Leisure activities, caregiving demands and catecholamine levels in dementia caregivers

This study examined whether satisfaction from leisure activities moderates the relationship between caregiving demands (i.e., hours per day spent caring for a spouse with dementia) and resting levels of the catecholamines norepinephrine (NE) and epinephrine (EPI). Spousal caregivers (n?=?107; mean age?=?73.95?±?8.12 years) were assessed in home for plasma levels of NE and EPI, amount of care provided, and leisure satisfaction. Regression was used to determine whether leisure satisfaction moderated the relationship between hours providing care per day and catecholamine levels. A significant interaction was found between hours caregiving and leisure satisfaction for NE, but not for EPI. Post?hoc regressions were conducted for both NE and EPI. At low leisure satisfaction, time spent caring for a spouse was positively associated with plasma NE (β?=?0.41; p?=?0.005) and EPI (β?=?0.44; p?=?0.003). In contrast, at high levels of satisfaction, time caregiving was not significantly associated with plasma NE (β?=?-0.08; p?=?0.57) or EPI (β?=?0.23; p?=?0.12). These findings suggest that leisure satisfaction may protect caregivers from increases in catecholamines, which have been implicated in cardiovascular risk. Further support for these findings may impact psychological treatments for distressed caregivers.     

Emotional stimuli exert parallel effects on attention and memory

Because emotional and neutral stimuli typically differ on non-emotional dimensions, it has been difficult to determine conclusively which factors underlie the ability of emotional stimuli to enhance immediate long-term memory. Here we induced arousal by varying participants' goals, a method that removes many potential confounds between emotional and non-emotional items. Hungry and sated participants encoded food and clothing images under divided attention conditions. Sated participants attended to and recalled food and clothing images equivalently. Hungry participants performed worse on the concurrent tone-discrimination task when they viewed food relative to clothing images, suggesting enhanced attention to food images, and they recalled more food than clothing images. A follow-up regression analysis of the factors predicting memory for individual pictures revealed that food images had parallel effects on attention and memory in hungry participants, so that enhanced attention to food images did not predict their enhanced memory. We suggest that immediate long-term memory for food is enhanced in the hungry state because hunger leads to more distinctive processing of food images rendering them more accessible during retrieval.     

Christ For Us Today – Promeity in the Christologies of Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard

In 1944, Bonhoeffer famously asked ‘Who is Christ really, for us today?’ This question is ambiguous: ‘Christ for us’ points to an objective claim concerning the personal identity of Christ, while ‘for us today’ signals the need for ever new subjective value judgements and contextual appropriations. Does emphasis upon the promeity of Christ, like that found in the work of Bonhoeffer, volatilize the identity of Christ? Examination of the theme of promeity in the work of Bonhoeffer himself, as well as that of Kierkegaard, demonstrates that in the hands of both these Lutheran theologians promeity is acknowledged to be intrinsic to the fides quae creditur. The subjective appropriation and contextual character of Christology then proves to be a function of a prior and more decisive reality, namely the very identity of God in Christ for us.     

Mood and multiple source characteristics: mood congruency of source consensus status and source trustworthiness as determinants of message scrutiny

This research deals with the interplay of mood and multiple source characteristics in regard to persuasion processes and attitudes. In a four-factorial experiment, mood (positive vs. negative), source consensus status (majority vs. minority), source trustworthiness (high vs. low), and message strength (strong vs. weak) were manipulated. Results were in line with predictions of a mood-congruent expectancies perspective rather than competing predictions of a mood-as-information perspective. Specifically, individuals in both moods evinced higher message scrutiny given mood-incongruent (vs. mood-congruent) source characteristics. That is, across source trustworthiness, positive (negative) mood led to higher message scrutiny given a minority (majority) versus a majority (minority) source. Furthermore, across source consensus, positive (negative) mood led to higher message scrutiny given an untrustworthy (trustworthy) versus a trustworthy (untrustworthy) source. Additional analyses revealed that processing effort increased from doubly mood-congruent source combinations (low effort) over mixed-source combinations (intermediate effort) to doubly mood-incongruent combinations (high effort). Implications are discussed.     

Predicting Training Success with General Mental Ability,Specific Ability Tests,and (Un)Structured Interviews: A meta‐analysis with unique samples

Several meta‐analyses combine an extensive amount of research concerned with predicting training success. General mental ability is regarded as the best predictor with specific abilities or tests explaining little additional variance. However, only few studies measured all predictors within one sample. Thus, intercorrelations were often estimated based on other studies. Moreover, new methods for correcting range restriction are now available. The present meta‐analyses used samples derived from a German company in which applicants for different apprenticeships were tested with an intelligence structure test, specific ability tests as well as a structured and an unstructured interview. Therefore, intercorrelations between different assessment tools did not have to be estimated from other data. Results in the final examination, taking place at least 2 years after the original assessment, served as criterion variable. The dominant role of general mental ability was confirmed. However, specific abilities were identified that can be used as valuable additions. Job complexity moderated some of the relationships. Structured interviews were found to have good incremental validity over and above general mental ability. Unstructured interviews, on the other hand, performed poorly. Practical implications are discussed.     

Die Phänomenologie und die Provokation des Unbewussten

Anhand des ph?nomenologischen Begriffs der Auffassung soll die Beziehung von Freudscher Psychoanalyse und Husserlscher Ph?nomenologie n?her bestimmt werden. Dabei wird von einer methodologischen Fragestellung ausgegangen, die sich allerdings notwendig auch zu einer inhaltlich bestimmten Perspektive weiten muss. Die These ist, dass die Ph?nomenologie sich in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem grundverschiedenen Ansatz der Psychoanalyse selbst genauer verstehen lernt, und zwar vor allem in ihrem Anspruch auf Wissenschaftlichkeit, in ihrer Forderung nach anschaulicher Ausweisung von philosophischer Wahrheit und in der Problematisierung des Subjektbegriffs.     

Is Fear of Others Linked to an Uncertain Sense of Self? The Relevance of Self-Worth, Interpersonal Self-Concepts, and Dysfunctional Beliefs to Paranoia

The assumption that a low sense of self-worth can give rise to paranoid delusions is relevant from a therapeutic perspective, but research has been inconsistent. The present study sought to investigate how interpersonal self-concepts and global self-worth relate to psychotic and depressive psychopathology in persons with psychosis. Participants with psychosis (n = 83) and healthy controls (n = 33) were assessed for global self-worth, interpersonal self-concepts, and dysfunctional beliefs using the Frankfurt Self-Concept Scale and the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale. Symptoms were assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory, the Paranoia Checklist, and the Beck Depression Inventory. We hypothesized that perceived threat to self-worth, as expressed in dysfunctional acceptance beliefs and negative interpersonal self-concepts, would be uniquely associated with persecutory delusions. In contrast, low global self-worth would be strongly associated with symptoms of depression. Multiple regression analyses were used to investigate the association between symptoms and self-concepts. As expected, low global self-worth was associated with depression, whereas the more specific perception of not being accepted by relevant others was most clearly related to psychotic symptoms. Almost half of the variance in paranoia scores was explained by negative interpersonal self-concepts and the interaction between negative interpersonal self-concepts and dysfunctional acceptance beliefs. Thus, cognitive interventions for delusions might be improved by focusing more on interpersonal self-concepts.     

Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model

Most words in English have more than one syllable, yet the most influential computational models of reading aloud are restricted to processing monosyllabic words. Here, we present CDP++, a new version of the Connectionist Dual Process model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). CDP++ is able to simulate the reading aloud of mono- and disyllabic words and nonwords, and learns to assign stress in exactly the same way as it learns to associate graphemes with phonemes. CDP++ is able to simulate the monosyllabic benchmark effects its predecessor could, and therefore shows full backwards compatibility. CDP++ also accounts for a number of novel effects specific to disyllabic words, including the effects of stress regularity and syllable number. In terms of database performance, CDP++ accounts for over 49% of the reaction time variance on items selected from the English Lexicon Project, a very large database of several thousand of words. With its lexicon of over 32,000 words, CDP++ is therefore a notable example of the successful scaling-up of a connectionist model to a size that more realistically approximates the human lexical system.     

Fluency,phonology and morphology: a response to the commentaries on becoming literate in different languages

We are delighted at the range of issues raised in the commentaries. The breadth and scope of these serve to make obvious the need for an effective evidence base across languages if we are to optimize the teaching of reading. Our psycholinguistic grain size theory clearly did not pay sufficient attention to the role of morphology in decoding, nor to fluency. The commentaries also highlight the need for considering in more depth the intimate links between phonological and morphological development. All issues raised were highly germane to generating an adequate theoretical framework for the cross‐language collection of relevant evidence in different countries.     

The influence of syllable onset complexity and syllable frequency on speech motor control

Functional imaging studies have delineated a "minimal network for overt speech production", encompassing mesiofrontal structures (supplementary motor area, anterior cingulate gyrus), bilateral pre- and postcentral convolutions, extending rostrally into posterior parts of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) of the language-dominant hemisphere, left anterior insula as well as bilateral components of the basal ganglia, the cerebellum, and the thalamus. In order to further elucidate the specific contribution of these cerebral regions to speech motor planning, subjects were asked to read aloud visually presented bisyllabic pseudowords during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The test stimuli systematically varied in onset complexity (CCV versus CV) and frequency of occurrence (high-frequency, HF versus low-frequency, LF) of the initial syllable. A cognitive subtraction approach revealed a significant main effect of syllable onset complexity (CCV versus CV) at the level of left posterior IFG, left anterior insula, and both cerebellar hemispheres. Conceivably, these areas closely cooperate in the sequencing of subsyllabic aspects of the sound structure of verbal utterances. A significant main effect of syllable frequency (LF versus HF), by contrast, did not emerge. However, calculation of the time series of hemodynamic activation within the various cerebral structures engaged in speech motor control revealed this factor to enhance functional connectivity between Broca's area and ipsilateral anterior insula.