The associations of illness perceptions and self-efficacy with psychological well-being of patients in preparation for joint replacement surgery

Patient well-being on referral to surgery likely affects their surgical experience yet few studies examine pre-surgical correlates of well-being. Guided by the Common Sense Model of Self-Regulation and Social Cognitive theory, this study examined whether illness and emotional representations, general and domain self-efficacy were associated with pre-surgical well-being. The pre-surgical assessment of a three-wave prospective study is reported. Fifty-four hip and knee replacements patients (mean age = 69.33; SD = 8.57) were recruited in the pre-surgery educational clinic at a UK general hospital. Patients completed a questionnaire-pack including the Revised Illness Perceptions Questionnaire, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, the Self-Efficacy for Rehabilitation Outcome Scale, the Falls-Efficacy Scale, and the Short Form of Psychological Well-Being Index. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses showed that above and beyond demographic and clinical characteristics, negative emotional representations were associated with lower psychological well-being while strong general self-efficacy beliefs were positively related to psychological well-being. Independent of demographic and clinical characteristics, joint replacement patients’ psychological well-being was associated with their cognitions and emotional reactions to their condition before surgery. Early interventions could potentially target these modifiable factors to improve pre-surgical well-being in this group of patients, with potential for additional post-surgical benefit.     

Does Controlling for Temporal Parameters Change the Levels-of-Processing Effect in Working Memory?

The distinguishability between working memory (WM) and long-term memory has been a frequent and long-lasting source of debate in the literature. One recent method of identifying the relationship between the two systems has been to consider the influence of long-term memory effects, such as the levels-of-processing (LoP) effect, in WM. However, the few studies that have examined the LoP effect in WM have shown divergent results. This study examined the LoP effect in WM by considering a theoretically meaningful methodological aspect of the LoP span task. Specifically, we fixed the presentation duration of the processing component a priori because such fixed complex span tasks have shown differences when compared to unfixed tasks in terms of recall from WM as well as the latent structure of WM. After establishing a fixed presentation rate from a pilot study, the LoP span task presented memoranda in red or blue font that were immediately followed by two processing words that matched the memoranda in terms of font color or semantic relatedness. On presentation of the processing words, participants made deep or shallow processing decisions for each of the memoranda before a cue to recall them from WM. Participants also completed delayed recall of the memoranda. Results indicated that LoP affected delayed recall, but not immediate recall from WM. These results suggest that fixing temporal parameters of the LoP span task does not moderate the null LoP effect in WM, and further indicate that WM and long-term episodic memory are dissociable on the basis of LoP effects.     

Cognitive processing impairments in a supra-second temporal discrimination task in rats with cerebellar lesion

The role of interpositus nuclei (IN) in timing in the sub-second range is well supported in eyeblink conditioning studies. Timing impairments shown in the seconds range in patients with intermediate cerebellar lesion, and known intermediate cerebellar cortex projection to IN raise the question of a possible involvement of IN in timing in the supra-second range as well. To address this question, we tested rats (Sprague-Dawley) given bilateral lesions of IN with Colchicine in a 2- vs. 8-s temporal discrimination task, followed by three daily sessions of a temporal bisection tests with five added intermediate non-reinforced durations. IN lesioned rats showed normal acquisition of the temporal discrimination, but a transient impairment of temporal sensitivity during the bisection tests. In addition, their response latencies suggested a different behavioral strategy from that of control animals. Our results indicate that the IN of the cerebellum may not be critically involved in temporal processing in the 2–8 s range, but may play a role in the cognitive processes that access temporal information in the mediation of choice behavior.     

Invisible displacement understanding in domestic dogs (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis familiaris</Emphasis>): the role of visual cues in search behavior

Recently, (Collier-Baker E, Davis JM, Suddendorf T (2004) J Comp Psychol 118:421–433) suggested that domestic dogs do not understand invisible displacements. In the present study, we further investigated the hypothesis that the search behavior of domestic dogs in invisible displacements is guided by various visual cues inherent to the task rather than by mental representation of an object’s past trajectory. Specifically, we examined the role of the experimenter as a function of the final position of the displacement device in the search behavior of domestic dogs. Visible and invisible displacement problems were administered to dogs (N = 11) under two conditions. In the Visible-experimenter condition, the experimenter was visible whereas in the Concealed-experimenter condition, the experimenter was visibly occluded behind a large rigid barrier. Our data supported the conclusion that dogs do not understand invisible displacements but primarily search as a function of the final position of the displacement device and, to a lesser extent, the position of the experimenter.     

Controlled processes account for age-related decrease in episodic memory

A decrease in controlled processes has been proposed to be responsible for age-related episodic memory decline. We used the Process Dissociation Procedure, a method that attempts to estimate the contribution of controlled and automatic processes to cognitive performance, and entered both estimates in regression analyses. Results indicate that only controlled processes explained a great part of the age-related variance in a word recall task, especially when little environmental support was offered.     

Scaffolding morality: Positioning a socio-cultural construct

The concept of scaffolding, as originally introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross [(1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 17, 89-100)] and later embedded within Vygotskian theory, has proven to be extremely valuable in its application to educational and psychological theory and practice. In recent years, there have been several attempts to alternatively expand and restrict the terminology and conceptual framework of the scaffolding concept. While movements within the fields of moral development and character education have not yet embraced this socio-cultural concept, it offers a useful tool in justifying and understanding common findings and practices. The character education movement seems particularly well-suited to benefit from scaffolding, within its original socio-cultural framing, in providing an improved understanding of current best practices as well as using the concept as a framework for future research and theoretical direction.     

Human capital,acculturation and social identity: Bosnian refugees in Australia

This article explores the processes of acculturation and identity among refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina who resettled in the Australian cities of Perth and Sydney during the 1990s. We start from the idea that refugees, through the process of forced migration, lose aspects of their identities that were embedded in their former communities, jobs, skills, language, and culture. Upon arrival in a new society, they seek to reconstruct their identity, and we argue that this happens in the context of the process of acculturation. We use two social psychological perspectives, social identity theory and acculturation theory, and the sociological theory of the migration of human capital, to examine our data collected by qualitative research methods from refugees and Australian professionals who work in the government‐funded refugee resettlement programme. Our data highlight the loss of identity experienced in forced migration, difficulties in refugee acculturation and identity reconstruction, and collective and individual strategies in acculturation and identity adaptation. We see our perspective as essentially interdisciplinary, and take an interactional view of the acculturation and identity processes, as the characteristics of both the host society and the immigrants affect them. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impaired sequential and partially compensated probabilistic skill learning in Parkinson's disease

The striatal dopaminergic dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been associated with deficits in skill learning in numerous studies, but some of the findings remain controversial. Our aim was to explore the generality of the learning deficit using two widely reported skill learning tasks in the same group of Parkinson's patients. Thirty-four patients with PD (mean age: 62.83 years, SD: 7.67) were compared to age-matched healthy adults. Two tasks were employed: the Serial Reaction Time Task (SRT), testing the learning of motor sequences, and the Weather Prediction (WP) task, testing non-sequential probabilistic category learning. On the SRT task, patients with PD showed no significant evidence for sequence learning. These results support and also extend previous findings, suggesting that motor skill learning is vulnerable in PD. On the WP task, the PD group showed the same amount of learning as controls, but they exploited qualitatively different strategies in predicting the target categories. While controls typically combined probabilities from multiple predicting cues, patients with PD instead focused on individual cues. We also found moderate to high correlations between the different measures of skill learning. These findings support our hypothesis that skill learning is generally impaired in PD, and can in some cases be compensated by relying on alternative learning strategies.     

Adaptive specialization in position encoding while learning to read

The present experiments focused on how orthographic processing develops during reading acquisition. Specifically, a large, cross‐sectional sample of children from grade 2 to grade 4 was exposed to pairs of words, pseudowords, digit strings, and pseudo‐letter (Armenian) strings while their sensitivity to transpositions (T) and substitutions (S) of internal characters was investigated in a perceptual matching task. The results showed that the development of identity and position decoding diverged between the four stimulus categories. Most importantly, sensitivity improved with longer exposure to formal education and higher reading level to both S and T pairs for digit strings, but only to S pairs for words and pseudowords. The results were successfully reproduced in two small independent samples. We propose a general framework, the Adaptive Specialization Hypothesis, to accommodate the results. According to this hypothesis, the transposed‐letter effect is not a hard‐wired feature of the orthographic processing system but an adaptive response of the developing orthographic system to the constraints of lexical access in several orthographies.     

Discontinuity in the enumeration of sequentially presented auditory and visual stimuli

The seeking of discontinuity in enumeration was recently renewed because Cowan [Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 87–185; Cowan, N. (2005). Working memory capacity. Hove: Psychology Press] suggested that it allows evaluating the limit of the focus of attention, currently estimated at four items. A strong argument in favour of a general constraint of the cognitive system is that similar discontinuities should be observed in modalities different from the classic simultaneous presentation of visual objects. Recently, data were provided on tactile stimuli, but the authors diverged in their conclusion about the existence of such discontinuity [Gallace, A., Tan, H. Z., & Spence, C. (2006). Numerosity judgments for tactile stimuli distributed over the body surface. Perception, 35(2), 247–266; Riggs, K. J., Ferrand, L., Lancelin, D., Fryziel, L., Dumur, G., & Simpson, A. (2006). Subitizing in tactile perception. Psychological Science, 17(4), 271–272]. Following a similar rationale, our study aimed at evaluating discontinuity in the enumeration of auditory and visual stimuli presented sequentially. The clear and similar discontinuity observed in error rates, response times and given responses for both modalities favours the general capacity limit view, but also questions the size of this capacity, because the discontinuity occurred here at size 2. However, the masking of stimuli in sensory memory could not be entirely discarded.