The Use of Rituals in Grieving for a Miscarriage or Stillbirth

Abstract

Preparation for their changing roles in family and society, as well as readying their intimate space for the arrival of an infant, totally engage expectant parents. Miscarriage or stillbirth may bring on a grief storm that strips away many tender roots and branches of new life in the community that the parents have been nurturing. Creation and participation in a grief ritual can bring the grieving parents to a healing resolution. This article describes the healing efficacy of ritual, its elements, and how a compassionate therapist can create one in collaboration with grieving clients.     

Interference suppression vs. response inhibition: An explanation for the absence of a bilingual advantage in preschoolers’ Stroop task performance

The well-documented advantage that bilingual speakers demonstrate across the lifespan on measures of controlled attention is not observed in preschoolers’ performance on Stroop task variations. We examined the role of task demands in explaining this discrepancy. Whereas the Color/Word Stroop used with adult participants requires interference suppression, the Stroop task typically used with preschoolers requires only response inhibition. We developed an age-appropriate conflict task that measures interference suppression. Fifty-one preschool children (26 bilinguals) completed this new Bivalent Shape Task and the Day/Night task used in previous research. Bilingual in comparison to monolingual children performed better on incongruent trials of the Bivalent Shape Task, but did not differ on other measures. The results indicate that the discrepancy between preschoolers and older individuals in performance on Stroop task adaptations results from characteristics of the task rather than developmental differences. Further, the findings provide additional support for the importance of interference suppression as a mechanism underlying the bilingual advantage.     

Depressive mood and smoking onset: A comparison of adolescents with and without asthma

This prospective population-based study aimed to compare associations between depressive feelings and smoking behaviour of adolescents with and without asthma. Data were collected from a two-wave 22–24 months prospective study among 5938 adolescents who completed self-report questionnaires. Logistic regression analyses showed that depressive feelings and smoking were related both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Smoking behaviour was similar for adolescents with and without asthma, as well as its correlation with depressive feelings. However, participants with asthma were more likely to report depressive feelings than those without asthma, implying an indirect relationship between asthma and smoking behaviour. Implications for prevention are addressed.     

Examining the effects of perceived social support on momentary mood and symptom reports in asthma and arthritis patients

Objective: Social support has been linked to beneficial effects on health directly (main effect) and as a buffer to stress. Most research, however, has examined these relationships using global and retrospective assessments of health and stress, which may be subject to recall biases. This study used ambulatory ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to test the main and stress-buffering effects of social support on the daily health and well-being of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients.

Design: Community volunteers with asthma (n?=?97) or RA (n?=?31) responded to EMA prompts five times daily for one week.

Main outcomes: Baseline perceived social support was obtained, and then, participants reported mood, stress and symptoms using EMA. Multilevel mixed-modelling examined whether social support predicted mood and symptoms directly or via stress-reducing effects.

Results: Supporting a main effect, more perceived social support predicted decreased negative mood and stress severity. Supporting a stress-buffering effect, more perceived social support resulted in fewer reported symptoms when stress was present.

Conclusion: Results suggest perceived social support directly relates to better ambulatory status and dynamically buffers individuals against the negative effects of stressors, and highlight the importance of studying social support across different temporal and contextual levels.     

A group comparison of those with hypertension and other chronic illness: A factor and item level analysis of anger and hostility

Abstract

A considerable body of research has suggested that essential hypertension is related to both expressed anger and suppressed hostility. This study suggests and provides some evidence that these reported results may simply have arisen as the result of a lack of proper statistical control and differential item functioning across the items on which the measures were based. Three groups of respondents were selected (a) those diagnosed as having hypertension (b) a group who admitted to having a chronic medical condition unrelated to hypertension and (c) individuals who did not have a chronic medical condition. A confirmatory factor model was used to test the structure of a measure of expressed anger and suppressed hostility. Differences were then examined across the three conditions at both the factor and item levels within a MIMIC structure and controlling for age and gender. Differential effects were found between females and males on two observed measures of expressed anger. Age had a direct effect on both the measure of expressed anger and suppressed hostility. After the effects of age and gender were controlled, no statistically significant group differences were found. Previous results indicating a difference on expressed anger and suppressed hostility may, as in the present analysis, be put down to a combination of lack of appropriate statistical control, and to ignoring the differential pattern of responding across the observed measures.     

Validation of a new multidimensional health locus of control scale (form c) in asthma research

Abstract

This study developed and validated an Asthma Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (AMHLC) scale using 186 asthmatics aged 13 to 55 years recruited from 46 pharmacies in the Hunter Valley, Australia. The construct validity and internal consistency of the scale were demonstrated using principal components factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha respectively. Although correlations were modest, findings indicate that asthmatics with higher “Powerful Others” locus of control perceived they had a better quality of doctor-patient relationship; the opposite was found for those with higher “Chance” scores. Powerful Others orientation was also associated with expectations and valuation of services doctors' provide. Knowledge of asthma was not related in the expected direction with the new scale, nor were clinical indices of asthma severity. Younger asthmatics had higher Chance scores while older asthmatics tended toward higher Powerful Others orientation. Overall, the AMHLC instrument achieved suitable measurement properties to allow further investigation of health care behavior in people with asthma.     

The effects of stressor predictability on lymphocyte proliferation in humans

Abstract

To demonstrate the effects of predictable and unpredictable stressors on immune function, 36 male subjects were randomly assigned to complete ten trials of either a predictable or unpredictable cold pressor task or a non-stressful warm pressor control task. The predictable and no-stressor groups were given information about the duration of each pressor trial and a countdown of seconds passed from beginning to end of each trial. The unpredictable stressor group received no information. Self-report, cardiovascular, and biochemical measures were taken throughout the tasks in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the predictability and stressor manipulations. Lymphocyte proliferation to concanavalin A (Con A) and pokeweed mitogen (PWM) were measured before, during and after the tasks. Lymphocyte proliferation to Con A (10/μg/ml) was significantly reduced only in response to the unpredictable stressor suggesting that predictability buffered the effect of the stressor on immune function. Proliferation to PWM followed a similar pattern but was not statistically significant. Blood pressure responses were negatively correlated with proliferation values suggesting that stressor predictability may attenuate stress-associated immune decreases by reducing sympathetic arousal.     

Attentional deficits in fibromyalgia and its relationships with pain,emotional distress and sleep dysfunction complaints

Cognitive complaints are common among subjects with fibromyalgia (FM). Yet, few studies have been able to document these deficits with cognitive tasks. A main limitation of existing studies is that attention has been broadly defined and the tasks used to measure attention are not designed to cover all the main components of the attentional system. Research on attention has identified three primary functions of attention, known as alerting, orienting and executive functioning. This study used the attentional network test-interactions task to explore whether and which of the three attentional networks are altered in FM. Results showed that FM patients have impaired executive control (greater interference), reduced vigilance (slower overall reaction time) and greater alertness (higher reduction in errors after a warning cue). Vigilance and alertness showed several relations with depression, anxiety and sleep quality. Sleep dysfunction was a significant predictor for alertness, whereas there were no significant predictors for vigilance. These findings highlight that the treatment of sleep difficulties in FM patients may help with some of their cognitive complaints.     

Is preschool executive function causally related to academic achievement?

The primary objective of this study was to reevaluate the well-established result that preschoolers' performance on executive function tasks are positively associated with their performance on academic achievement tests. The current study replicated the previously established concurrent associations between children's performance on EF tasks and academic achievement tests. Specifically, children's performance on measures of inhibitory and motor control were positively associated with their performance on tests of reading, writing, and mathematics achievement (rs?=?.2?.5); moreover, although diminished in magnitude, most of these associations held up even after including an earlier measure of academic achievement as a covariate (rs?=?.1?.3). However, the application of an alternative analytic method, fixed effects analysis, a method that capitalizes on repeated measures data to control for all time stable measured and unmeasured covariates, rendered the apparent positive associations between executive function and academic achievement nonsignificant (rs?=?.0?.1). Taken together, these results suggest that the well-replicated association between executive function abilities and academic achievement may be spurious. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of utilizing analytic methods and research designs that facilitate strong causal inferences between executive function and academic achievement in early childhood, as well as the limitations of making curriculum development recommendations and/or public policy decisions based on studies that have failed to do so.     

Interference control in adolescents with Mild-to-Borderline Intellectual Disabilities and/or behavior disorders

The aim of this study was to investigate interference control in adolescents with Mild to Borderline Intellectual Disability (MBID) by addressing two key questions. First, as MBID is often associated with comorbid behavior disorders (BD), we investigated whether MBID and BD both affect interference control. Second, we studied whether interference control deficits are associated to problems in everyday executive functioning. Four groups of adolescents with and without MBID and/or BD performed the Eriksen flanker task, requiring participants to respond to a central target while ignoring interfering flanking stimuli. Their teachers rated behavior on the Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF). We found pronounced effects of MBID but not BD on flanker interference control. In contrast, we observed pronounced effects of BD, but not MBID, on the BRIEF. In addition, flanker interference scores and BRIEF scores did not correlate. These results are taken to suggest that adolescents with MBID are characterized by deficits in interference control that do not become manifest in ratings of everyday executive functioning. In contrast, adolescents with BD are not characterized by deficits in interference control but do show elevated ratings of deficits in everyday executive function.