Health related quality of life in adult cancer survivors: Importance of social and emotional support

BackgroundAdult cancer survivors (ACS) are at increased risk for developing various comorbid conditions and having poor health-related quality of life (HRQOL) when compared to adults with no history of cancer. The effect of social and emotional support on HRQOL among ACS is not fully elucidated. The purpose of this study was to understand the role of social and emotional support on HRQOL in ACS and to examine if the association between social and emotional support and HRQOL is modified by gender, time since cancer diagnosis, or marital status.MethodsData for this study were obtained from the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Statistical analysis was based on ACS with complete data (n = 23,939) on all variables considered. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to model the association between social and emotional support and indicators of HRQOL (i.e., general health, physical health, mental health, and activity limitation). To examine if gender, marital status, or the number of years since cancer diagnosis modify the association, separate stratified analyses were conducted.ResultsWhen compared to ACS who reported that they Rarely/Never received social and emotional support, those who reported that they Always received were 32 % less likely to report Fair/Poor General health, 23 % less likely to report frequent unhealthy days of Physical health, 73 % less likely to report frequent unhealthy days of Mental health and 38 % less likely to report frequent unhealthy days of Activity limitation. Social and emotional support was positively associated with all four domains of HRQOL among ACS who were female, unmarried, or greater than 5 years since cancer diagnosis, while this positive association was evident only with one or two domains of HRQOL among their corresponding counterparts (i.e., male, married, less than 5 years since diagnosis).ConclusionsSocial and emotional support is an important factor directly related to a better HRQOL, but it is modified by gender, marital status, and time since diagnosis. Findings from this study should inform health care providers about the importance of a support system for ACS in improving their overall quality of life.     

Psychiatric Programs: Their Medical Integration

The basic premise that psychiatry and medicine are one and the same discipline is advanced. Patients present with symptoms: sometimes largely the result of structural change, sometimes largely the result of emotional perturbation, but most frequently a mixture of both. The physician can never do his job satisfactorily without attention to the emotional problems of his patient, which is essentially the subject matter of psychiatry. He must have adequate training during his medical school years in order to recognize and handle emotional problems. The psychiatrically oriented general practitioner and the psychiatrist, who live in the community, are most valuable mental health resources and must have treatment facilities in the general hospital. Furthermore, hospital and medical insurance plans must be devised that will not penalize either doctor or patient when mental illness is recognized and dealt with in the most appropriate manner.     

A GOOD DEATH: WHO BEST TO BRING IT?*

The author supports the right of persons to terminate their lives when it would be in their "best interests" to do so. He considers cases in which persons are unable to kill themselves and request euthanasia or have requested it beforehand in a living will. Crisp rejects relatives, friends, and most physicians as the agents to carry out the request because of the emotional trauma to the agents and the damage to the image of physicians as savers of lives. He proposes that the practice of euthanasia be part of "telostrics," an area of medical specialization in the care of the terminally ill, and that these "telostricians" should perform voluntary euthanasia.     

Time Perception and Dynamics of Facial Expressions of Emotions

Two experiments were run to examine the effects of dynamic displays of facial expressions of emotions on time judgments. The participants were given a temporal bisection task with emotional facial expressions presented in a dynamic or a static display. Two emotional facial expressions and a neutral expression were tested and compared. Each of the emotional expressions had the same affective valence (unpleasant), but one was high-arousing (expressing anger) and the other low-arousing (expressing sadness). Our results showed that time judgments are highly sensitive to movements in facial expressions and the emotions expressed. Indeed, longer perceived durations were found in response to the dynamic faces and the high-arousing emotional expressions compared to the static faces and low-arousing expressions. In addition, the facial movements amplified the effect of emotions on time perception. Dynamic facial expressions are thus interesting tools for examining variations in temporal judgments in different social contexts.     

Personality Factors Associated with Frequency of Marijuana Use

A number of personality and style-of-life variables were found to be significantly related to frequency of marijuana use, in a study of 1215 students on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus. Compared with the non-user, in composite the typical marijuana-user is somewhat depressed, more inclined to doubt his emotional adjustment. He likes to take risks and seeks stimulation; he has strong political opinions; he believes in punishment for law-breakers, but he is more likely to question it. He is not religious; he is less well identified with parents, and he has a lower opinion of their marital adjustment. He is not decisive about career goals; he is a fine arts or liberal arts major. He uses alcohol, sometimes in combination with marijuana; he first tried marijuana after entering college and is not increasing his use. The typical marijuana-user in the sample uses it infrequently, twice a month or less often, and is not likely to be using other drugs. The frequent user probably uses other drugs.     

Introspectiveness and adolescent symptom reporting

A new measure of introspectiveness--the tendency to devote diffuse attention to thoughts and feelings about the self--was used to investigate adolescent symptom reporting. Introspectiveness was correlated with psychological distress (r = .40) and with physical symptoms (r = .27) in a random sample of college freshmen, and remained the strongest correlate of distress and symptoms when controlling for a variety of other measures. Women, Jews, and certain Hispanic groups were higher on introspectiveness than other students. An unanticipated, but possibly significant, result was that economic discontinuities and discontinuities involving significant others had markedly different relationships with health. Strong associations between perceptions of parental characteristics, adolescent introspectiveness, and health suggested the importance of socialization processes for understanding distress and symptoms. Finally, measures of emotional sensitivity and time spent alone were associated with introspectiveness and symptom reporting. Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of introspectiveness and its correlates for understanding the processes leading to adolescent symptom reporting.     

Locus ceruleus: the regulation of hemato-encephalic barrier function normally and under emotional stress

To study the role of locus ceruleus in maintaining the blood-brain barrier function in conditions of emotional stress, the blood-brain barrier permeability was estimated after locus ceruleus damaging with DSP4 (N-2-chloroethyl-N-ethyl-2-bromobenzylamine). The importance of locus ceruleus for the integrity of blood-brain barrier functions in control animals and especially in rats exposed to emotional stress was revealed. The data obtained prove the homeostatic role of locus ceruleus, which is the most prominent in conditions of emotional stress.     

Acoustic correlates of individual features of functional and emotional states

General theoretic and applied studies on the effects of emotional and functional states on the acoustic parameters of human speech were analyzed. In most studies, the number of frequency, time, and power characteristics of vocalization were used as the most informative acoustic correlates of emotional and functional states. As a rule, sthenic states lead to the increase, and asthenic states induce the decrease in pitch, formant, and intensity. The relationship between acoustic parameters of speech and emotional and functional states was found, which depended on individual features of the subject and appeared as diverse changes in time and power parameters. For more accurate identification of psychoemotional state of an individual, the study of general tonal phonemes that are common and easily recognizable in different languages may be helpful. The research of acoustic correlates of individual speech parameters is a promising approach to diagnosis of functional and emotional states of a person using the vocalization parameters.     

The effect of emotion and personality on olfactory perception

It is well established that both the emotional tone of sensory stimuli and the personality characteristics of an individual can bias sensory perception. What has largely been unexplored is whether the current emotional state of an individual has a similar effect, and how it works together with other factors. Here we carry out a comprehensive study to examine how olfactory perception is affected by the emotional tone of the stimuli, and the personality and current emotional state of the individual. Subjects reported experiencing happiness, sadness, negativity/hostility and neutrality when exposed to corresponding emotionally themed video clips, and in each case, smelled a suprathreshold pleasant, an unpleasant and a neutral odorant. The time taken for the subject to detect each odorant and the olfactory intensity were recorded. We found that women detected the pleasant odorant faster than the neutral one. In addition, personality modulated reaction time and olfactory intensity, such that neurotic and anxious individuals were selectively biased toward affective rather than neutral odorants. Finally, current emotional state augmented intensity in men but not in women, and differentially influenced the response time. These findings provided new insights into the effects of emotion and personality on olfactory perception.     

Linnaeus,animals and man*

Linnaeus is often undervalued as a zoologist. His importance lies not only in the introduction of binomial nomenclature and his Systema Naturae. As a systematist he divided the insects into the groups, Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera, Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera and Aptera. His programme, as expressed in his Methodus in Systema Naturae (1st ed.) is astounding in its biological manysidedness. He was before his time in many respects: he wrote and lectured upon bird migration, biological control of insects with their parasites or predators, protective mimicry, the struggle by all organisms for survival, contagious diseases as well as fermentation due to small living particles. He was the first to call attention to the close relationship between man and the anthropoid apes.     

Sensitivity towards Fear of Electric Shock in Passive Threat Situations

Human judgment and decision-making (JDM) requires an assessment of different choice options. While traditional theories of choice argue that cognitive processes are the main driver to reach a decision, growing evidence highlights the importance of emotion in decision-making. Following these findings, it appears relevant to understand how individuals asses the attractiveness or riskiness of a situation in terms of emotional processes. The following study aims at a better understanding of the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying threat sensitivity by measuring skin conductance responses (SCRs) in passive threat situations. While previous studies demonstrate the role of magnitude on emotional body reactions preceding an outcome, this study focuses on probability. In order to analyze emotional body reactions preceding negative events with varying probability of occurrence, we have our participants play a two-stage card game. The first stage of the card game reveals the probability of receiving an unpleasant electric shock. The second stage applies the electric shock with the previously announced probability. For the analysis, we focus on the time interval between the first and second stage. We observe a linear relation between SCRs in anticipation of receiving an electric shock and shock probability. This finding indicates that SCRs are able to code the likelihood of negative events. We outline how this coding function of SCRs during the anticipation of negative events might add to an understanding of human JDM.     

Analyzing the dynamics of emotional scene sequence using recurrent neuro-fuzzy network

In this paper, we propose a new framework to analyze the temporal dynamics of the emotional stimuli. For this framework, both electroencephalography signal and visual information are of great importance. The fusion of visual information with brain signals allows us to capture the users’ emotional state. Thus we adopt previously proposed fuzzy-GIST as emotional feature to summarize the emotional feedback. In order to model the dynamics of the emotional stimuli sequence, we develop a recurrent neuro-fuzzy network for modeling the dynamic events of emotional dimensions including valence and arousal. It can incorporate human expertise by IF-THEN fuzzy rule while recurrent connections allow the fuzzy rules of network to see its own previous output. The results show that such a framework can interact with human subjects and generate arbitrary emotional sequences after learning the dynamics of an emotional sequence with enough number of samples.     

Down-regulation of negative emotional processing by transcranial direct current stimulation: effects of personality characteristics

Evidence from neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies indicates that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a core region in emotional processing, particularly during down-regulation of negative emotional conditions. However, emotional regulation is a process subject to major inter-individual differences, some of which may be explained by personality traits. In the present study we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left DLPFC to investigate whether transiently increasing the activity of this region resulted in changes in the ratings of positive, neutral and negative emotional pictures. Results revealed that anodal, but not cathodal, tDCS reduced the perceived degree of emotional valence for negative stimuli, possibly due to an enhancement of cognitive control of emotional expression. We also aimed to determine whether personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) might condition the impact of tDCS. We found that individuals with higher scores on the introversion personality dimension were more permeable than extraverts to the modulatory effects of the stimulation. The present study underlines the role of the left DLPFC in emotional regulation, and stresses the importance of considering individual personality characteristics as a relevant variable, although replication is needed given the limited sample size of our study.     

Medical Care of the Alcoholic Patient

Alcoholism is an illness that constitutes a major health problem at all levels of society. The physician should accept his responsibility to prevent it and to care for the alcoholic. If he knows that one of his patients is drinking immoderately, he should warn him of the outlook. A patient''s acquired dependence on alcohol may be overt, or revealed only on examination for organic disease or emotional disturbance. The diagnosis may be accepted reluctantly, or denied despite positive evidence, but the patient should be persuaded to give up drinking. He may require psychiatric help or advice from a social worker. He may be so ill as to require treatment in hospital, and hospitals must recognize the urgency of such admissions. Discharge from hospital does not end treatment, for alcoholism is a chronic disease, requiring long-term planning, persistent follow-up and enduring sympathy by the physician, who must always be as available to his alcoholic patient as he is to his patient with diabetes, epilepsy or cardiac disease.     

Humans rely on the same rules to assess emotional valence and intensity in conspecific and dog vocalizations

Humans excel at assessing conspecific emotional valence and intensity, based solely on non-verbal vocal bursts that are also common in other mammals. It is not known, however, whether human listeners rely on similar acoustic cues to assess emotional content in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations, and which acoustical parameters affect their performance. Here, for the first time, we directly compared the emotional valence and intensity perception of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations. We revealed similar relationships between acoustic features and emotional valence and intensity ratings of human and dog vocalizations: those with shorter call lengths were rated as more positive, whereas those with a higher pitch were rated as more intense. Our findings demonstrate that humans rate conspecific emotional vocalizations along basic acoustic rules, and that they apply similar rules when processing dog vocal expressions. This suggests that humans may utilize similar mental mechanisms for recognizing human and heterospecific vocal emotions.     

The Role of Nature and Nurture for Individual Differences in Primary Emotional Systems: Evidence from a Twin Study

The present study investigated for the first time the relative importance of genetics and environment on individual differences in primary emotionality as measured with the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) by means of a twin-sibling study design. In N = 795 participants (n = 303 monozygotic twins, n = 172 dizygotic twins and n = 267 non-twin full siblings), moderate to strong influences of genetics on individual differences in these emotional systems are observed. Lowest heritability estimates are presented for the SEEKING system (33%) and highest for the PLAY system (69%). Further, multivariate genetic modeling was applied to the data showing that associations among the six ANPS scales were influences by both, a genetic as well as an environmental overlap between them. In sum, the study underlines the usefulness of the ANPS for biologically oriented personality psychology research.     

How visual stimulus effects the time perception? The evidence from time perception of emotional videos

Time perception is defined as a subjective judgment on the elapsed time of an event. It can change according to both external and internal factors. There are two main paradigms of time perception; retrospective time perception (RTP) and prospective time perception (PTP). Two paradigms differ from each other according to whether the subject has knowledge on the importance of passage of time in the given task. Since RTP paradigm studies are harder to conduct, studies on RTP paradigm is far fewer than studies on PTP. Thus in the current study, both RTP and PTP paradigms are investigated. Also, time perception is discussed in relation to internal clock model and cognitive load. Emotional motion videos are used to create cognitive load and manipulate internal clock. Results showed the effect of emotion on time perception. Another major finding is that shorter videos are perceived longer whereas longer videos are perceived shorter as in accordance with Vierordt’s Law. However, there was no difference between RTP and PTP paradigms. These results indicate that emotional videos change our internal clock while a number of changes in a motion video create cognitive load causing disturbance of time perception.     

Wilhelm Ludwig and his contributions to population genetics

This article reviews the life and work of the German biologist Wilhelm Ludwig (1901-1959), whose contributions to population genetics have been largely ignored. Ludwig's work was a rich tapestry of population biology, spanning investigations into population growth, biological asymmetries, sex ratio, and paternity analysis. He was ahead of his time in explicitly combining the theory of population ecology and population genetics. His classic paper on annidation showed the possibility of population differentiation in the face of gene flow, and his early studies demonstrated the importance of selection in evolutionary change. Much of his work spanned the period of the Second World War in Germany, and interesting questions remain about his life during this turbulent period.     

Cellular processes in the amygdala: gates to emotional memory?

The amygdala is considered a core structure of the so-called limbic system and has been implicated in a variety of functions, including emotional interpretation of sensory information, emotional arousal, emotional memory, fear and anxiety, and related clinical disorders. Despite the clinical and functional importance of the amygdala, it is only recently that some general principles of intra-amygdaloid mechanisms of signal processing that are relevant for fear behavior and memory have emerged from behavioral, anatomical, electrophysiological, and neurochemical studies performed in the amygdala of various mammalian species in vivo, in situ and in vitro.