A Systematic Review of Sleep Associations in Parents and Children

This systematic review aimed to examine sleep associations in a) typically developing children and their parents, and b) children with neurodevelopmental disorders and their parents. Literature search was conducted on PubMed, PsycINFO, EMBASE and Scopus databases for articles examining sleep associations between parents and children. Thirty studies were included in the final review. Based on the first aim, sleep associations between parents and typically developing children were observed for sleep quality, sleep duration and sleep efficiency. However, evidence for associations between sleepiness levels in parents and children and sleep schedules related to bedtime or waketime was limited. Based on the second aim, children with neurodevelopmental disorders and their parents reported greater sleep disturbances in comparison to typically developing children and their parents. The review concluded that sleep in parents and children is interrelated across a number of sleep parameters. It also revealed some preliminary evidence on bidirectionality in parent-child sleep, which warrants further examination. The review highlights the need to examine the mediating role of environmental factors on the interactions between parent-child sleep. Rigorous, longitudinal designs should be employed to explore the pathways through which parents may impact their children’s sleep and functioning and vice-versa.

     

How the Abstract Becomes Concrete: Irrational Numbers Are Understood Relative to Natural Numbers and Perfect Squares

Mathematical cognition research has largely emphasized concepts that can be directly perceived or grounded in visuospatial referents. These include concrete number systems like natural numbers, integers, and rational numbers. Here, we investigate how a more abstract number system, the irrationals denoted by radical expressions like , is understood across three tasks. Performance on a magnitude comparison task suggests that people interpret irrational numbers (specifically, the radicands of radical expressions) as natural numbers. Strategy self‐reports during a number line estimation task reveal that the spatial locations of irrationals are determined by referencing neighboring perfect squares. Finally, perfect squares facilitate the evaluation of arithmetic expressions. These converging results align with a constellation of related phenomena spanning tasks and number systems of varying complexity. Accordingly, we propose that the task‐specific recruitment of more concrete representations to make sense of more abstract concepts (referential processing) is an important mechanism for teaching and learning mathematics.     

Sacrifice: Psychodynamic,Cultural and Clinical Aspects

Noting that the topic of sacrifice has remained largely unaddressed in psychoanalytic literature, the authors offer a discussion of it. Their elucidation of sacrifice opens with the definition and etymology of the word and moves on to the place of sacrifice in various religious traditions. They then summarize Freud's views on the topic and suggest that the subsequent analytic contributions have gone in three directions: the first extends and modifies Freud's proposal of triadic-hostile origins of sacrifice, the second locates such origins in dyadic and loving relations, and the third seeks to synthesize the foregoing trends. The authors then delineate the triad of altruism, masochism, and narcissism that underlie sacrifice. They propose that a spectrum of phenomena, ranging from healthy to pathological, is subsumed under the rubric of sacrifice. They also discuss the significance of such ideas to the conduct of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.     

Religiosity and adolescent marijuana use

Among adolescents, religiosity has been associated with lower rates of marijuana use, though few studies have examined its impact on the perceived risk of use. There is strong support that perceived risk of using marijuana is negatively correlated with the frequency of use. We examined the relationship among religiosity, perceived risk, and marijuana use from a national survey of adolescents that contained questions about lifetime, weekly, and past month substance use, social support, religious involvement and attitudes, and perceived riskiness of use. We tested a structural equation model of relationships among latent variables of religiosity and perceived risk, and an observed variable of total days of marijuana use in the past 12 months. Results indicated the model was a good fit to the data and described a mediating relationship of perceived risk of use between religiosity and marijuana use. Implications for leveraging religiosity in prevention of substance use are discussed.     

Impact of Depression and Anxiety on the Quality of Life of Constipated Patients

Constipation negatively affects quality of life (QOL), however, the specific mechanisms through which this relationship occurs are unclear. The present study examined anxiety and depression as potential mediators of the relationship between constipation severity and QOL in a sample of 142 constipated patients. Results indicated that depression symptom severity mediated the relationship between constipation severity and mental health-related QOL. For patients meeting diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Disorder, indirect effects were observed in the relationship between constipation severity and both physical and mental health-related QOL. Anxiety did not contribute to this model. Treating depression may be useful in improving QOL in severely constipated patients, which highlights the importance of psychological screening and treatment referrals in primary care settings.     

Effortful semantic decision-making boosts memory performance in older adults

A major concern in age-related cognitive decline is episodic memory (EM). Previous studies indicate that both resource and binding deficits contribute to EM decline. Environmental support by task manipulations encouraging stronger cognitive effort and deeper levels of processing may facilitate compensation for these two deficits. To clarify factors that can counteract age-related EM decline, we assessed effects of cognitive effort (four levels) and level of processing (LoP, shallow/deep) during encoding on subsequent retrieval. Young (YAs, N?=?23) and older (OAs, N?=?23) adults performed two incidental encoding tasks, deep/semantic and shallow/perceptual. Cognitive effort was manipulated by varying decision-making demands. EM performance, indexed by d-prime, was later tested using a recognition task. Results showed that regardless of LoP, increased cognitive effort caused higher d-primes in both age groups. Compared to YAs, OAs showed a lower d-prime after shallow encoding across all cognitive effort levels, and after deep encoding with low cognitive effort. Deep encoding with higher levels of cognitive effort completely eliminated these age differences. Our findings support an environmental-compensatory account of cognitive ageing and can have important therapeutic implications.     

Criteria for the design and evaluation of cognitive architectures

Cognitive architectures are unified theories of cognition that take the form of computational formalisms. They support computational models that collectively account for large numbers of empirical regularities using small numbers of computational mechanisms. Empirical coverage and parsimony are the most prominent criteria by which architectures are designed and evaluated, but they are not the only ones. This paper considers three additional criteria that have been comparatively undertheorized. (a) Successful architectures possess subjective and intersubjective meaning, making cognition comprehensible to individual cognitive scientists and organizing groups of like-minded cognitive scientists into genuine communities. (b) Successful architectures provide idioms that structure the design and interpretation of computational models. (c) Successful architectures are strange: They make provocative, often disturbing, and ultimately compelling claims about human information processing that demand evaluation.     

Distorted Time Perception during Flow as Revealed by an Attention-Demanding Cognitive Task

Flow is the state of full attention to the task at hand. It is typically studied in daily life, as people engage deeply in activities such as art, sports, and leisure, and typically its affective characteristics are emphasized. This research investigates flow in the laboratory, focusing on its cognitive characteristics. Participants completed different versions of the Trail Making test, a measure of executive function, that made parametrically increasing demands on attention. As predicted, more participants were in the flow state when attentional demands were moderate than when they were low or high. This was revealed by conventional survey measures indicating a balance between the perceived challenge of the task and the perceived skill of participants. Critically, this was also evidenced by a new operational measure of time distortion, defined as the difference between people’s subjective estimates of their task completion times and the objective, experimenter-recorded times. Participants experienced downward time distortion—the feeling of time flying—when attentional demands were moderate. These findings demonstrate for the first time the causal role of attentional demands in inducing the flow state. They set the stage for future studies of flow and time distortion using attention-demanding cognitive tasks, and of the association between time perception and creative thinking.