Relationships between physical exercise and cognitive abilities in older adults.

We investigated relationship between physical exercise and the cognitive abilities of older adults. We hypothesized that the performance of vigorous exercisers would be superior to that of sedentary individuals on measures of reasoning, working memory, and reaction time (RT). We gave a series of cognitive tasks to 62 older men and women who exercised vigorously and 62 sedentary men and women. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance (ANOVAs), with age and education as covariates, indicated that the performance of the exercisers was significantly better on measures of reasoning, working memory, and RT. Between-group differences persisted when vocabulary, on which the performance of exercisers was superior, was used as third covariate. Subsequent analyses showed that neither self-rated health, medical conditions, nor medications contributed to the differences between exercise groups. Results suggest that the possible contribution of physical exercise to individual differences in cognition among older adults should be further investigated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Meta-analyses comparing theory of mind abilities of individuals with autism, individuals with mental retardation, and normally developing individuals

A deficit in theory of mind (ToM) abilities has been described as the core deficit in autism. The authors performed 3 meta-analyses, comparing ToM abilities of individuals with autism, individuals with mental retardation (MR), and normally developing individuals. Results indicated that individuals with autism and MR have impaired ToM abilities. The etiology associated with MR (i.e., Down syndrome, undifferentiated etiology) was found to be an important moderator variable. Chronological age (CA) and verbal mental age (VMA) of the normally developing children and CA, VMA, and performance mental age of individuals with MR, and type of matching between the groups were also found to be moderator variables. Discussion focuses on the implication of the findings and emphasizes the need to consider the specific etiology of comparison groups when studying abilities and impairments of individuals with autism and MR.     

Longitudinal change in cognitive performance among individuals with mild cognitive impairment.

The authors used mixed-effects growth models to examine longitudinal change in neuropsychological performance over a 4-year period among 197 individuals who were either normal or had mild cognitive impairment (MCI) at baseline. At follow-up, the participants were divided into 4 groups: (a) controls: participants who were normal at both baseline and follow-up (n = 33), (b) stables: participants with MCI whose Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB) score did not differ between the first and last evaluations (n = 22), (c) decliners: participants with MCI whose CDR-SB score declined between the first and last evaluations (n = 95), and (d) converters: participants who received a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease during the follow-up period (n = 47). Only the Episodic Memory factor showed a significantly greater rate of decline over the follow-up period among the converters. Two other factors were significantly lower in converters at baseline in comparison with other groups (the executive function factor and the general knowledge factor), but the rate of decline over time did not differ. Individuals with an APOE ε4 allele scored lower on the episodic memory and executive function factors at baseline. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in depressive self-schemata and depressive symptoms following cognitive therapy.

Examined the effects of 6–8 sessions of Beck's cognitive therapy on mildly and moderately depressed college students' depressive symptoms and depressive self-schemata. Participants were randomly assigned to either cognitive therapy (n?=?31) or no treatment (n?=?43). The Beck Depression Inventory was used to assess depressive symptoms, and self-referent judgment, recall, and reaction time (RT) measures were used to assess depressive self-schemata. Results support the efficacy of cognitive therapy in reducing depressive symptoms and depressive self-schemata, as measured by self-referent judgment and self-referent recall. The reduction in the recall of negative self-referent judgments may play a role in the outcome of cognitive therapy for depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-system therapy as an intervention for self-regulatory dysfunction in depression: A randomized comparison with cognitive therapy.

Self-system therapy (SST) is a new therapy based on regulatory focus theory (E. T. Higgins, 1997) for depressed individuals unable to pursue promotion goals effectively. The authors conducted a randomized trial comparing SST with cognitive therapy (CT) in a sample of 45 patients with a range of depressive symptoms to test 2 hypotheses: that SST would be more efficacious for depressed individuals characterized by inadequate socialization toward pursuing promotion goals and that SST would lead to greater reduction in dysphoric responses to priming of promotion goals. There was no overall difference in efficacy between treatments, but patients whose socialization history lacked an emphasis on promotion goals showed significantly greater improvement with SST. In addition, SST patients showed a greater reduction in dysphoric responses to promotion goal priming than did CT patients. The results illustrate the value of a theory-based translational approach to treatment design and selection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Romantic attachment in individuals with physical disabilities.

Objective: To examine the relationship between adult attachment style and physical disability in intimate romantic relationships. Method: Participants were 50 individuals with adult-onset spinal cord injuries (SCI) and 50 individuals with congenital disabilities (CON) living in the community. The main outcome measures were adult attachment style and dyadic relationship adjustment. Results: Participants with SCI and CON did not differ in rates of secure versus insecure attachment, and the rates of neither group differed significantly from rates reported for persons without disability. Dyadic adjustment was clearly predicted by attachment variables and differed between the participants with SCI and those with CON; individuals with SCI reported greater total dyadic adjustment. Avoidance showed a strong negative association with dyadic satisfaction, but no association was found with dyadic cohesion. Social participation variables were associated with dyadic adjustment. For instance, mobility was positively associated with dyadic satisfaction. Conclusions: Dyadic adjustment in people with disabilities, as in other groups, is affected by attachment style, but disability and social participation variables may also affect dyadic adjustment. Clinicians should consider differences in attachment styles among persons with disabilities and their implications for intimate close relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Maintenance of physical activity and dietary change following a telephone-delivered intervention.

Objective: To examine the maintenance of behavioral changes 6 months following a telephone-delivered physical activity and diet intervention. Design: Patients (n = 434) with Type 2 diabetes or hypertension were recruited from 10 primary care practices in a disadvantaged community; practices were randomized to a telephone-counseling intervention (TC; 5 practices, n = 228) or usual care (UC; 5 practices, n = 206). Main Outcome Measures: Validated, self-report measures of physical activity and diet were taken at baseline, 12 months (end-of-intervention), and 18 months (6 months postintervention completion). Results: For physical activity, the significant (p p p = .05]. Intervention effects across all health behavior outcomes were stronger for the subgroup (n = 145) adhering to the study protocol. Conclusion: Telephone-delivered interventions can promote maintenance of health behavior change. Studies with longer-term follow-up are needed, particularly to determine how intervention duration and intensity might further enhance maintenance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Computerized cognitive training for severely emotionally disturbed children with ADHD

An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of Captain's Log (a computerized cognitive-training system) on the behaviors and performance capabilities of 4 severely emotionally disturbed children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), ages 7 to 11. Behavioral scales, spectral electroencephalograms, and intelligence and performance tests were assessed pre- and posttreatment. A behavioral point system and monitoring of progress on computer tasks were used throughout treatment to evaluate ongoing improvements. There were 64 training sessions administered over a 16-week period. Outcome of treatment was determined by computer advancement, changes in behavioral points, and pre- and postmeasures. Results support the expectation that children who were most successful in the training would demonstrate the highest levels of generalization of those skills that were the focus of treatment.     

Morita therapy: Its basic features and cognitive intervention for anxiety treatment.

Describes Morita therapy as being centered around positive reinterpretation of anxiety in order to stimulate attentional, attitudinal, and behavioral change in self-preoccupied anxious clients. It promotes clients' behavioral commitment to constructive and productive activities. The shinkeishitsusho disposition is regarded as a combination of predispositional nervousness and hypersensitivity and learned and habituated cognitive patterns of anxious self-preoccupation. The aim of the therapy is not to reject the nervous disposition but to modify clients' dysfunctional cognitive and behavioral patterns to reduce unproductive self-preoccupation. The therapy promotes clients' acceptance of their predispositional nervous sensitivity and anxiousness, not as personal weaknesses but as potentially functional and constructive qualities as they are redirected toward concrete tasks and realistic action-taking. Therapeutic progress is thus initiated when clients take a positive view of their previously rejected nervous dispositions and successfully apply it to practical activities for productive purposes. Similarities and differences between Morita therapy and rational-emotive therapy are noted. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgments about estrogen replacement therapy: The role of age, cognitive abilities, and beliefs.

This study investigated age, cognitive abilities, health beliefs, and other factors in women's judgments about effective treatments for menopause. Women (N?=?102) ranging in age from 20 to 79 read a vignette about a woman facing a decision about Estrogen Replacement Therapy (ERT) and then made judgments about what should be done. Participants also completed a battery of questions pertaining to ERT and cognitive abilities. Path-analytic techniques were used to determine the role of specific cognitive abilities and the representation of menopause and its treatment in making judgments about ERT treatments. Cognitive abilities had direct effects on treatment decisions. Education affected the number of perceived options for treatment. Age and education indirectly affected treatment decisions, operating through cognitive abilities. Factors related to the mental representation of menopause had no direct effects and few indirect effects on treatment decisions. Potential mechanisms that can help older adults compensate for declines in cognitive abilities in medical decisions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal interactions with individuals presenting with and without physical disability.

Examined actual language behavior directed toward individuals with and without apparent disabilities in a standardized but naturalistic setting. Four experimenters (2 male and 2 female) requested directions to the bookstore from a total of 160 college students on a university campus. Each experimenter portrayed a student with a disability using a wheelchair and a student without a disability. Conversations were surreptitiously recorded, and verbal interaction patterns were analyzed. Significant differences were observed on all dependent variables, word counts, frequency of interrogatives, and use of locator words. Findings suggest that individuals with a disability are addressed differently than those without disabilities, and provide limited behavioral replication of research documenting differential responses of college students to persons with and without disabilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mediators of change in physical activity following an intervention in primary care: PACE

Lysozyme is able to lyse Gram-positive bacteria acting as muramidase on the peptidoglycan polymer. Gram-negative bacteria in vitro are not lysed by lysozyme. It was assumed that the peptido-glycan is protected by the outer membrane and thus that Gram-negative bacteria are not affected by lysozyme without the aid of other factors such as EDTA or complement which enable lysozyme to penetrate the outer membrane. Accidentally, Pellegrini et al. [(1992) J. Appl. Bacteriol., 72:180-187] found that lysozyme per se is able to kill some Gram-negative bacteria. On the basis of morphological and immunocytochemical findings obtained from chemically fixed bacteria, it was concluded that lysozyme does not lyse Gram-negative bacteria but affects the cytoplasm of for example, Escherichia coli, leading to its disintegration, whilst the membranes do not break down. In an attempt to clarify the action of lysozyme on E. coli, we employed cryotechniques including ultrarapid freezing, cryomicroscopy and freeze substitution, and immunolabeling. Bacteria that were immediately frozen after exposure to lysozyme remained morphologically intact. Individual bacteria plated on agar after exposure to lysozyme were mostly intact when frozen within a few seconds. However, inner and outer membranes of 80% of the bacteria were disrupted, whereas the cytoplasm of only a few bacteria showed signs of disintegration when bacteria were frozen with a delay of only 5 min of plating onto pure agar or agar containing growth medium. After a period of time of 15 min between plating onto agar and freezing, about 97% of the bacteria showed changes of disintegration of various extent. Immunolabeling showed that lysozyme binds to the outer cell membrane and may penetrate the membrane, reaching the periplasmic space and possibly the inner cell membrane. The ultrastructural findings and the results of antibacterial assays suggest that lysozyme is bactericidal for E. coli but is not able to induce disintegration. Disintegration is accomplished by changes of the environment starting at the cell membranes. The mechanism by which lysozyme penetrates the membrane, the way it acts to be bactericidal, and the way disintegration is initiated remain to be clarified.     

Long-term stability and intercorrelations of cognitive abilities in older persons.

This project studied the intercorrelations and long-term stabilities of standard Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised (WAIS—R), Wechsler Memory Scale—Revised (WMS—R), and Auditory–Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) summary indexes. It also reports similar data on the recently published Mayo Cognitive Factor Scales (MCFS), which are derivative indexes for the combined administrations of these 3 tests. These analyses challenge 2 assumptions that most psychologists make when interpreting adult cognitive tests: (a) that for cognitively normal people, performance in one cognitive domain correlates well with and predicts functioning in other cognitive domains, and (b) that in the absence of pathology, cognition is stable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time estimation abilities in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease.

Accurate time estimation abilities are assumed to play an important role in efficient performance of many daily activities. The authors investigated the role of episodic memory impairment in temporal perception using a prospective verbal time estimation paradigm. Verbal time estimations were made for filled intervals both within (i.e., 30 s) intervals. The verbal time estimates of both older adult groups, however, deviated more significantly from true time when compared with younger adult controls. In Experiment 2, 17 individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrated greater error and variability in their time estimates, but no disproportionate differences emerged between short- and long-duration estimates when compared with age-matched controls. The findings did not support a noteworthy role for episodic memory impairment in temporal perception but rather elucidated a significant effect of normal aging, as well as a detrimental effect of AD on temporal perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variability and stability in cognitive abilities are largely genetic later in life

Radiographic cephalometry has been used for the assessment of the effects of mandibular rotation and of posterior growth displacement of the temporomandibular joint on the development of the face and on overjet in 43 patients with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate between the ages of 10 and 15 years. Rotation acted mainly on vertical facial measurements and on the position of the lower jaw. The degree of posterior displacement of the temporomandibular joint exerted an influence on the position of the mandible, on the difference between the functional length of the upper and lower jaw, and on the occlusion of incisors. The direction of growth of the mandible as a whole represented the result of a combination of changes produced by the rotation of the jaw and by the degree of posterior displacement of the temporomandibular joint. The most favourable conditions for development were a combination of the neutral type of rotation with a more pronounced posterior displacement of the temporomandibular joint.     

Microemboli in cerebral circulation and alteration of cognitive abilities in patients with mechanical prosthetic heart valves

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: It has been shown previously that cerebral microemboli may occur frequently in patients with a normal mechanical heart valve (MHV) without prior history of stroke. Some arguments strongly suggest that these microemboli have a gaseous origin. In other circumstances such as extracorporeal circulation or decompression in divers, it has been demonstrated that cerebral microbubbles could lead to some deterioration in cognitive functions. Therefore, we have studied attention and memory, which are among the most impaired cognitive functions as demonstrated in previous studies, in patients with an MHV. METHODS: Three groups of 12 volunteers each were composed of patients with an MHV and embolic signals in the cerebral circulation (group 1), patients with biological prostheses (group 2), and healthy subjects (group 3). Groups were carefully matched for age and verbal intellectual abilities. For each group, a transcranial Doppler examination was performed and a set of cognitive tests assessing sustained and selective attention and episodic and working memory was administered. RESULTS: The mean embolic rate was 29 per hour in patients with an MHV. No embolus was detected in the other 2 groups. Episodic memory was significantly modified in both groups 1 and 2 compared with the control group for tasks that required high-processing resources. Working memory performance was significantly decreased in MHV patients. No between-groups differences were observed for the other parameters. CONCLUSIONS: Alteration of episodic memory can be attributed to a long-term effect of the surgical procedure. Deterioration of working memory can be related to the presence of cerebral microemboli in MHV patients.     

Specific cognitive abilities in 5- to 12-year-old twins

Eleven tests of specific cognitive abilities were administered to 108 pairs of young twins (average age of 7.6 years). Internal consistencies are high for all measures except Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices and Delayed Picture Memory. Two-month, test-retest reliabilities are also reported. The twin sample is representative in terms of both means and variances when compared to normative data from standardization samples, and twin correlations for height and weight are similar to those obtained in six other twin studies. Because all measures were highly correlated with age (average correlation with age was 0.64), scores were aged adjusted. Previous twin studies of specific cognitive abilities in adolescents and adults found genetic variance for nearly all tests. In contrast, our study of young twins yielded significant genetic influence for only 1 of the 11 measures, PIAT Reading Recognition, and suggested the possibility of genetic influence on 2 others (vocabulary and WISC-R mazes). Environmental influences seem to dominate, particularly for nonverbal measures, as children begin their education. In accord with other studies, we found that between-family environmental factors have an important influence on the development of nearly all of the measures of specific cognitive abilities. However, we found that our tests of perceptual speed and memory were substantially influenced by within-family environmental factors independent of error.     

Maintenance of locomotor abilities following Laufband (treadmill) therapy in para- and tetraplegic persons: follow-up studies

Recent reports indicate that walking capabilities in spinal cord damaged persons significantly improve--as compared to conventional rehabilitation therapy--after intensive training of aided (Laufband) treadmill-stepping. In the present report, follow up investigations on two collectives of spinal cord injured (sci) persons are described who had undergone (Laufband) treadmill therapy either during a period of renewed rehabilitation months or years after spinal cord injury (35 chronic patients) or during their first postacute rehabilitation period (41 acute patients). Among the initially chronic patients, 20 from 25 still wheelchair-bound before the onset of (Laufband) treadmill therapy, ie not capable of raising from the wheelchair and walking without help by other persons, became independent walkers after therapy. Assessment of voluntary muscle activity in resting position before and after the period of therapy had shown only small increases in most patients, indicating the involvement of motor automatisms and better utilisation of remaining muscle function during walking. Follow-up assessments performed 6 months to 6 1/2 years after discharge from the hospital revealed that the walking capabilities achieved by (Laufband) treadmill therapy in the 35 initially chronic patients were maintained in 31 persons, in three they had further improved, in only one it was reduced. These results indicate that the improvements achieved under clinical conditions can be maintained in every day life under domestic surroundings. From 41 initially acute patients, 15 had further improved and none had reduced his walking capability 6 months to 6 years after discharge from the hospital.