Adversarial Growth in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis and their Partners: Relationships with Illness Perceptions,Disability and Distress

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and their partners show adversarial growth and to examine which psychological and disability variables contribute to this in patients and their partners. The study also investigated the relationship between growth and distress. Seventy-two patients with MS and their partners provided demographic information and completed measures of posttraumatic growth, illness perceptions, depression, cognitive function and disability. Both patients and partners showed adversarial growth, with patients reporting significantly higher growth than partners. The only significant predictor for patient growth was partner growth, and vice versa. Dissimilarity in illness representations between patients and their partners on the consequences of MS dimension, patient mood and patient growth accounted for significant variance in partner growth. The findings support the idea of a ‘communal search for meaning’ where patients and their partners experience the trauma of having a chronic illness and subsequently find positive aspects together.     

Longitudinal attentional engagement rescues mice from age-related cognitive declines and cognitive inflexibility

Learning, attentional, and perseverative deficits are characteristic of cognitive aging. In this study, genetically diverse CD-1 mice underwent longitudinal training in a task asserted to tax working memory capacity and its dependence on selective attention. Beginning at 3 mo of age, animals were trained for 12 d to perform in a dual radial-arm maze task that required the mice to remember and operate on two sets of overlapping guidance (spatial) cues. As previously reported, this training resulted in an immediate (at 4 mo of age) improvement in the animals' aggregate performance across a battery of five learning tasks. Subsequently, these animals received an additional 3 d of working memory training at 3-wk intervals for 15 mo (totaling 66 training sessions), and at 18 mo of age were assessed on a selective attention task, a second set of learning tasks, and variations of those tasks that required the animals to modify the previously learned response. Both attentional and learning abilities (on passive avoidance, active avoidance, and reinforced alternation tasks) were impaired in aged animals that had not received working memory training. Likewise, these aged animals exhibited consistent deficits when required to modify a previously instantiated learned response (in reinforced alternation, active avoidance, and spatial water maze). In contrast, these attentional, learning, and perseverative deficits were attenuated in aged animals that had undergone lifelong working memory exercise. These results suggest that general impairments of learning, attention, and cognitive flexibility may be mitigated by a cognitive exercise regimen that requires chronic attentional engagement.     

Bullying-victimization problems and aggressive tendencies in Spanish secondary schools students: the role of gender stereotypical traits

This paper presents data concerning culturally prescribed gender traits and their influence on bullying/victimization problems and aggressive tendencies from a wide sample of 1,654 Spanish adolescents. The aims of this study were to clarify the effect of masculine traits on male and female secondary students’ aggression, and also to explore the role of feminine traits in either the inhibition of aggression or the use of more covert forms. Results show that masculine stereotypical traits are related more strongly with bully perpetration, proneness to aggression and experience of anger and hostility in both sexes. In contrast, traditional feminine traits are negatively related with bullying perpetration and proneness to aggression. However, feminine traits are linked to male students’ victimization. Results are discussed in the light of previous findings and are taken into consideration in the design of intervention practices in secondary schools.     

Deconstructive aporias: quasi-transcendental and normative

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy.     

Species difference in the timing of gaze movement between chimpanzees and humans

How do humans and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, differ in their fundamental abilities for seeing the visual world? In this study, we directly compared the gaze movements of humans and the closest species, chimpanzees, using an eye-tracking system. During free viewing of a naturalistic scene, chimpanzees made more fixations per second (up to four) than did humans (up to three). This species difference was independent of the semantic variability of the presented scenes. The gap–overlap paradigm revealed that, rather than resulting from the sensitivity to the peripherally presented stimuli per se, the species difference reflected the particular strategy each species employed to solve the rivalry between central (fixated) and peripheral stimuli in their visual fields. Finally, when presented with a movie in which small images successively appeared/disappeared at random positions at the chosen presentation rate, chimpanzees tracked those images at the point of fixation for a longer time than did humans, outperforming humans in their speed of scanning. Our results suggest that chimpanzees and humans differ quantitatively in their visual strategies involving the timing of gaze movement. We discuss the functional reasons for each species’ employing such specific strategies.     

Should We Treat Depression with drugs or psychological interventions? A Reply to Ioannidis

We reply to the Ioannidis's paper "Effectiveness of antidepressants; an evidence based myth constructed from a thousand controlled trials." We disagree that antidepressants have no greater efficacy than placebo. We present the efficacy from hundreds of trials in terms of the percentage of patients with a substantial clinical response (a 50% improvement or more symptomatic reduction). This meta-analysis finds that 42-70% of depressed patients improve with drug and 21%-39% improve with placebo. The response benefit of antidepressant treatment is 33%-11% greater than placebo. Ioannidis argues that it would be vanishingly smaller because systematic biasing in these clinical trials would reduce the drug-placebo difference to zero. Ioannidis' argument that antidepressants have no benefit is eroded by his failures of logic because he does not present any evidence that there are a large number of studies where placebo is substantially more effective than drug. (To reduce to zero, one would also have to show that some of the unpublished studies find placebo better than drug and have substantial systematic or methodological bias). We also present the empirical evidence showing that these methodological concerns generally have the opposite effect of what Ioannidis argues, supporting our contention that the measured efficacy of antidepressants likely underestimates true efficacy. Our most important criticism is Ioannidis’ basic underlying argument about antidepressants that if the existing evidence is imperfect and methods can be criticized, then this proves that antidepressant are not efficacious. He presents no credible evidence that antidepressants have zero effect size. Valid arguments can point out difficulties with the data but do not prove that a given drug had no efficacy. Indeed better evidence might prove it was more efficacious that originally found. We find no empirical or ethical reason why psychiatrists should not try to help depressed patients with drugs and/or with psychotherapeutic/behavioral treatments given evidence of efficacy even though our treatment knowledge has limitations. The immense suffering of patients with major depression leads to ethical, moral, professional and legal obligations to treat patients with the best available tools at our disposal, while diligently and actively monitoring for adverse effects and actively revising treatment components as necessary.