Effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning,cognitive abilities,metacognitive confidence,and decision making

Performance on many decision‐making tasks is underpinned by metacognitive monitoring, cognitive abilities, and executive functioning. Fatigue‐inducing conditions, such as sleep loss, compromise these factors, leading to decline in decision performance. Using a 40‐hr sleep deprivation protocol, we examined these factors and the resulting decision performance. Thirteen Australian Army male volunteers (aged 20–30 years) were tested at multiple time points on psychomotor vigilance, inhibitory control, task switching, working memory, short‐term memory, fluid intelligence, and decision accuracy and confidence in a medical diagnosis‐making test. Assessment took place in the morning and night over two consecutive days, during which participants were kept awake. Consistent with previous work, cognitive performance declined after a night without sleep. Extending previous findings, self‐regulation and self‐monitoring suffered significantly greater declines immediately after the sleepless night. These results indicate that the known decline in complex decision‐making performance under fatigue‐inducing conditions might be facilitated by metacognitive rather than cognitive mechanisms.     

等级反应多水平评分者漂移模型的构建

对于评定耗时较长的测验来说,时间因素对评分精确性的影响不容忽视,因此,评分者漂移方面的研究备受关注。研究基于康春花,孙小坚和曾平飞(2016)提出的等级反应多水平侧面模型建构出可用于检测评分者漂移的等级反应多水平评分者漂移模型,并通过模拟研究对模型性能进行验证。结果表明：模型能够精确估计项目和能力参数;且与固定效应模型相比,评分者随机效应模型能更有效地检测出评分者漂移效应,随机效应模型的有效性和稳定性更佳。     

Trans‐Congregational Triadic Closure: Churchgoers’ Networks Within and Beyond the Pews

Triadic closure is the common tendency for connections to emerge between people's social network ties. This phenomenon has clear implications for congregational networks and may underlie many of the social benefits associated with church involvement. Less documented in the sociology of religion, however, is the occurrence of triadic closure involving congregational and noncongregational relationships within people's close personal networks. To conceptualize this boundary‐spanning network overlap, we elaborate the concept of trans‐congregational triadic closure (TCTC). Using data from the Portraits of American Life Survey—a project that examines both general and congregation‐specific networks of U.S. adults—we consider how religious tradition, macro‐level context, and individual factors predict the occurrence of TCTC in churchgoers’ networks. Findings suggest pronounced differences between evangelicals and mainline Protestants, a considerably lower likelihood of TCTC in densely populated areas, and higher likelihoods of TCTC corresponding with long durations of congregational involvement. We conclude by noting some of the implications of TCTC for the lives of individual believers and for religious organizations, and suggest ways that this concept could elucidate further aspects of contemporary religious life.     

Brief report: Response inhibition and processing speed in children with motor difficulties and developmental coordination disorder

A previous study reported that children with poor motor skills, classified as having motor difficulties (MD) or Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), produced more errors in a motor response inhibition task compared to typically developing (TD) children but did not differ in verbal inhibition errors. The present study investigated whether these groups differed in the length of time they took to respond in order to achieve these levels of accuracy, and whether any differences in response speed could be explained by generally slow information processing in children with poor motor skills. Timing data from the Verbal Inhibition Motor Inhibition test were analyzed to identify differences in performance between the groups on verbal and motor inhibition, as well as on processing speed measures from standardized batteries. Although children with MD and DCD produced more errors in the motor inhibition task than TD children, the current analyses found that they did not take longer to complete the task. Children with DCD were slower at inhibiting verbal responses than TD children, while the MD group seemed to perform at an intermediate level between the other groups in terms of verbal inhibition speed. Slow processing speed did not account for these group differences. Results extended previous research into response inhibition in children with poor motor skills by explicitly comparing motor and verbal responses, and suggesting that slow performance, even when accurate, may be attributable to an inefficient way of inhibiting responses, rather than slow information processing speed per se.     

Being positive despite illness: The contribution of positivity to the quality of life of cancer patients

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal relationship between Positivity (POS), defined as a stable disposition to view at experience under a positive outlook, and physical and psychological functioning in a sample of cancer patients immediately after diagnosis and one year later.

Methods: A total of 110 patients (40% males) with pulmonary, colorectal and breast cancer, aged 30–75 (M age = 59.62; SD = 10.33), have been prospectively enrolled between 2012 and 2013, at the S. Andrea Hospital in Rome. All patients were previously aware of their diagnosis. A follow-up one year after diagnosis was conducted. We used structural equation modeling in order to analyse the specific effects of POS on functioning impairment from diagnosis to follow up.

Results: POS was associated with less functioning impairment both at diagnosis and follow-up assessments. Furthermore, POS level at diagnosis continued to be associated with less functioning impairment one year later, after controlling for its stability.

Conclusions: Patients with higher level of POS tended to report less symptoms associated with negative affect such as anxiety and despondency and to preserve their habitual relationships and social roles. POS may act as a basic disposition that sustains patients’ efforts to deal efficaciously with severe illness, by complying with medical treatment and using cognitive strategies that enable individuals to cope with concurrent and prospective challenges of illness.