Relationship between church attendance and mental health among Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah

A prevention model was applied to assess the protective effect of religion and church attendance against mental illness among respondents to the 1996 Utah Health Status Survey. Compared to Mormons that attend church weekly (active), less active Mormons, less active non-Mormons, and those with no religious preference, because of emotional problems, are at increased risk of accomplishing less than desired (model 1); having trouble doing work or other activities as carefully as desired (model 2); and seeking professional help (model 3). After adjusting for alcohol and tobacco use, education, income, physical activity, general health status, employment, body mass index, gender and age, only less active Mormons and those with no religious preference remained at significantly increased risk in model 3. Self-reported health status was the strongest predictor of mental health in each model. Active Mormons reported having the best health status and, consequently, the lowest levels of mental illness.     

Effects of Stimulus Properties and Age on Random-Array Letter Cancellation Tasks

Random-array letter cancellation tasks are commonly used in the clinical assessment of visuospatial function. How stimulus properties and aging affect cancellation performance is not well understood. This study evaluated the effects of stimulus factors and age on 3 measures of cancellation performance. Thirty younger and 30 older adults each completed 12 cancellation forms that varied in paper size, stimulus density, and target-to-distractor (T/D) ratio. Interactions between stimulus factors were identified for a calculated composite measure of speed and accuracy (effectiveness), a standardized measure of the time required for completion of forms, and a standardized measure of the number of omission errors. The results showed complex interactions between stimulus factors that were different for each dependent variable. These interactions were generally similar for both age groups. The findings indicate that both stimulus properties and dependent variables must be carefully considered in the design and interpretation of cancellation paradigms.     

Attentional distraction and time perception in children

The purpose of the present study was to test the effect of attentional distraction on temporal bisection performance in 5‐ and 8‐year‐old children. During a first learning phase, children were trained to discriminate on a temporal bisection task a short standard duration (2 sec) from a long one (8 sec), presented as visual stimuli. Later, in a second testing phase, intermediate durations (3, 4, 5, 6, 7 s), including the standard durations, were presented. Children's task still was to report if it was a short standard duration or a long one. In addition, during the non‐standard duration, a distracter either did or did not appear. Results showed increasing proportions of “it is the long standard duration” (response “long”) with increasing stimulus durations in both distracter and non‐distracter conditions. However, psychophysical functions were flatter in the 5‐year‐olds than in the 8‐year‐olds, revealing their lower sensibility to time. Nevertheless, the 5‐year‐olds' proportion of long responses was higher under the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Consequently, the point of subjective equality (PSE), corresponding to the stimulus duration to which the subject produced 50% of responses of “long” was lower under the distracter condition as compared to the non‐distracter condition. Conversely, for the 8‐year‐olds, the PSE was significantly higher in the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Five‐year old children overestimated the time in the presence of an attentional distracter, whereas 8‐year olds tended to underestimate it. The leftward shift and the rightward shift of the PSE in the 5‐ and the 8‐year‐olds, respectively, were accounted for by limited‐capacity attention in the five‐year olds.     

Organizational social context and psychopathology of youth in residential care: The intervening role of youth–caregiver relationship quality

Drawing on an ecological approach with multiple informants, this study investigated the mediating role of youth–caregiver relationship quality in associations between different features of residential care settings' organizational social context and youth's psychopathology. Participants were 378 youth aged between 12 and 25 years old, and 54 caregivers aged between 24 and 57 years old, from 29 generalist residential youth care settings in Portugal. Given the hierarchical structure of data, analyses were performed using multilevel modeling. Results revealed that organizational social contexts characterized by higher levels of engagement, stress, and centralization, as perceived by the caregivers, were associated with lower levels of youth's externalizing problems (e.g., aggressive behavior and delinquency), reported by the caregivers, via better youth–caregiver relationship quality, perceived by the youth in care. These findings highlight the relevance of creating an organizational social context in residential care settings that supports caregivers in establishing high-quality relationships with the youth in care, thereby promoting their mental health. This study contributes to the clarification of conflicting findings in previous studies of this field, by offering further empirical investigation of these issues.     

The Incompleteness of Theories of Games

We first state a few previously obtained results that lead to general undecidability and incompleteness theorems in axiomatized theories that range from the theory of finite sets to classical elementary analysis. Out of those results we prove several incompleteness theorems for axiomatic versions of the theory of noncooperative games with Nash equilibria; in particular, we show the existence of finite games whose equilibria cannot be proven to be computable.