Adjustment to Acute Leukemia: The Impact of Social Support and Marital Satisfaction on Distress and Quality of Life Among Newly Diagnosed Patients and Their Caregivers

Little is known about the specific patterns of adjustment among newly diagnosed acute leukemia patients and their caregivers. This study examined the trajectories of patient and caregiver distress over time as well as the extent to which marital satisfaction and social support moderated these trajectories among those with significant-other caregivers. Forty six patient-caregiver dyads provided ratings at four time points: within 1 week of diagnosis (T1), 2 week follow-up (T2), 6 week follow-up (T3) and 12 week follow-up (T4). As anticipated, patients and caregivers reported higher levels of distress around the time of diagnosis than they did during subsequent time points. Marital satisfaction was a significant predictor of distress among patients, whereas among caregivers, social support predicted distress and quality of life. Results support the inclusion of relational variables such as social support and relationship satisfaction in the assessment of newly diagnosed patients and families in order to best identify those at risk for distress over time.     

Maintaining disulfiram ingestion among outpatient alcoholics: a security-deposit contingency contracting procedure

Disulfiram is frequently prescribed to alcoholic patients as a deterrent to drinking. Although ingestion of ethanol by a disulfiram patient quickly results in an intense dysphonc reaction, the drug is not generally credited with significant value in alcoholism treatment (Mottin, 1973). It is suggested that most alcoholics simply stop taking the medication (Gerrein et al., 1973). and review articles conclude that motivation for abstinence is the crucial variable involved in successful disulfiram treatment (Ditman, 1966: Mottin, 1973).Motivation may be a characteristic of environmental contingencies rather than of individuals. If so, environmental contingencies should permit one to design into a disulfiram treatment progrim the requisite motivation to achieve therapeutic success. Contingency management procedures supporting disulfiram ingestion reported to date (Liebson et al., 1973: Haynes, 1973) have been of the sort to be imposed upon difficult populations rather than offered to general treatment applicants. Contingency contracting may represent a technique for supporting disulfiram ingestion appropriate to the broader general population of voluntary alcoholism treatment applicants. Contingency contract treatment (Homme, 1969; Stuart, 1971) is a procedure in which client and therapist mutually agree to establish an incentive for the client to achieve a behavioral goal. Contingency contracts can be viewed as a form of self-control therapy, and have been applied in a wide variety of problem areas, including school problems (Homme, 1969: Cantrell, et al., 1969). delinquency (Stuart, 1971),weight control (Mann, 1972). smoking reduction (Elliott and Tighe, 1968: Winett, 1973), drug abuse (Boudin, 1972), and alcoholism (Miller, 1972).Frequently contingency contracting involves the client's posting of a financial security deposit to serve as his incentive for achieving the agreed-upon therapeutic goal (Tighe and Elliot, 1968). This security deposit can be earned back consequent upon achieving specific goals, or sacrificed consequent upon failure. Controlled studies by Mann (1972) and by Winett (1973) have demonstrated this security-deposit procedure to be effective in enhancing weight loss and smoking reduction, respectively.We report here on our experience with application of the security deposit contracting procedure to maintaining routine disulfiram ingestion among outpatients in an alcoholism treatment program.     

Weapons and Eye Contact as Instigators or Inhibitors of Aggressive Arousal in Police-Citizen Interaction1

A field experiment was conducted with police officers during the normal course of their traffic patrol duties. The purpose was to determine whether the presence of holstered weapons and mirror sunglasses affected the degree of aggressiveness expressed nonverbally, and reported on a mood scale by citizens halted for an information check (neutral condition) or in order to be given a traffic ticket (negative condition). Results indicated that subjects in the negative condition both expressed and reported more aggressivity when the police officer wore a weapon than when no weapon was visible. The use of sunglasses had no effect on aggressivity but resulted in the officer's being perceived more negatively, though he was not perceived more negatively when he wore a weapon. No sex differences in expressed or reported aggressivity were obtained, although some sex differences on measures of secondary interest did occur. The implications of these findings for research on the “weapons effect” and on policy regarding the visibility of police weapons and the wearing of sunglasses by police officers are discussed.     

Prejudice and the function of attitudes relating to Muslim Australians and Indigenous Australians

The aim of the present study was to examine prejudice against Muslim Australians and Indigenous Australians and the function of those attitudes using previously identified functions, direct experiential–schematic and value expressive, and including a new indirect experiential–schematic function. Respondents were categorised into two groups: accepting and rejecting. For the Muslim data there was no difference between accepting and rejecting groups regarding the value‐expressive function, but acceptors reported the experiential–schematic function to a greater extent than did rejectors. For the Indigenous data there was no difference between groups on the value‐expressive or the experiential–schematic function. With both target groups, rejectors reported the indirect experiential–schematic function more than acceptors. The value‐expressive function was higher for the Muslim data and the experiential–schematic function was higher for the Indigenous data. The importance of taking into account the function of respondents' attitudes, the distinction between source and function of attitudes, as well as specific issues surrounding target groups themselves, is discussed.     

Videogame Addiction and its Treatment

For many, the concept of videogame addiction seems far-fetched, particularly if their concepts and definitions of addiction involve the taking of drugs. This paper overviews the small, but growing area of videogame addiction and then examines the treatment options available for those affected by excessive videogame playing. An overview of the available empirical literature appears to indicate that adverse effects are likely to affect only a relatively small subgroup of players and that frequent players are the most at-risk for developing problems. Worldwide, there are relatively few practitioners that specialise in the treatment of videogame addiction and this may be because there are so few players who are genuinely addicted to playing videogames. However, the Internet may be facilitating excessive online game playing as evidenced by the increasing number of specialist addiction treatment clinics for online videogame addiction. This paper overviews the various approaches that have been used as an intervention in treating videogame addicts, including online support groups, 12-step programmes, behavioural and cognitive-behavioural therapies, and motivational interviewing.     

Using category structures to test iterated learning as a method for identifying inductive biases

Many of the problems studied in cognitive science are inductive problems, requiring people to evaluate hypotheses in the light of data. The key to solving these problems successfully is having the right inductive biases—assumptions about the world that make it possible to choose between hypotheses that are equally consistent with the observed data. This article explores a novel experimental method for identifying the biases that guide human inductive inferences. The idea behind this method is simple: This article uses the responses produced by a participant on one trial to generate the stimuli that either they or another participant will see on the next. A formal analysis of this "iterated learning" procedure, based on the assumption that the learners are Bayesian agents, predicts that it should reveal the inductive biases of these learners, as expressed in a prior probability distribution over hypotheses. This article presents a series of experiments using stimuli based on a well-studied set of category structures, demonstrating that iterated learning can be used to reveal the inductive biases of human learners.     

Circulating fibrinogen but not D-dimer level is associated with vital exhaustion in school teachers

Meta-analyses have established elevated fibrinogen and D-dimer levels in the circulation as biological risk factors for the development and progression of coronary artery disease (CAD). Here, we investigated whether vital exhaustion (VE), a known psychosocial risk factor for CAD, is associated with fibrinogen and D-dimer levels in a sample of apparently healthy school teachers. The teaching profession has been proposed as a potentially high stressful occupation due to enhanced psychosocial stress at the workplace. Plasma fibrinogen and D-dimer levels were measured in 150 middle-aged male and female teachers derived from the first year of the Trier-Teacher-Stress-Study. Log-transformed levels were analyzed using linear regression. Results yielded a significant association between VE and fibrinogen (p = 0.02) but not D-dimer controlling for relevant covariates. Further investigation of possible interaction effects resulted in a significant association between fibrinogen and the interaction term "VE x gender" (p = 0.05). In a secondary analysis, we reran linear regression models for males and females separately. Gender-specific results revealed that the association between fibrinogen and VE remained significant in males but not females. In sum, the present data support the notion that fibrinogen levels are positively related to VE. Elevated fibrinogen might be one biological pathway by which chronic work stress may impact on teachers' cardiovascular health in the long run.     

Google and the mind: predicting fluency with PageRank

Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.     

An Examination of the Psychometric Properties and Factor Structure of the Feelings of Stigmatization Questionnaire

As the experience of stigma and its psychological dimensions require careful measurement, the purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Feelings of Stigmatization Questionnaire (FSQ). A total of 170 participants with psoriasis and 124 with atopic dermatitis (AD) completed the FSQ. AD participants self-rated AD severity, while psoriasis severity was determined by a clinician. Confirmatory (CFA) and exploratory factor analytic (EFA) techniques were used to examine the factor structure of the FSQ. The FSQ total score was not related to age, age at onset, illness duration or psoriasis severity but it was negatively associated with AD severity (r = −.25, p < .01). The original six-factor structure of the FSQ was not replicated in our sample. Using EFA, a fixed three-factor solution proved the most stable, with the dimensions of feeling flawed, anticipation of rejection and secrecy, and positive attitudes towards skin disease being identified.