nonword (NW-NW) conditions S1 was a nonword, while S2 was either a word (in NW-W trials) or a nonword (in NW-NW trials). If S1 was not a word, the subjects were instructed to wait for S2, and respond as fast as possible by pressing the "YES" button if it was a word an the "NO" button if it was not a word. EEG was sampled during a time epoch that started 100 msec before the onset of S1 and continued for another 2560 msec. The ERPs were analyzed separately for each experimental condition and for time epochs related to S1, to S2, and to the SOA. Expected antonyms were recognized significantly faster than any other words or nonwords. The RTs to words in the W-NA and NW-W condition, and to nonwords in the NW-NW condition did not differ significantly from each other. The ERP difference between the four conditions following S2 was interpreted in terms of a negative-going potential which appeared prior to the P300, during a time period which started 200 msec and ended 550 msec from stimulus onset. The negativity related to nonwords was significantly larger than the negativity related to words. The negativity related to the expected antonym was almost nonexistent. It is speculated that this negativity has the same origin as N400, and that it might be related to the process of lexical access.     

Non-equilibrium dynamics as an indispensable characteristic of a healthy biological system

Healthy systems in physiology and medicine are remarkable for their structural variability and dynamical complexity. The concept of fractal growth and form offers novel approaches to understanding morphogenesis and function from the level of the gene to the organism. For example, scale-invariance and long-range power-law correlations are features of non-coding DNA sequences as well as of healthy heartbeat dynamics. For cardiac regulation, perturbation of the control mechanisms by disease or aging may lead to a breakdown of these long-range correlations that normally extend over thousands of heartbeats. Quantification of such long-range scaling alterations are providing new approaches to problems ranging from molecular evolution to monitoring patients at high risk of sudden death. We briefly review recent work from our laboratory concerning the application of fractals to two apparently unrelated problems: DNA organization and beat-to-beat heart rate variability. We show how the measurement of long-range power-law correlations may provide new understanding of nucleotide organization as well as of the complex fluctuations of the heartbeat under normal and pathologic conditions.     

Angry, disgusted, or afraid? Studies on the malleability of emotion perception

ABSTRACT— Current theories of emotion perception posit that basic facial expressions signal categorically discrete emotions or affective dimensions of valence and arousal. In both cases, the information is thought to be directly "read out" from the face in a way that is largely immune to context. In contrast, the three studies reported here demonstrated that identical facial configurations convey strikingly different emotions and dimensional values depending on the affective context in which they are embedded. This effect is modulated by the similarity between the target facial expression and the facial expression typically associated with the context. Moreover, by monitoring eye movements, we demonstrated that characteristic fixation patterns previously thought to be determined solely by the facial expression are systematically modulated by emotional context already at very early stages of visual processing, even by the first time the face is fixated. Our results indicate that the perception of basic facial expressions is not context invariant and can be categorically altered by context at early perceptual levels.     

A rational look at the emotional stroop phenomenon: a generic slowdown, not a stroop effect

The role of Stroop processes in the emotional Stroop effect was subjected to a conceptual scrutiny augmented by a series of experiments entailing reading or lexical decision as well as color naming. The analysis showed that the Stroop effect is not defined in the emotional Stroop task. The experiments showed that reading, lexical decision, and color naming all are slower with emotional words and that this delay is immune to task-irrelevant variation and to changes in the relative salience of the words and the colors. The delay was absent when emotional and neutral words appeared in a single block. A threat-driven generic slowdown is implicated, not a selective attention mechanism associated with the classic Stroop effect.     

Neurocognitive outcomes in children with chronic kidney disease: Current findings and contemporary endeavors

Given the rise in chronic kidney disease (CKD) in both children and adults, CKD has recently been targeted as a public health priority. Childhood onset kidney disease is generally a noncurable and progressive condition that leads to kidney failure by early adulthood. Fortunately, improved identification of kidney problems allows for early intervention, which is thought to slow progression toward end-stage renal disease. In addition, medical interventions for pediatric end-stage renal disease have also improved, allowing children to take advantage of lifesaving renal replacement treatments such as dialysis and kidney transplantation. In spite of improvements in identification and treatment, CKD causes both direct and indirect insults to a variety of organ systems. This paper reviews recently published studies pertaining to the neurocognitive and psychosocial impact of CKD on children of various ages and at various stages of kidney failure. Specific attention is focused on summarizing peer reviewed research that describes associations between kidney functioning and cognitive functioning, language acquisition, visual spatial abilities, memory, and executive functioning. In addition, peer reviewed research describing psychosocial outcomes associated with CKD related to academic achievement, social-behavioral functioning, and quality of life are summarized. The authors also identified disease-specific factors that likely mediate neurocognitive outcomes (e.g., anemia, hypertension, cardiovascular) and endorse the importance of continued interdisciplinary research collaborations that will provide a better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for improved neurocognitive functioning after transplantation. The authors conclude this review by describing a multicenter, prospective, longitudinal, National Institutes of Health funded study that is currently examining the developmental outcomes of children with mild to moderate CKD. The authors speculate that the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children Prospective Cohort Study (CKiD) findings will provide additional evidence-based guidance for clinicians and researchers working with children and adolescents with deteriorating kidney function to improve medical and developmental outcomes.     

Effects of sentential context on the processing of unambiguous words by the two cerebral hemispheres

The effect of sentence context on the processing of different aspects of meaning of unambiguous nouns by the two cerebral hemispheres was examined. Participants performed a lexical decision task on target words following two primes, an unambiguous noun preceded by an incomplete sentence. Priming sentences were consistent with either the dominant or the subordinate aspect of meaning of their final unambiguous word. Short and long SOAs were used. A principal finding of this study was that, when compared to unrelated aspects of meaning, for both the short and the long SOAs, the dominant and subordinate aspects of meaning of the unambiguous words were activated regardless of context in both hemispheres. However, the activation of the subordinate aspect of meaning of unambiguous words appears to be more sensitive to sentential context, especially when the unambiguous word is being processed by the left hemisphere.     

Domain specificity versus expertise: factors influencing distinct processing of faces

To explore face specificity in visual processing, we compared the role of task-associated strategies and expertise on the N170 event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by human faces with the ERPs elicited by cars, birds, items of furniture, and ape faces. In Experiment 1, participants performed a car monitoring task and an animacy decision task. In Experiment 2, participants monitored human faces while faces of apes were the distracters. Faces elicited an equally conspicuous N170, significantly larger than the ERPs elicited by non-face categories regardless of whether they were ignored or had an equal status with other categories (Experiment 1), or were the targets (in Experiment 2). In contrast, the negative component elicited by cars during the same time range was larger if they were targets than if they were not. Furthermore, unlike the posterior-temporal distribution of the N170, the negative component elicited by cars and its modulation by task were more conspicuous at occipital sites. Faces of apes elicited an N170 that was similar in amplitude to that elicited by the human face targets, albeit peaking 10 ms later. As our participants were not ape experts, this pattern indicates that the N170 is face-specific, but not specie-specific, i.e. it is elicited by particular face features regardless of expertise. Overall, these results demonstrate the domain specificity of the visual mechanism implicated in processing faces, a mechanism which is not influenced by either task or expertise. The processing of other objects is probably accomplished by a more general visual processor, which is sensitive to strategic manipulations and attention.