Preschool children's accumulated and sustained physical activity

39 3- to 5-year-old children wore heart-rate monitors for 12 hr. on three consecutive days to examine physical activity patterns. Parent logs supplied additional information on type and location of activity. The highest number of accumulated minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity was recorded during the weekday (38.6 min.) and weekend (31.4 min.) afternoons, a time period when more activity occurred outdoors. Sustained activity was mostly short in duration, but many children (71%) accumulated recommended amounts of activity on the weekday, fewer (46%) on the weekend. Spearman rank correlations for weekday (r=.50, p=.004) and weekend (r=.58, p=.004) activity were significant. Considering health risk factors associated with physical inactivity, early educators must look to the essence of young children's physical activity patterns in designing programs. Large motor activity that is intense and that occurs outdoors is a good place to start.     

The Effect of a Discrete Signal on Context Conditioning: Assessment by Preference and Freezing Tests

Four experiments with rats assessed conditioning to contextual cues after the delivery of footshocks that were either signaled by a discrete stimulus or unsignaled. Two different tests were used. The first was a context preference test in which subjects were allowed to move freely in a brightly lit, unconditionally aversive context and the former shock context. The second test consisted of scoring freezing behavior while the animals were confined to the former conditioning context. During context preference tests, signaled-shock animals spent more time in the conditioning context and/or entered that context more frequently than did unsignaled-shock subjects. However, freezing tests largely failed to detect a difference between groups. These results were discussed in terms of possible interactions between the formation of context-shock, signal-shock, and context-signal associations and their effect on performance in each of the two types of tests.     

Near‐ and Far‐Transfer Effects of Working Memory Updating Training in Elderly Adults

Age‐related declines in working memory, especially with regard to updating ability, affect many high‐level aspects of cognition in elderly adults. Recent studies have demonstrated that training might improve working memory. We investigated the effects of 20 days of adaptive training of working memory updating in healthy elderly adults. Comparing the performance on cognitive function tests before and after training in a trained group and a non‐trained group, significant positive training effects were observed in a numerical updating task and a digit‐span test, but not in a non‐verbal reasoning test. The results suggest beneficial effects of working memory updating training to working memory tasks that use different content material and task formats than those used during training. However, confirming the results of previous studies, transfer effects to other higher order cognitive processes seem to be absent in elderly adults. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of a post-hospitalization group health education programme for patients with coronary heart disease

Abstract

Effects of a post-hospitolization group health education programme for patients with coronary heart disease. A health education programme was offered to groups of coronary heart patients and their partners after discharge from hospital. A randomized pre-test post-test control group design was used to evaluate the effects of this experimental intervention. The health education programme was offered to 109 coronary heart patients in groups of between five and eight patients together with their partners in addition to standard medical care and physical training. A control group of 108 patients received only standard medical care and physical training.

The intervention consisted of eight weekly two-hour group health education sessions and one follow-up session. All sessions focused on the promotion of healthy habits and the reduction of adverse psychosocial consequences of the incident.

In the short term (about four months after the incident) the health education programme showed statistically significant intervention effects on knowledge about coronary heart diseases, smoking cessation, healthy eating habits and the number of consultations with the family physician, but no effects on emotional distress. In the long term (one year after the incident) there was only a significant intervention effect on smoking cessation.

These results suggest that the effects of the programme are modest, especially in terms of maintenance of behavioural change. As a consequence, it is suggested that the programme should not be offered to all coronary patients during cardiac rehabilitation, but only to those who can be expected to profit most from it.     

The Job Demand-Control-Social Support Model and Wellness/Health Outcomes: A European Study

The EUROTEACH study which is reported here, comprised 2796 secondary school teachers from 13 European countries. The study firstly aimed at testing an extended Job Demand-Control-Social support (JDCS) model and checking its gender specificity. While this study failed to provide evidence for the buffer hypothesis derived from the JDCS-model, the strain hypothesis was mostly supported. Additional job conditions tested in this study proved to be important predictors of the outcome variables (emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, personal accomplishment, somatic complaints and job satisfaction) and standard of living indicators also added explained variance in these outcomes. The study proved that the JDCS model cannot be called a male model. Secondly the study looked at the comparability of 3 European regions (South, West, East). Apart from important regional differences in job conditions, standard of living indicators and outcomes, the most important finding is that the JDCS model explains most variance in outcome variables in Western Europe, and the least in Eastern Europe, and thus seems to suffer from a Western bias.     

SOCIAL SHARING IN ANTICIPATION OF CARDIAC SURGERY: WHO TALKS MORE AND WHY

This study presents the stress and sharing model, which was developed in order to predict the extent to which patients anticipating cardiac surgery, share their emotions. The model hypothesizes that preoperative sharing of emotions mediated by need, is positively related to surgery-related stress measured independently, and in comparison to the roommates. The model was tested for surgery-related and surgery-unrelated feelings. One hundred and fifty-seven Greek patients participated in the study. The variables included in the model were measured daily, using self-reports. Results show a good fit of the model only for surgery-related feelings (χ²=4.688, p=0.321). The study shows that patients anticipating surgery share their emotions in the same way as patients recovering from stressful or traumatic events. Stressed patients experience the need to focus on the threat (verbally) and not to be ‘distracted’ by talking about irrelevant topics. These findings have important implications for the design of preparatory interventions for surgical patients.     

Psychometric Properties of Bully,Fighting, and Victimization Scales Among Clinically Referred Youth

Bullying involvement is a multidimensional issue and a significant concern for school-aged youth. However, research on bullying involvement within clinical samples is limited. The present study examines the psychometric properties of the University of Illinois Bully, Fighting, and Victimization Scales among children and adolescents presenting for mood symptoms at a behavioral health outpatient clinic. Patients (n = 165) with an age range of 8–18 years were included in this investigation. Item frequencies, internal consistency, and construct validity were examined while confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses were conducted. Results showed that the scales were low to moderately correlated with each other. Internal consistencies were acceptable for the Bully (α = .70), Fighting (α = .84), and Victimization (α = .88) Scales. Exploratory factor analysis revealed clean three-factor solutions with items loading on their intended factors and with few cross-loadings. Fit of the confirmatory factor analysis was good when items were treated as ordinal and two items were allowed to cross-load on more than one factor. The University of Illinois Bully, Fighting, and Victimization Scales show utility for use with clinically referred youth.     

On the historical and conceptual background of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

In this paper, we describe the development of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We trace the history of sorting tasks from the studies of Narziss Ach on the psychology of thinking, via the work of Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb on brain lesioned patients around 1920 and subsequent developments, up to the actual design of the WCST by Harry Harlow, David Grant, and their student Esther Berg. The WCST thus seems to originate from the psychology of thinking ('Denkpsychologie'), but the test, as it is used in clinical neuropsychological practice, was designed by experimenters working within the behaviorist tradition. We also note recent developments suggesting that, contrary to the general impression, implicit learning may play a role in WCST-like discrimination learning tasks.     

Effortful semantic decision-making boosts memory performance in older adults

A major concern in age-related cognitive decline is episodic memory (EM). Previous studies indicate that both resource and binding deficits contribute to EM decline. Environmental support by task manipulations encouraging stronger cognitive effort and deeper levels of processing may facilitate compensation for these two deficits. To clarify factors that can counteract age-related EM decline, we assessed effects of cognitive effort (four levels) and level of processing (LoP, shallow/deep) during encoding on subsequent retrieval. Young (YAs, N?=?23) and older (OAs, N?=?23) adults performed two incidental encoding tasks, deep/semantic and shallow/perceptual. Cognitive effort was manipulated by varying decision-making demands. EM performance, indexed by d-prime, was later tested using a recognition task. Results showed that regardless of LoP, increased cognitive effort caused higher d-primes in both age groups. Compared to YAs, OAs showed a lower d-prime after shallow encoding across all cognitive effort levels, and after deep encoding with low cognitive effort. Deep encoding with higher levels of cognitive effort completely eliminated these age differences. Our findings support an environmental-compensatory account of cognitive ageing and can have important therapeutic implications.