Search

Objective: Family visits with residents at long-term care (LTC) facilities have been restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective was to examine what communication methods, other than in-person visits, during the pandemic were associated with greater positive and lower negative emotional experiences for LTC residents and their family members and friends.Design: Cross-sectional.Setting: Nationally targeted online survey.Participants: One hundred sixty-one community-dwelling adults who had a family member or friend in a LTC facility.Measurements: The Positive and Negative Affect Scale was used to assess participant's own emotions and perceived resident emotions during the pandemic. Questions were asked about nine communication methods other than physical visits (e.g., phone, video-conference, e-mail, and letters) in terms of frequency of use during the pandemic. Sociodemographics, resident health, and facility factors were assessed and used as covariates where indicated.Results: During the pandemic, greater phone frequency was associated with less participant negative emotions (β = -0.17). Greater e-mail frequency was associated with more perceived resident positive emotions (β = 0.28). Greater frequency of letters delivered by staff was associated with more participant negative emotions (β = 0.23). Greater frequency of letters delivered by staff and the postal service were associated with more perceived resident negative emotions (β = 0.28; β = 0.34, respectively).Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of synchronous, familiar methods of communication like the phone and email between families and LTC residents to maintain their emotional well-being when in-person visits are restricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated the specific contribution of creativity, as assessed by the five creativity subtests of the Aurora Battery, to future academic performance, independently of past academic performance. Specifically, in a sample of 1165 7th grade students (UK Year 8, 48.3% female) we first looked at whether the factorial structure of the five subtests was better explained by a domain-general (i.e., the g -factor of creativity) or domain-specific (i.e., verbal, numerical, figural) model of creativity. Then, in a subsample of 315 students (46.3% females) we estimated a structural equation model to explore the mediating role of creativity between students' performance on different academic tests, specifically the Key Stage 2 test (KS2), taken almost two years before Aurora, and the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams (GCSE), taken almost three and a half years after Aurora. Results showed that Aurora's subtest scores were better represented by a single latent factor (a general creativity factor) than multiple (domain-specific) creativity factors. Furthermore, this creativity factor predicted individuals' performance on the GCSE four years after taking Aurora, even after controlling for previous academic performance. In addition, creativity mediated the relationship between the KS2 and GCSE. These results suggest that a domain-general form of creativity contributes to future academic performance above and beyond other academics skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Associative learning has been identified as one of several non-linguistic processes involved in reading acquisition. However, it has not been established whether it is an independent process that contributes to reading performance on its own or whether it is a process that is embedded in other linguistic skills (e.g., phonological awareness or phonological memory) and, therefore, contributing to reading performance indirectly. Research has shown that performance on tasks assessing associative learning, e.g., paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks, is lower in children with specific reading difficulties compared to typical readers. We explored the differential associations of two distinct verbal–visual PAL tasks (the Bala Bbala Graphogame, BBG, and a Foreign Language Learning Task, FLLT) with reading skills (word reading and pseudo-word decoding), controlling for phonological awareness, rapid naming, and letter and digit span in children at risk for reading disabilities and their typically developing peers. Our study sample consisted of 110 children living in rural Zambia, ranging in age from 7 to 18 years old (48.1% female). Multivariate analyses of covariance were used to explore the group differences in reading performance. Repeated-measures ANCOVA was used to examine children's learning across the PAL tasks. The differential relationships between both PAL tasks and reading performance were explored via structural equation modeling. The main result was that the children at risk for reading difficulties had lower performance on both PAL tasks. The BBG was a significant predictor for both word reading and pseudo-word decoding, whereas the FLLT—only for word reading. Performance on the FLLT partially mediated the association between phonological awareness and word reading. These results illustrate the partial independence of associative learning from other reading-related skills; the specifics of this relationship vary based on the type of PAL task administered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in computational psychiatry have identified latent cognitive and perceptual states that predispose to psychotic symptoms. Behavioral data fit to Bayesian models have demonstrated an overreliance on priors (i.e., prior overweighting) during perception in select samples of individuals with hallucinations, corresponding to increased precision of prior expectations over incoming sensory evidence. However, the clinical utility of this observation depends on the extent to which it reflects static symptom risk or current symptom state. To determine whether task performance and estimated prior weighting relate to specific elements of symptom expression, a large, heterogeneous, and deeply phenotyped sample of hallucinators (n = 249) and nonhallucinators (n = 209) performed the conditioned hallucination (CH) task. We found that CH rates predicted stable measures of hallucination status (i.e., peak frequency). However, CH rates were more sensitive to hallucination state (i.e., recent frequency), significantly correlating with recent hallucination severity and driven by heightened reliance on past experiences (priors). To further test the sensitivity of CH rate and prior weighting to symptom severity, a subset of participants with hallucinations (n = 40) performed a repeated-measures version of the CH task. Changes in both CH frequency and prior weighting varied with changes in auditory hallucination frequency on follow-up. These results indicate that CH rate and prior overweighting are state markers of hallucination status, potentially useful in tracking disease development and treatment response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]