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Cognitive stimulation (CS) is a psychological intervention for people with dementia aimed at maintaining cognitive functioning. CS provided by caregivers would allow long-term maintenance without greatly increasing demands on health services, but raises questions concerning treatment fidelity and acceptability, which were investigated in this study. Caregivers of home-living people with dementia were trained to provide CS activities to their relative with dementia. Recordings of intervention sessions and analysis of training manuals suggested adequate delivery of the intervention. Dyads continued with the activities after caregiver training had stopped. In addition, presentation of the activities without supervision from a health care professional had no detrimental effect on well-being in the caregiver or the person with dementia. The majority of caregivers indicated that, even though they experienced some burden from doing the activities with their relative, they themselves had also benefited from the intervention and intended to continue with some of the activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although abnormalities in emotion recognition during a depressed episode have frequently been reported in patients with depression, less is known about the stability of these abnormalities. To examine the stability of emotion recognition abnormalities, this longitudinal study assessed patients with unipolar depression on three separate occasions at 3-monthly intervals. Recognition of sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, happy and neutral facial expressions was assessed in a matching task and a labelling task. Patients performed as well as matched healthy controls on the matching task. On the labelling task, patients showed higher accuracy and higher response bias than controls for sad expressions only, which remained stable over a 6-month interval. Over the same period, symptom severity, as measured with the Beck Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, decreased significantly in the patient group. Furthermore, labelling performance for sad expressions was not associated with symptom severity or with changes in severity over time. This stable bias for sad expressions might signal a vulnerability factor for depression, as proposed by cognitive theories of depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Changes in emotional and social behaviour are relatively common following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Impairments in recognising the emotional state of others may underlie some of the problems in social relationships that these patients experience. The few previous studies examining emotion recognition in TBI typically assessed patients once, long after the onset of brain injury, making it difficult to distinguish the direct effect of brain injury from the effects of environmental changes. This study examined 30 patients with TBI shortly after brain injury and 32 orthopaedic control patients on their recognition of emotions expressed in the face and the voice using discrimination and labelling tasks. These patients were followed up 1 year later to examine the longitudinal development of emotion recognition deficits. TBI patients were found to be impaired on emotion recognition compared to the control patients both early after injury and 1 year later. The fact that impairments in emotion recognition were evident early after TBI and no evidence of recovery over time was found, suggests a direct effect of brain injury. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Functional abnormalities in emotion-related brain systems have been implicated in depression, and depressed patients may therefore attribute emotional valence to stimuli that are normally interpreted as emotionally neutral. The present study examined this hypothesis by comparing recognition of different facial expressions in patients with moderate to severe depression. Eighteen depressed patients and 18 matched healthy controls made a forced-choice response to briefly presented neutral, happy, and sad faces. Recognition accuracy and response time were measured. Twelve patients were retested after showing signs of symptom remission. Depressed patients and controls were equally accurate at recognizing happy and sad faces. Controls also recognized neutral faces as accurately as happy and sad faces, but depressed patients recognized neutral faces less accurately than either happy or sad faces. Depressed patients were also particularly slow to recognize neutral faces. The impairment in processing of neutral faces was still evident after symptom remission. Error analyses showed that depressed patients attributed not only sadness, but also happiness (in remission), to neutral faces. These results suggest that, unlike healthy subjects, depression-prone individuals do not seem to perceive neutral faces as unambiguous signals of emotional neutrality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract Background Nursing home residents with dementia show a rapid decline in their ability to perform activities of daily living. This decline is linked to a greater care dependency, which is associated with a reduced quality of life. Care dependency is influenced by multiple predictors, yet current research often focuses on the contribution of a single or a small number of predictors of care dependency. Objectives To examine the contribution of multiple predictors in predicting care dependency. Design The present study analyzed baseline data from a 6-month double-parallel randomized controlled trial which examined the effect of three physical activity interventions on multiple outcomes. Setting This study was conducted in eleven nursing homes in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands. Participants In total, 85 nursing home residents with moderate to severe dementia were included in the study, of which 75 were included for analysis. Methods Predictors considered were cognitive, physical, neuropsychiatric, demographic, and disease related factors. The outcome measure care dependency was assessed with the Care Dependency Scale and the Erlangen Test of Activities of Daily Living. Linear multilevel regression analyses were used to identify the most important predictors of care dependency. Results Apathy, physical endurance, number of comorbidities, and global cognition were significant predictors of care dependency. The model explained 66% of the variance in care dependency. Global cognition was a significant predictor of ability to perform activities of daily living and explained 60% percent of its variance. Conclusion The present study shows that multiple predictors (i.e., apathy, cognitive and physical abilities, and disease-related factors) contribute to predicting care dependency. Future research could focus on the effectiveness of multifactorial interventions to maintain the highest possible level of independence in nursing home residents with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In contrast to the visual spatial domain, the effect of attention on sensory processing and stimulus appearance in temporal selection tasks is still controversial. Using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) procedure, we examined whether the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a color cue and a motion target affects the appearance of the latter. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded simultaneously allowed us to test whether a change in the targets'' appearance is associated with a modulation of the sensory ERP components. In the experimental condition ‘SOA’, the temporal interval between the cue and the target was varied between 0 and 300 ms. In a control condition, the physical appearance of the motion target was varied (level of coherence: 25–100%) while holding the cue–target SOA constant (300 ms). In trials when the participant detected the target motion, his/her task was to report the strength of the perceived motion on a 5-point scale. In both conditions, the mean rating of the target''s appearance increased monotonically with increasing SOA and the level of coherence, respectively. The psychophysical ratings were associated with an increase of a negative deflection about 200 ms (N200) related to the sensory processing of visual motion. The physical variation of motion coherence and the variation of the cue–target SOA affected the N200 response in similar fashion. These results indicate that sensory processing is also modulated by attentional resources in temporal selection tasks which – in turn – affect the appearance of the relevant target stimulus. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There is growing evidence that motion perception is modulated by visual selective attention. In the ‘attention-induced motion blindness’ paradigm the detection of coherent motion in a random dot kinematogram (RDK) is impaired in a rapid serial presentation task [Sahraie, A., Milders, M., & Niedeggen, M. (2001). Attention induced motion blindness. Vision Research, 41, 1613–1617]. The effect depends on irrelevant motion episodes (distractors) prior to the target. In this study, we show that both the number and timing of distractors affect detection performance, allowing for implications on the build-up and release of inhibition. Furthermore, we rule out the possibility that subjects falsely classify targets as distractors due to uncertainty of temporal order. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent psychophysical studies have revealed attentional modulation of visual motion perception and interest now focuses on the locus of this interaction. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) we examined whether transient motion blindness evoked in a dual task [Vision Res. 41 (2001) 1613–1617] is related to a selection process occurring at the stage of sensory processing or at a higher level. In our paradigm, a particular change of colour of the fixation point cued the subject to detect a brief episode of coherent random dot motion embedded in a succession of episodes of incoherent motion. Detection of the coherent motion was significantly impaired when it occurred simultaneously with the colour cue, and recovered over the subsequent 300 ms. This functional relationship was reflected in the amplitude of a sensory, motion-evoked component (N200), and in a late positive complex (P300). However, a direct comparison of ERPs produced by stimuli that were detected or missed revealed differences only in the P300 component. These results indicate that attenuation of sensory motion processing does not account for this transient, attention-induced deficit in visual motion perception. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]