Self-care independence in children with neurological disorders: An interactional model of adaptive demands and executive dysfunction.

Objective: To describe a neuropsychological assessment model that proposes executive functioning as a key moderator in the development of self-care independence. Setting: Inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation facilities. Participants: Transition-age youths with congenital and acquired neurological disorders. Intervention: Transition to the adaptive roles and expectations of adulthood can be challenging for adolescents with neurological disorders and other chronic medical conditions. These individuals frequently encounter functional problems related to additional time requirements, new life skill demands, and increased need for organization and planning. In addition, the neuropsychological consequences of these disorders often include deficits in motor speed and coordination as well as executive control (including planning, organization, and working memory). Consideration of the integrity of executive function skills and the presence of atypical adaptive demands is crucial during planning for transition of individuals into self-care independence and development of an approach to assessment and intervention. Conclusions: Rehabilitation psychologists have the potential to improve the quality of life of adolescents with neurological disorders as they transition into adulthood by considering the "executive burden" posed to the individuals by various combinations of executive dysfunction and atypical adaptive demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development and preliminary evaluation of a pediatric measure of community integration: The Pediatric Community Participation Questionnaire (PCPQ).

Objective: To develop and evaluate a new pediatric measure of community integration: the Pediatric Community Participation Questionnaire (PCPQ). Participants: 105 youths with physical disabilities. Measures: In addition to the PCPQ, demographic and disability-related questions and the Functional Disability Inventory (FDI) were administered. Results: The PCPQ demonstrated convergent validity through its high association with functional ability, discriminant validity through its ability to discriminate between ambulatory and nonambulatory participants, and excellent internal consistency. Conclusions: Community participation, an important component of positive overall development, may be particularly important for youths with physical disabilities. The findings from this study provide preliminary support for the validity and reliability of the PCPQ, supporting its use as a measure of community participation with this population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Computational Techniques and Shear Band Development for Cylindrical and Spherical Penetrometers in Strain-Softening Clay

This paper addresses numerical simulation of deep penetration of full-flow penetrometers in strain-softening, rate-dependent, cohesive soil, and the observed phenomenon of periodic shear bands. The analysis was conducted using a large deformation finite element approach, modifying the simple elastic–perfectly plastic Tresca soil model to allow strain-softening, with strain-rate dependency being incorporated in order to avoid spurious mesh dependency. Parametric analyses were carried out varying the strain-softening parameters (hence the relative brittleness of the soil), the rigidity index of the soil, and the strain-rate parameter. Increased brittleness of the soil led to reduction in the penetration resistance, but also to increasingly significant oscillations in the resistance–penetration responses. The oscillation was found to result from periodic shear bands evolving cyclically ahead of the advancing cylindrical and spherical penetrometers. Analyses with different values of rigidity index confirmed further that the periodic shear bands were a real material phenomenon, rather than due to errors in numerical simulation. Similar phenomena have been observed for continuous flow problems in granular materials. However, rising strain-rate dependency tended to suppress the oscillations.     

Fraternity and sorority involvement, social influences, and alcohol use among college students: A prospective examination.

This study used latent growth curve modeling to investigate whether the effects of gender and Greek involvement on alcohol use and problems over the first 2 years of college are best characterized by selection, socialization, or reciprocal influence processes. Three social influences (alcohol offers, social modeling, and perceived norms) were examined as potential mediators of these effects. Undergraduate participants (N = 388) completed self-report measures prior to enrollment and in the spring of their freshmen and sophomore years. Male gender and involvement in the Greek system were associated with greater alcohol use and problems prior to college. Both gender and Greek involvement significantly predicted increases in alcohol use and problems over the first 2 years of college. Cross-domain analyses provided strong support for a mediational role of each of the social influence constructs on alcohol use and problems prior to matriculation, and prematriculation social modeling and alcohol offers mediated relations between Greek involvement and changes in alcohol use over time. Findings suggest that students, particularly men, who affiliate with Greek organizations constitute an at-risk group prior to entering college, suggesting the need for selected interventions with this population, which should take place before or during the pledging process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of continuing care adherence on environmental risks, substance use, and substance-related problems following adolescent residential treatment.

The effectiveness of adolescent treatment to reduce substance use has been demonstrated by a number of different literature reviews, yet longer term outcome studies have suggested that continued alcohol and other drug use is common. Participation in continuing care services and reductions in environmental risk factors (e.g., peer substance use or alcohol or drug use in the home) have both been found to be associated with improved posttreatment substance use. The authors conducted Path analysis to examine the experimental direct effect of the Assertive Continuing Care Protocol (S. H. Godley, M. D. Godley, & M. L. Dennis, 2001) on general continuing care adherence following residential treatment and the protocol's indirect effect (via general continuing care adherence) on social and environmental risk factors, as well as subsequent substance use and substance-related problems. Supporting previous findings, the final model indicates that greater adherence to continuing care is associated with reductions in environmental risk, which in turn is associated with reduced adolescent substance use and substance-related problems 9 months after discharge from residential treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concurrent brief versus intensive smoking intervention during alcohol dependence treatment.

Alcohol dependent smokers (N=118) enrolled in an intensive outpatient substance abuse treatment program were randomized to a concurrent brief or intensive smoking cessation intervention. Brief treatment consisted of a 15-min counseling session with 5 min of follow-up. Intensive intervention consisted of three 1-hr counseling sessions plus 8 weeks of nicotine patch therapy. The cigarette abstinence rate, verified by breath carbon monoxide, was significantly higher for the intensive treatment group (27.5%) versus the rate for the brief treatment group (6.6%) at 1 month after the quit date but not at 6 months, when abstinence rates fell to 9.1% for the intensive treatment group and 2.1% for the brief treatment group. Smoking treatment assignment did not significantly impact alcohol outcomes. Although intensive smoking treatment was associated with higher rates of short-term tobacco abstinence, other, perhaps more intensive, smoking interventions are needed to produce lasting smoking cessation in alcohol dependent smokers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of yohimbine on the extinction of conditioned fear: A role for context.

Six experiments with rat subjects examined the effect of yohimbine, an alpha-2 adrenergic autoreceptor antagonist, on the extinction of conditioned fear to a tone. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that systemic administration of yohimbine (1.0 mg/kg) facilitated a long-term decrease in freezing after extinction, and this depended on pairing drug administration with extinction training. However, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that yohimbine did not eradicate the original fear learning: Freezing was renewed when the tone was tested outside of the extinction context. Experiments 5 and 6 found that the contextually specific attenuation of fear produced by yohimbine transferred to another extinguished conditional stimulus (CS) and not to a nonextinguished CS. The results suggest that yohimbine, when administered in the presence of a neutral context, creates a form of inhibition in that context that allows that specific context to reduce fear of an extinguished CS. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impaired processing of local geometric features during navigation in a water maze following hippocampal lesions in rats.

Hippocampal damage impairs navigation with respect to information provided by the shape of an arena. Recent evidence has suggested that normal rats use local geometric information, as opposed to a global geometric representation, to navigate to a correct corner. One implication of this pattern of results is that hippocampal lesions may impair processing of 1 or more of the local geometric features of an environment. The authors therefore investigated the effects of hippocampal cell loss in rats on navigation to a hidden goal with respect to a variety of local cues in an environment with a distinctive shape. Rats with lesions of the hippocampus were impaired in discriminating a right-angled corner from its mirror image. However, they were able to use cues provided by an acute-angled corner (Experiment 1) or a local polarizing cue (Experiment 2). In contrast, lesioned rats were impaired in discriminating long versus short walls (Experiment 3). Results indicate that the hippocampus plays a role in disambiguating locations by processing (metric) information related to the distance between corners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kinetics of Phosphorus Release and Uptake in a Membrane-Assisted Biological Phosphorus Removal Process

A long-term comparative study on the kinetics of enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) was carried out in pilot scale membrane-assisted and conventional biological phosphorus removal processes, by monitoring system performance, phosphorus mass balances, and maximum specific rates in off-line batch tests. The two systems exhibited similar performance in the removal of soluble phosphorus (P) from the influent wastewater, in the specific P release observed in the anaerobic zone, and in the maximum specific P release and volatile fatty acid (VFA) uptake rates. However, when the VFA in the influent was limiting, the conventional EBPR (CEBPR) process performed significantly better than the membrane (MEBPR) counterpart, and this behavior was also reflected in the kinetics of P release. Denitrifying dephosphatation was observed to be significant in both processes during periods of satisfactory P removal. When the aerobic recycle ratio was reduced to a minimum level, the anoxic P uptake activity in the CEBPR sludge was lower than that of the MEBPR sludge. Finally, the biomass decay rates of the two sludge types were estimated to be comparable, with significant reduction of the decay under unaerated conditions.     

Multisensory recognition of actively explored objects.

Shape recognition can be achieved through vision or touch, raising the issue of how this information is shared across modalities. Here we provide a short review of previous findings on cross-modal object recognition and we provide new empirical data on multisensory recognition of actively explored objects. It was previously shown that, similar to vision, haptic recognition of objects fixed in space is orientation specific and that cross-modal object recognition performance was relatively efficient when these views of the objects were matched across the sensory modalities (Newell, Ernst, Tjan, & Bülthoff, 2001). For actively explored (i.e., spatially unconstrained) objects, we now found a cost in cross-modal relative to within-modal recognition performance. At first, this may seem to be in contrast to findings by Newell et al. (2001). However, a detailed video analysis of the visual and haptic exploration behaviour during learning and recognition revealed that one view of the objects was predominantly explored relative to all others. Thus, active visual and haptic exploration is not balanced across object views. The cost in recognition performance across modalities for actively explored objects could be attributed to the fact that the predominantly learned object view was not appropriately matched between learning and recognition test in the cross-modal conditions. Thus, it seems that participants naturally adopt an exploration strategy during visual and haptic object learning that involves constraining the orientation of the objects. Although this strategy ensures good within-modal performance, it is not optimal for achieving the best recognition performance across modalities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)