Relationship of social support and social burden to repeated breast cancer screening in the women's health initiative.

Direct and interactive effects of social support, social burden (caregiving, negative life events, and social strain), education, and income on repeated use of breast cancer screening among a large (N=55,278), national sample of postmenopausal women participating in the Women's Health Initiative observational study were examined. Repeated screening decreased as emotional/informational support and positive social interactions decreased (ps<.01). Repeated mammography decreased with frequent caregiving (p<.01). Less social strain reduced the frequency of repeated breast self-examinations (BSEs; ps<.01), but frequent caregiving and more negative life events increased repeated use of BSE (ps<.01). Interactive effects suggested that emotional/informational but not tangible support is associated with repeated mammography and clinical breast examinations (ps<.01) and may be particularly important among low-income older women, especially those burdened by caregiving.     

Engaging with research ethics in central Francophone Africa: reflections on a workshop about ancillary care

ABSTRACT: Research ethics is predominantly taught and practiced in Anglophone countries, particularly those in North America and Western Europe. Initiatives to build research ethics capacity in developing countries must attempt to avoid imposing foreign frameworks and engage with ethical issues in research that are locally relevant. This article describes the process and outcomes of a capacity-building workshop that took place in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2011. Although the workshop focused on a specific ethical theme - the responsibilities of researchers to provide health-related care to their research participants - we argue that the structure of the workshop offers a useful method for engaging with research ethics in general, and the theme of ancillary care encourages a broad perspective on research ethics that is highly pertinent in low-income countries. The workshop follows an interactive, locally driven model that could be fruitfully replicated in similar settings.     

Linking the demands–control–support model to innovation: The moderating role of personal initiative on the generation and implementation of ideas

The demands–control–support model indicates that workers can use job control and social support for problem solving. We examined whether personal initiative moderated relationships between, on the one hand, job control used for problem solving and social support used for problem solving and, on the other hand, ideas generation and implementation. We operationalized job control used for problem solving as ‘changing aspects of work activities to solve problems’. We operationalized social support used for problem solving as ‘discussing problems to solve problems’. Using an experience sampling methodology, participants provided data for up to four times a day for up to five working days (N= 89). The extent to which people ‘changed aspects of their work activities to solve problems’ was associated with higher levels of ideas generation for people with high personal initiative. The extent to which people ‘discussed problems to solve problems’ was associated with higher levels of ideas implementation for people with high personal initiative.     

Somatosensory prior entry assessed with temporal order judgments and simultaneity judgments

Attention is central to perception, yet a clear understanding of how attention influences the latency of perception has proven surprisingly elusive. Recent research has indicated that spatially attended stimuli are perceived earlier than unattended stimuli across a range of sensory modalities-an effect termed prior entry. However, the method commonly used to measure this, the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, has been criticized as susceptible to response bias, despite deliberate attempts to minimize such bias. A preferred alternative is the simultaneity judgment (SJ) task. We tested the prior-entry hypothesis for somatosensory stimuli using both a TOJ task (replicating an earlier experiment) and an SJ task. Prior-entry effects were found for both, though the effect was reduced in the SJ task. Additional experiments (TOJ and SJ) using visual cues established that the earlier perception of cued tactile targets does not result from intramodal sensory interactions between tactile cues and targets.     

Rightward collisions and their association with pseudoneglect

Whereas right parietal damage can result in left hemineglect, the general population shows a subtle neglect of the right hemispace-known as pseudoneglect. A recent study has demonstrated that people collide to the right more often and attributed this bias to pseudoneglect. [Nicholls, M. E. R., Loftus, A., Meyer, K., & Mattingley, J.B. (2007). Things that go bump in the right: The effect of unimanual activity on rightward collisions. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1122-1126]. Nicholls examined the effect of unimanual activation by requiring participants to fire projectiles at a target whilst walking and found that the rightward bias was exaggerated or reversed when the left and right hands were active, respectively. However, the act of aiming at a target may have inadvertently biased walking trajectory to the right. The current study addressed this issue by requiring participants (n=149) to walk through a narrow doorway three times whilst entering text into a phone using the (a) left, (b) right or (c) both hands. Despite the fact that entering text into a phone should produce no rightward bias, participants bumped to the right more often. Unlike previous research, no effect of unimanual activation was observed. This lack of effect was attributed to the smaller hand movements for entering numbers compared to firing a toy gun. Finally, this study showed an association for the first time between biases in observable bumping and line bisection performance-suggesting that unilateral bumping is related to pseudoneglect.     

Maternal and Paternal Perceptions of Social Competence in Children and Adolescents

We examined maternal and paternal perceptions of social competence in children and adolescents. One hundred forty-seven parents rated scenarios depicting children who varied in age, gender, and social competence. Parents also completed questionnaires assessing the amount of time they spend with their own children, their gender identity, their psychological symptoms, and their affectivity. Results indicated that the amount of time parents spend with their own children was related to maternal and paternal ratings, whereas affectivity was related to paternal ratings. In contrast, parents’ gender identity and psychological symptoms were unrelated to their ratings of social competence. Finally, there was an interaction between parent gender and the level of social competence depicted in the scenarios they rated, suggesting that there were differences in maternal and paternal ratings. These findings emphasize the importance of examining the perceptions of both mothers and fathers when assessing social competence in children and adolescents.     

Pseudoneglect for the bisection of mental number lines

Patients with unilateral neglect of the left side bisect physical lines to the right whereas individuals with an intact brain bisect lines slightly to the left (pseudoneglect). Similarly, for mental number lines, which are arranged in a left-to-right ascending sequence, neglect patients bisect to the right. This study determined whether individuals with an intact brain show pseudoneglect for mental number lines. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual number triplets (e.g., 16, 36, 55) and determined whether the numerical distance was greater on the left or right side of the inner number. Despite changing the spatial configuration of the stimuli, or their temporal order, the numerical length on the left was consistently overestimated. The fact that the bias was unaffected by physical stimulus changes demonstrates that the bias is based on a mental representation. The leftward bias was also observed for sets of negative numbers (Experiment 2)--demonstrating not only that the number line extends into negative space but also that the bias is not the result of an arithmetic distortion caused by logarithmic scaling. The leftward bias could be caused by a rounding-down effect. Using numbers that were prone to large or small rounding-down errors, Experiment 3 showed no effect of rounding down. The task demands were changed in Experiment 4 so that participants determined whether the inner number was the true arithmetic centre or not. Participants mistook inner numbers shifted to the left to be the true numerical centre--reflecting leftward overestimation. The task was applied to 3 patients with right parietal damage with severe, moderate, or no spatial neglect (Experiment 5). A rightward bias was observed, which depended on the severity of neglect symptoms. Together, the data demonstrate a reliable and robust leftward bias for mental number line bisection, which reverses in clinical neglect. The bias mirrors pseudoneglect for physical lines and most likely reflects an expansion of the space occupied by lower numbers on the left side of the line and a contraction of space for higher numbers located on the right.     

Somatosensory prior entry

The perceived timing of sensory events does not necessarily match the actual timing. In the present study, we investigated the effect of location of attention on the perceived timing of somatosensory stimuli. Participants judged the temporal order of two taps, delivered one to each hand, with taps presented at different elevations (upper and lower) on the opposing hands. The task was to discriminate the elevation of the tap presented first (or second). This vertical discrimination task was orthogonal to the horizontal attentional cuing manipulation, removing the response bias confound that has undermined earlier studies investigating the impact of attention on the perceived timing of sensory stimuli. We manipulated spatial attention either (1) exogenously (Experiment 1) in 13 participants, using brief taps to either the left or right hand, or (2) endogenously (Experiment 2) in 22 participants, using centrally presented symbolic cues. The results supported the hypothesis that attended stimuli are perceived more rapidly than unattended stimuli. This effect was larger when attention was exogenously manipulated. Previous research has demonstrated a similar effect for visual stimuli. The present study, which extends this result to somatosensory perception, indicates that the phenomenon may represent a more global feature of the perceptual system, which is possibly mediated by a common modality-independent mechanism.     

The consequences of effortful emotion regulation when processing distressing material: A comparison of suppression and acceptance

The present study investigated the consequences of different forms of emotion regulation. Eighty nine healthy participants viewed a distressing video of the aftermath of road traffic accidents under either suppression (of both felt and expressed affect), acceptance, or no-regulation control instructions and the immediate and longer-term consequences on emotion, mood, and memory were examined. Suppression (relative to control) led to reduced subjective experience of fear when viewing the video, but did not alter electrodermal (EDA) or heart rate (HR) response. Subsequently, suppression led to a less marked subjective emotional reaction to positive but not negative emotional images, reduced free recall memory of the video, and a greater likelihood of experiencing zero intrusions of the video's content. Acceptance (relative to control) had no impact when viewing the video, was associated with a less marked increase in EDA activity in the 5 min period immediately after viewing the video, a more marked HR deceleration and EDA response to both positive and negative images, and elevated negative affect at one week follow-up. These findings suggest, contrary to the current clinical zeitgeist, that emotion suppression can successfully lead to an ongoing down-regulation of emotion and memory, whereas acceptance may elevate subsequent emotionality.