Supervision of Psychosocial Skills in Genetic Counseling

Little has been written about how genetic counseling supervisors can help students develop psychosocial skills in their clinical rotations. The authors describe several approaches supervisors can use, ranging from preventive measures (e.g., normalizing anxiety), to skill-enhancing interventions (e.g., modeling and thinking aloud), to more direct approaches (e.g., immediacy, confrontation) that may be necessary for students who are reluctant, or even resistant, to using psychosocial skills with their clients.     

Evidence for retarded extinction of aversive learning in anxious children

The habituation to intense acoustic stimuli and the acquisition of differentially conditioned fear were assessed in 53 clinically anxious and 30 non-anxious control children and young adolescents. Anxious children tended to show larger electrodermal responses during habituation, but did not differ in blink startle latency or magnitude. After acquisition training, non-anxious children rated the CS+ as more fear provoking and arousing than the CS- whereas the ratings of anxious children did not differ. However, anxious children rated the CS+ as more fear provoking after extinction, a difference that was absent in non-anxious children. During extinction training, anxious children displayed larger blink magnitude facilitation during CS+ and a trend towards larger electrodermal responses, a tendency not seen in non-anxious children. These data suggest that extinction of fear learning is retarded in anxious children.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in native speakers and second-language learners

Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the locus of age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects in skilled readers with English or Dutch as their first language. AoA effects have generally been explained in terms of phonological processing. In Experiment 1, Dutch elementary school and secondary school students were presented with words factorially manipulated on surface frequency and AoA). Two main effects and an interaction were found, confirming findings reported for English speakers by Gerhand and Barry (1999). In addition, a language development effect was established: AoA effects decreased with reading age. Elementary school students showed the largest AoA effects. Experiment 2 used two groups of subjects. The first group consisted of Dutch students enrolled in a master's degree program in English. The second group consisted of native speakers of English. All subjects were presented with the experimental set of words used by Gerhand and Barry (1999). British subjects showed the same response pattern as reported by Gerhand and Barry (1999). The question of interest was whether Dutch subjects would show an AoA effect on the English set or not. The answer was affirmative. Dutch subjects produced identical response patterns as the British group, showing only an overall 94-msec latency delay. This result challenges predictions of the phonological completeness hypothesis. Alternative accounts in terms of semantic processing are discussed.     

What drives horse success at following human-given cues? An investigation of handler familiarity and living conditions

Animal Cognition - Cues such as the human pointing gesture, gaze or proximity to an object are widely used in behavioural studies to evaluate animals’ abilities to follow human-given cues....     

Prior probability modulates anticipatory activity in category-specific areas

Bayesian models are currently a dominant framework for describing human information processing. However, it is not clear yet how major tenets of this framework can be translated to brain processes. In this study, we addressed the neural underpinning of prior probability and its effect on anticipatory activity in category-specific areas. Before fMRI scanning, participants were trained in two behavioral sessions to learn the prior probability and correct order of visual events within a sequence. The events of each sequence included two different presentations of a geometric shape and one picture of either a house or a face, which appeared with either a high or a low likelihood. Each sequence was preceded by a cue that gave participants probabilistic information about which items to expect next. This allowed examining cue-related anticipatory modulation of activity as a function of prior probability in category-specific areas (fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area). Our findings show that activity in the fusiform face area was higher when faces had a higher prior probability. The finding of a difference between levels of expectations is consistent with graded, probabilistically modulated activity, but the data do not rule out the alternative explanation of a categorical neural response. Importantly, these differences were only visible during anticipation, and vanished at the time of stimulus presentation, calling for a functional distinction when considering the effects of prior probability. Finally, there were no anticipatory effects for houses in the parahippocampal place area, suggesting sensitivity to stimulus material when looking at effects of prediction.     

Weighing the Evidence: A Systematic Review on Long-Term Neurocognitive Effects of Cannabis Use in Abstinent Adolescents and Adults

Findings on neurocognitive effects of sustained cannabis use are heterogeneous. Previous work has rarely taken time of abstinence into account. In this review, we focus on understanding sustained effects of cannabis, which begin when clinical symptoms of the drug have worn off after at least 14 days. We conducted a search between 2004 and 2015 and found 38 studies with such a prolonged abstinence phase. Study-design quality in terms of evidence-based medicine is similar among studies. Studies found some attention or concentration deficits in cannabis users (CU). There is evidence that chronic CU might experience sustained deficits in memory function. Findings are mixed regarding impairments in inhibition, impulsivity and decision making for CU, but there is a trend towards worse performance. Three out of four studies found evidence that motor function remains impaired even after a time of abstinence, while no impairments in visual spatial functioning can be concluded. Functional imaging demonstrates clear differences in activation patterns between CU and controls especially in hippocampal, prefrontal and cerebellar areas. Structural differences are found in cortical areas, especially the orbitofrontal region and the hippocampus. Twenty studies (57 %) reported data on outcome effects, leading to an overall effect size of r _mean?=?.378 (CI 95 %?=?[.342; .453]). Heavy use is found to be more consistently associated with effects in diverse domains than early age of onset. Questions of causality―in view of scarce longitudinal studies, especially those targeting co-occurring psychiatric disorders―are discussed.     

Multisystemic therapy treatment of substance abusing or dependent adolescent offenders: Costs of reducing incarceration,inpatient, and residential placement

The development of more effective and less costly family- and community-based services to serve as alternatives to out-of-home placements of children is an important priority in the reform of mental health services for children and adolescents. Within the context of a randomized trial with 118 substance abusing or dependent juvenile offenders, we examined the incremental costs of multisystemic therapy (MST) and related these costs to observed reductions in days of incarceration, hospitalization, and residential treatment at approximately 1 year postreferral. Results showed that the incremental costs of MST were nearly offset by the savings incurred as a result of reductions in days of out-of-home placement during the year. The need to validate effective treatments for youth with serious clinical problems and to link the costs of treatment     

COGNITIVE APPRAISALS OF LIFE STRESS AND DEPRESSION IN THE ELDERLY: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF ASIANS AND CAUCASIANS

Cognitive models of depression have not been adequately tested in different cultural settings involving personally relevant events that affect the lives of the elderly. A cross-sectional comparison was made of cognitions obtained from Asian and Caucasian subjects, residing in Canada and the United States. The objective was to determine whether cognitive appraisals of stressful events would differentiate the elderly in the two cultural groups. Results supported the hypotheses that cognitive appraisals of locus of control, uncertainty, self-responsibility, self-confidence in future coping and fear about future recurrence of negative events are strongly associated with the depressive responses of the elderly in general. A comparison of the cognitive appraisals of the elderly in the two cultural groups showed depressed Asians more significantly than depressed Caucasians, reporting more external locus of control and self-blaming attributions. The results have implications for community workers, psychotherapists and social welfare agents concerned with the mental well-being of the elderly and the care of the elderly from different cultures.     

RATINGS OF ANXIETY-PRONENESS AND RESPONSES TO ELECTRICAL PAIN STIMULATION: Preliminary experiments in a group of young delinquents

A group of young delinquents clinically rated as manifesting a tendency to react with anxiety and tension was compared with a group from the same prison with predominantly 'psychopathic' traits according to clinical ratings. The delinquents were subjected to electrical pain stimulation and tested with a battery of tests and personality inventories. In line with the hypotheses, the more anxiety-prone delinquents showed greater sensitivity to pain, had lower scores in the Leg Persistence Test, shorter reaction times and more errors in an auditive choice reaction test. There were no significant differences with regard to the inventory variables.     

Bayesian PTSD-Trajectory Analysis with Informed Priors Based on a Systematic Literature Search and Expert Elicitation

There is a recent increase in interest of Bayesian analysis. However, little effort has been made thus far to directly incorporate background knowledge via the prior distribution into the analyses. This process might be especially useful in the context of latent growth mixture modeling when one or more of the latent groups are expected to be relatively small due to what we refer to as limited data. We argue that the use of Bayesian statistics has great advantages in limited data situations, but only if background knowledge can be incorporated into the analysis via prior distributions. We highlight these advantages through a data set including patients with burn injuries and analyze trajectories of posttraumatic stress symptoms using the Bayesian framework following the steps of the WAMBS-checklist. In the included example, we illustrate how to obtain background information using previous literature based on a systematic literature search and by using expert knowledge. Finally, we show how to translate this knowledge into prior distributions and we illustrate the importance of conducting a prior sensitivity analysis. Although our example is from the trauma field, the techniques we illustrate can be applied to any field.