Understanding depressed mood in the context of a family-oriented culture

This study examined the contribution of individual and family variables to depressive symptoms among youths in a family-centered culture. Participants were 262 Mexican adolescents (mean age = 15.9 years). At the individual level, gender (being female) and higher levels of perceived stressfulness of life events and ruminative coping style were correlated with higher frequency of depressive symptoms. At the family level, higher levels of perceived parental warmth and acceptance and parental monitoring were correlated with lower levels of depressed mood, whereas higher levels of parent-adolescent conflict were associated with greater frequency of depressive symptoms. Regression analyses confirmed our prediction that both individual factors (gender, ruminative coping) and family factors (parental warmth and parental monitoring) would make unique contributions to depressive symptoms. The model comprised of individual and family variables accounted for 50% of the variance in depressed mood. Moreover, parental warmth and acceptance attenuated the impact of ruminative coping style on adolescents' depressive symptomatology. Findings are discussed in relation to previous research on adolescents in another family-centered culture (China), and directions for future research are proposed.     

Happiness and health: environmental and genetic contributions to the relationship between subjective well-being, perceived health, and somatic illness

The aim was to identify genetic and environmental influences on the covariances between subjective well-being (SWB), perceived health, and somatic illness. Analyses were based on 6576 Norwegian twins aged 18-31. Heritabilities ranged from .24 to.66. SWB correlated .50 with perceived health, -.25 with musculoskeletal pain, and -.07 with allergy. Common genetic factors accounted for 45%-60% of associations. SWB and perceived health was to a high extent influenced by the same genes (r(g)=.72 and.82 for males and females, respectively). For SWB and musculoskeletal pain, r-sub(g) =-.29 and -.42 for males and females, respectively. Effects were partly sex specific. Environmental factors shared by twins did not affect the covariances. Results support a differentiated view of SWB-health relations, and imply that both genes and environment play important roles in the associations between well-being and health.     

Early phonological skills as a predictor of reading acquisition: a follow-up study from kindergarten to the middle of grade 2

The purpose of this study was to investigate the power of early measures of phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rapid naming, short-term memory) in predicting later reading skills at various points of time. About 70 children were followed from the end of kindergarten to the middle of grade 2. Correlation analyses were performed as well as a linear growth curve analyses. In the traditional regression analysis, phonemic awareness in kindergarten explained about 27% of the variance in word reading six months later and about 9.5% of the variance at the end of grade 1. Even when prior level of reading skill was included in the predictive equation, a significant amount of variance was still explained by phonemic awareness. The other predictor variables did not explain any variance in word reading, and phonemic awareness did not predict any variance in reading skills in grade 2. When using sentence reading as the dependent variable, phonemic awareness explained about 16% of unique variance after six months, and about 13% of the variance in the middle of grade 2. Similarly, when employing growth curve analysis, phonemic awareness was the only phonological factor that accounted for significant variance in the word reading slope, explaining about 25% of its variance, whereas naming and short-term memory did not explain any unique variance. The lack of predictive power of phonemic awareness on the sentence b-slope is assumed to be caused by unreliable sentence scores in kindergarten.     

Quality of life - three competing views

The aim of the present paper is to describe three different attempts, which have been made by philosophers, to define what quality of life is; and to spell out some of the difficulties that faces each definition. One, Perfectionism, focuses on the capacities that human beings possess: capacities for friendship, knowledge and creative activity, for instance. It says that the good life consists in the development and use of these capacities. Another account, the Preference Theory, urges that satisfying one's preferences, or desires, is what improves one's quality of life. And a third account, Hedonism, sees life-quality as consisting in the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The paper describes and evaluates objections to each of these views, thereby displaying their weaknesses and strengths. Since no view comes out as the right one there is a choice to be made. At the end of the paper it is being discussed how well each of the views cohere with different methodologies used in quality of life research. Also it is suggested that considerations about what the research is to be used for are relevant.     

John Dewey's impact on Turkish education

Conclusion The cultural characteristics of any country generally give shape to the educational system. However, no country can assert its own educational system to be wholly indigenous. All the systems come into being as a synthesis of various ingredients of the home country and other countries. And it is quite natural to make use of the experiences and stock of knowledge of the others. This fact is indispensable especially when education is concerned. The curicial problem is to what extent the borrowing process should be used. When the process of borrowing ideas become to take the form of imitation or copy, unexpected results and failure are unavoidable.     

Genes and family environment in familial clustering of cancer

Familial clustering of a disease is defined as the occurrence of the disease within some families in excess of what would be expected from the occurrence in the population. It has been demonstrated for several cancer types, ranging from rare cancers as the adenomatosis-coli-associated colon cancer or the Li-Fraumeni syndrome to more common cancers as breast cancer and colon cancer. Familial clustering, however, is merely an epidemiological pattern, and it does not tell whether genetic or environmental causes or both in combination are responsible for the familial clustering. Familial clustering may be due to genetic predisposition to the disease, but exposure to environmental factors — shared by members of some families, but not by members of other families — may also cause familial clustering and hence mimic genetic inheritance in the study of nuclear families. Based on assumptions regarding the individual steps in the biological process starting with exposure to carcinogens and ending with death from disseminated cancer we suggest that genetic and environmental factors may both be involved in most of these steps. The present paper focuses on research methodologies necessary to discriminate between the effect of genes and family environment in the development of cancer.     

Hemispheric asymmetry and human associative learning: Interactions with attention

In a previous study (Hugdahl & Brobeck, 1986) it was shown that Pavlovian conditioning to an auditory verbal conditioned stimulus (CS) initially presented only to the left cerebral hemisphere was stronger than when the same CS was presented to the right hemisphere. This was followed up in the present study by controlling for the possibility that the effect was caused by laterally biased attention. The study was performed using the “dichotic extinction paradigm,” which consists of three different phases. During the habituation phase, the CS+ and CS- were presented binaurally and separated in time. During the acquisition phase, the CS+ was followed by a white-noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS). During the dichotic extinction phase, the CS+ and CS- were presented dichotically, i.e., simultaneous presentations on each trial. Half of the subjects had the CS+ in the right ear, and half had the CS+ in the left ear. Each group was further divided into two subgroups, with one subgroup instructed to attend only to the right ear input, and the other subgroup to attend only to the left ear input. During acquisition, larger electrodermal responses were obtained to the CS+ than to the CS-. During dichotic extinction, the CS+ right ear group showed superior resistance to extinction compared to the CS+ left ear group, with no effect of the manipulation of attention. The effect was, however, attenuated when levels of acquisition was used as covariates in an analysis of covariance. There were overall larger responses from the left hand recording.     

Brain asymmetry and autonomic conditioning: Sensitization control

In the present experiment we report effects of cerebral asymmetry, or laterality, during classical conditioning to facial emotional stimuli. Twenty-five female subjects were presented with slides of a happy face in one visual half-field (VHF), and simultaneously a slide of an angry face in the other VHF, followed by shock as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). To control for effects of sensitization, a new stimulus, never associated with the UCS, was introduced in the extinction phase. Dependent measures were phasic heart rate responses (HR) and skin conductance responses (SCR). The HR results showed a significant right hemisphere effect for the CS-UCS association, that was not attributable to UCS sensitization. No significant effects were found for the SCRs. The basic HR finding was a right hemisphere superiority for learning of a conditioned association.     

Clinicians and supervisors' experiences with developing practices of open dialogue in network meetings in public mental health services

Open Dialogue is a dialogical approach focusing on the perspectives of patients and their social networks on treatment and recovery processes. As part of a larger research project, this prospective cohort study explores what promotes and hinders the development of Open Dialogue in network meetings (ODNM) based on the experiences of thirty-seven clinicians and seven supervisors. Multistage focus group interviews were used to collect data and were analysed thematically. We generated two main themes: (1) togetherness and isolation and (2) challenging and evolving. The findings show that ODNM can be developed in public mental healthcare, but this leads to both challenges and opportunities at the organisational level, such as conflicting perspectives, the difficulty of maintaining interest in ODNM, the need for committed and involved leaders, and the growing change in the traditional view of treatment, which has made clinicians collaborate more with patients and their relatives.     

Videoconference to supervise early intensive behavioral intervention: A preliminary evaluation of acceptability

At present, early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for children with autism spectrum disorders is the intervention that has the strongest empirical support. EIBI requires frequent supervision by qualified professionals. Norway, like many other countries, has a shortage of qualified supervisors, particularly in rural regions. This study used a reversal design to investigate how supervisors and supervisees perceive the quality of EIBI supervision and the local team's preparedness when supervision was provided either on-site or via videoconference. Calculations were made on how much time could be saved on travel when part of the supervision was provided via videoconference. There were no significant differences in the supervisors' and supervisees' ratings of on-site and videoconference supervision. Moreover, the supervisors found the local EIBI teams to be better prepared when supervision was provided via videoconference, and the videoconference supervision meetings were shorter. The study discusses the implications of these findings for the accessibility of EIBI and case capacity and proposes some areas for further research.