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Line Guénette,1–3 Sophie Lauzier,1–3 Laurence Guillaumie,2–4 Gabriel Giguère,1 Jean-Pierre Grégoire,1–3 Jocelyne Moisan1–3 1Faculty of Pharmacy, Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada; 2Chair on Adherence to Treatments, Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada; 3CHU de Québec Research Center, Population Health and Optimal Practices Research Unit, Quebec City, QC, Canada; 4Faculty of Nursing, Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada Purpose: The purpose of this study was to elicit patients’ beliefs about taking their oral antidiabetic drugs (OADs) as prescribed to inform the development of sound adherence-enhancing interventions.Methods: A qualitative study was performed. Adults with type 2 diabetes who had been taking an OAD for >3 months were solicited to participate in one of six focus groups. Discussions were facilitated using a structured guide designed to gather beliefs related to important constructs of the theory of planned behavior. Four coders using this theory as the theoretical framework analyzed the videotaped discussions.Results: Forty-five adults participated. The most frequently mentioned advantages for OAD-taking as prescribed were to avoid long-term complications and to control glycemia. Family members were perceived as positively influential. Carrying the OAD at all times, having the OAD in sight, and having a routine were important facilitating factors. Being away from home, not accepting the disease, and not having confidence in the physician’s prescription were major barriers to OAD-taking.Conclusion: This study elicited several beliefs regarding OAD-taking behavior. Awareness of these beliefs may help clinicians adjust their interventions in view of their patients’ beliefs. Moreover, this knowledge is crucial to the planning, development, and evaluation of interventions that aim to improve medication adherence. Keywords: type 2 diabetes, medication adherence, theory of planned behavior, focus groups

Guénette L, Lauzier S, Guillaumie L, Giguère G, Grégoire JP, Moisan J. Patient Prefer Adherence. 2015;9:413–420.On page 414, Data collection and variables section, 1st paragraph, “We used a modified version of the validated French version18 of the 4-item Morisky medication adherence scale (MMAS-4).19” should have been “We used a modified version of the validated French version18 of a 4-item self-report medication adherence scale (SR-4).19”Read the original article

Psychotic disorders can be severely enabling, and functional recovery is often difficult to achieve. Admission to a psychiatric unit represents a key opportunity to implement strategies that will improve functional outcomes. In the current literature, there is a lack of consensus on which factors influence functional recovery. Therefore, the present longitudinal cohort study aimed to identify factors associated with functional trajectories following hospital admission for acute psychosis. A sample of 453 individuals with acute psychosis was extracted from the Signature Biobank database. Participants were followed for up to a year following admission. Various clinical indicators were documented over time. Functional trajectories were calculated based on the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0. Three groups were identified: "improving", "stable", and "worsening" function. Individuals with a more severe symptomatic presentation at baseline were found to have better functional improve more over time. Over time, individuals in the "improving" and "stable" groups had significant improvements in their psychiatric symptoms. Finally, individuals following a "worsening" functional trajectory initially improved in terms of psychotic symptoms, but it did not persist over time. These results highlight the importance of studying function as a key component of recovery rather than solely focusing on relapse prevention., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no direct conflicts of interest. AD is the holder of a senior researcher salary award from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec (FRQS). MB's doctoral studies are funded by the FRQS as well. SP is the holder of the Eli Lilly Chair on schizophrenia research. The authors report no financial relationships with commercial interests. The authors received no funding for this project., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This article studies the effects of local dependence within the items of the first section of the LS/CMI on its reliability. Analysis were done to identify the dependent items namely through their correlations before and after Rasch modeling. Seven items were thus discarded, deemed dependent and redundant, and Cronbach's alpha was calculated with all 43 items and then with the 36 items deemed independent. Test information and predictive validity were also compared. Removing the seven redundant items did not seem to have major effects on the reliability of the LS/CMI or the psychometric information it provided, and no tangible effects were observed on its predictive validity. The reliability of an instrument should be assessed with items that contribute each in its own way. However, it is hazardous to report the reliability of an instrument known to be multidimensional with means meant to be used with unidimensional instruments., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Some decisions, such as predicting the winner of a baseball game, are challenging in part because outcomes are probabilistic. When making such decisions, one view is that humans stochastically and selectively retrieve a small set of relevant memories that provides evidence for competing options. We show that optimal performance at test is impossible when retrieving information in this fashion, no matter how extensive training is, because limited retrieval introduces noise into the decision process that cannot be overcome. One implication is that people should be more accurate in predicting future events when trained on idealized rather than on the actual distributions of items. In other words, we predict the best way to convey information to people is to present it in a distorted, idealized form. Idealization of training distributions is predicted to reduce the harmful noise induced by immutable bottlenecks in people's memory retrieval processes. In contrast, machine learning systems that selectively weight (i.e., retrieve) all training examples at test should not benefit from idealization. These conjectures are strongly supported by several studies and supporting analyses. Unlike machine systems, people's test performance on a target distribution is higher when they are trained on an idealized version of the distribution rather than on the actual target distribution. Optimal machine classifiers modified to selectively and stochastically sample from memory match the pattern of human performance. These results suggest firm limits on human rationality and have broad implications for how to train humans tasked with important classification decisions, such as radiologists, baggage screeners, intelligence analysts, and gamblers.

Previous research reveals that older adults sometimes show enhanced processing of emotionally positive stimuli relative to negative stimuli, but that this positivity bias reverses to become a negativity bias when cognitive control resources are less available. In this study, we test the hypothesis that emotionally positive feedback will attenuate well-established age-related deficits in rule learning whereas emotionally negative feedback will amplify age deficits-but that this pattern will reverse when the task involves a high cognitive load. Experiment 1 used emotional face feedback and revealed an interaction among age, valence of the feedback, and task load. When the task placed minimal load on cognitive control resources, happy-face feedback attenuated age-related deficits in initial rule learning and angry-face feedback led to age-related deficits in initial rule learning and set shifting. However, when the task placed a high load on cognitive control resources, we found that angry-face feedback attenuated age-related deficits in initial rule learning and set shifting whereas happy-face feedback led to age-related deficits in initial rule learning and set shifting. Experiment 2 used less emotional point feedback and revealed age-related deficits in initial rule learning and set shifting under low and high cognitive load for point-gain and point-loss conditions. The research presented here demonstrates that emotional feedback can attenuate age-related learning deficits-but only positive feedback for tasks with a low cognitive load and negative feedback for tasks with high cognitive load., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Available studies on categorization in autism indicate possibly intact category formation, performed through atypical processes. Category learning was investigated in 16 high-functioning autistic and 16 IQ-matched nonautistic participants, using a category structure that could generate a conflict between the application of a rule and exemplar memory. Same-different and matching-to-sample tasks allowed us to verify discrimination abilities for the stimuli to be used in category learning. Participants were then trained to distinguish between two categories of imaginary animals, using categorization tests early in the training and at the end (160 trials). A recognition test followed, in order to evaluate explicit exemplar memory. Similar discrimination performance was found in control tasks for both groups. For the categorization task, autistic participants did not use any identifiable strategy early in the training, but used strategies similar to those of the nonautistic participants by the end, with the same level of accuracy. Memory for the exemplars was poor in both groups. Our findings confirm that categorization may be successfully performed by autistics, but may necessitate longer exposure to material, as the top-down use of rules may be only secondary to a guessing strategy in autistics.

Star polymers derived from cholic acid with poly(allyl glycidyl ether) arms have been prepared via anionic polymerization, yielding polymers with well-defined molecular weight and low polydispersity. The double bonds of the allyl groups on the polymer are used to introduce either amine or carboxylic acid groups to obtain amphiphilic polymers with cationic and anionic groups, respectively. The polymers can aggregate in water above a certain critical concentration, which was found to vary with the arm length of the star polymers. The star polymers bearing amino groups showed interesting thermosensitivity, which also depends on the pH of the media. A simple acetylation of the amine groups can sharpen the transition and vary the cloud point from 15 to 48 degrees C, depending on the degree of acetylation. Such polymers offer useful alternatives to the existing thermosensitive polymers.

In this paper, we present a new recurrent bidirectional model that encompasses correlational, competitive and topological model properties. The simultaneous use of many classes of network behaviors allows for the unsupervised learning/categorization of perceptual patterns (through input compression) and the concurrent encoding of proximities in a multidimensional space. All of these operations are achieved within a common learning operation, and using a single set of defining properties. It is shown that the model can learn categories by developing prototype representations strictly from exposition to specific exemplars. Moreover, because the model is recurrent, it can reconstruct perfect outputs from incomplete and noisy patterns. Empirical exploration of the model's properties and performance shows that its ability for adequate clustering stems from: (1) properly distributing connection weights, and (2) producing a weight space with a low dispersion level (or higher density). In addition, since the model uses a sparse representation (k-winners), the size of topological neighborhood can be fixed, and no longer requires a decrease through time as was the case with classic self-organizing feature maps. Since the model's learning and transmission parameters are independent from learning trials, the model can develop stable fixed points in a constrained topological architecture, while being flexible enough to learn novel patterns.

Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) arms are grafted onto a cholic acid core via anionic polymerization, yielding star-shaped polymers with a unique asymmetric structure with facial amphiphilicity. Well-defined cholic acid-PEG(4) stars (polydispersity index, ca. 1.05) with tunable molar masses (ca. 1000-13,000) were obtained and characterized by the use of size exclusion chromatography, MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, NMR spectroscopy, and thermal analysis. The asymmetric star polymers were found to aggregate differently from cholic acid salt. The critical aggregation concentrations of the star polymers were determined by surface tension measurements, and spherical aggregates of the polymers with different PEG chain lengths were observed by transmission electron microscopy using the freeze-fracture etching technique. The elongated aggregates formed by the sodium salt of cholic acid were also observed. The hydrodynamic diameters of the aggregates were also measured using dynamic light scattering technique. The formation of aggregates makes them interesting systems as potential drug carriers.

S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991) have shown that exemplar memory can affect categorization even when participants are provided with a classification rule. G. Regehr and L. R. Brooks (1993) argued that stimuli must be individuated for such effects to occur. In this study, the authors further analyze the conditions that yield exemplar effects in this rule application paradigm. The results of Experiments 1-3 show that interchangeable attributes, which are not part of the rule, influence categorization only when attention is explicitly drawn on them. Experiment 4 shows that exemplar effects can occur in an incidental learning condition, whether stimulus individuation is preserved or not. The authors conclude that the influence of exemplar learning in rule-driven categorization stems from the attributes specified in the rule or in the instructions, not from the stimulus gestalts.