The past as a resource for the bereaved: nostalgia predicts declines in distress.

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks. In a longitudinal study, we examined whether dispositional nostalgia predicted reductions in distress associated with the death of a loved one. Undergraduate students (N = 133) provided information regarding their loss (time elapsed since loss, expectedness) and levels of initial grief, nostalgia, and distress (hyperarousal, intrusion, avoidance) at three time points over a one-month period (Times 2 and 3 occurred one week and one month after the initial session, respectively). Individuals experiencing higher nostalgia reported a decrease in intrusive thoughts across time, whereas those experiencing lower nostalgia reported no change in intrusive thoughts across time. Hyperarousal (physical symptoms, negative feelings) decreased across time among individuals with higher initial grief who experienced greater nostalgia, but increased across time among those with higher initial grief who experienced lesser nostalgia. No changes occurred in avoidance. Nostalgia can palliate bereavement.

Overview of the testing and assessment of effects of microbial pesticides on bees: strengths, challenges and perspectives.

Currently, there is a growing interest in developing biopesticides and increasing their share in the plant protection market as sustainable tools in integrated pest management (IPM). Therefore, it is important that regulatory requirements are consistent and thorough in consideration of biopesticides' unique properties. While microbial pesticides generally have a lower risk profile, they present special challenges in non-target organism testing and risk assessment since, in contrast to chemical pesticides, their modes of action include infectivity and pathogenicity rather than toxicity alone. For this reason, non-target organism testing guidelines designed for conventional chemical pesticides are not necessarily directly applicable to microbial pesticides. Many stakeholders have recognised the need for improvements in the guidance available for testing microbial pesticides with honey bees, particularly given the increasing interest in development and registration of microbial pesticides and concerns over risks to pollinators. This paper provides an overview of the challenges with testing and assessment of the effects of microbial pesticides on honey bees (Apis mellifera), which have served as a surrogate for both Apis and non-Apis bees, and provides a foundation toward developing improved testing methods.

The role of religious affiliation in Christian and unaffiliated bereaved emerging adults' use of religious coping.

Though research on bereavement has grown, few studies have focused on emerging adults. To add to the literature, the authors administered the RCOPE to a sample of bereaved college students (analyzed sample N = 748) and explored the relationship between self-reported religious affiliation and religious coping strategies used and endorsed as "most helpful." Results highlight the rich topography of bereavement previously unexamined in understudied populations (i.e., emerging adults, religiously unaffiliated). Specifically, the Christians/affiliated used "negative" religious coping strategies most often, yet identified "positive" strategies as "most helpful," whereas the unaffiliated instead used "positive" strategies most often and identified "negative" strategies as "most helpful."

Interactive effects of pesticide exposure and pathogen infection on bee health - a critical analysis.

Bees are fundamentally important for pollination services and declines in populations could have significant economic and environmental implications. Pesticide exposure and pathogen infection are recognised as potential stressors impacting upon bee populations and recently there has been a surge in research on pesticide-disease interactions to reflect environmentally realistic scenarios better. We critically analyse the findings on pesticide-disease interactions, including effects on the survival, pathogen loads and immunity of bees, and assess the suitability of various endpoints to inform our mechanistic understanding of these interactions. We show that pesticide exposure and pathogen infection have not yet been found to interact to affect worker survival under field-realistic scenarios. Colony-level implications of pesticide effects on Nosema infections, viral loads and honey bee immunity remain unclear as these effects have been observed in a laboratory setting only using a small range of pesticide exposures, generally exceeding those likely to occur in the natural environment, and assessing a highly selected series of immune-related endpoints. Future research priorities include the need for a better understanding of pesticide effects on the antimicrobial peptide (AMP) component of an individual's immune response and on social defence behaviours. Interactions between pesticide exposure and bacterial and fungal infections have yet to be addressed. The paucity of studies in non-Apis bee species is a further major knowledge gap.

Development of a Short-Form of the RCOPE for Use with Bereaved College Students.

Bereavement is being increasingly recognized as a key issue in college populations (Balk in Mortality 2:207-220, 1997; Balk et al. in Death Stud 34:459-468, 2010). However, there is currently a dearth of research on the impact that the loss of a loved one has on college students and the ways that college students cope during the grieving process. This lack of research, particularly among younger groups, is problematic as researchers have shown that emerging adults experience a surprisingly high number of losses and are an at-risk group for poor post-loss outcomes (Servaty-Seib and Taub 2010; Servaty-Seib and Hamilton 2006; Arnett in Am Psychol 55(5):469, 2000). Religion is a common way that individuals cope with bereavement (Frantz et al. in Pastor Psychol 44(3):151-163, 1996) and may also be commonly used by college students to manage everyday stress (Merrill et al. 2009). The RCOPE (Pargament et al. in J Clin Psychol 56(4):519-543, 2000; J Health Psychol 9:713-730, 2004) is a frequently used measure of religious coping that has recently been evaluated for use with a bereaved undergraduate population. Lord and Gramling (2014) examined the factor structure of the RCOPE and concluded that overlap between the positive and negative religious coping subscales when used with a bereaved undergraduate sample detracted from the predictive utility of the instrument. The researchers provided evidence for the use of a new 2-factor, 39-item version of the RCOPE with the bereaved college student population. The current study replicated Lord and Gramling (2014) with a large follow-up sample of bereaved undergraduates. Participants (N = 677) consisted of individuals who had lost a loved one within the past 2 years, had a mean age of 19.1, and were predominantly female (62%) underclassmen (84% freshman or sophomore status). A majority of participants (68%) were identified as Christian. Exploratory factor analyses closely mimicked the results of the previous study, and the number of items was further reduced in order to provide a briefer version of the scale for use in future research. Hierarchical regression models demonstrated discriminate, convergent, and predictive validity of the instrument.

Depression reduces perceptual sensitivity for positive words and pictures.

There is evidence of maladaptive attentional biases for lexical information (e.g., Atchley, Ilardi, & Enloe, 2003; Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007) and for pictographic stimuli (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004) among patients with depression. The current research looks for depressotypic processing biases among depressed out-patients and non-clinical controls, using both verbal and pictorial stimuli. A d' measure (sensitivity index) was used to examine each participant's perceptual sensitivity threshold. Never-depressed controls evidenced a detection bias for positive picture stimuli, while depressed participants had no such bias. With verbal stimuli, depressed individuals showed specific decrements in the detection of positive person-referent words (WINNER), but not with positive non-person-referent words (SUNSHINE) or with negative words. Never-depressed participants showed no such differences across word types. In the current study, depression is characterised both by an absence of the normal positivistic biases seen in individuals without mood disorders (consistent with McCabe & Gotlib, 1995), and by a specific reduction in sensitivity for person-referent positive information that might be inconsistent with depressotypic self-schemas.

Relations among linguistic and cognitive skills and spoken word recognition in adults with cochlear implants.

This study examined spoken word recognition in adults with cochlear implants (CIs) to determine the extent to which linguistic and cognitive abilities predict variability in speech-perception performance. Both a traditional consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC)-repetition measure and a gated-word recognition measure (F. Grosjean, 1996) were used. Stimuli in the gated-word-recognition task varied in neighborhood density. Adults with CIs repeated CVC words less accurately than did age-matched adults with normal hearing sensitivity (NH). In addition, adults with CIs required more acoustic information to recognize gated words than did adults with NH. Neighborhood density had a smaller influence on gated-word recognition by adults with CIs than on recognition by adults with NH. With the exception of 1 outlying participant, standardized, norm-referenced measures of cognitive and linguistic abilities were not correlated with word-recognition measures. Taken together, these results do not support the hypothesis that cognitive and linguistic abilities predict variability in speech-perception performance in a heterogeneous group of adults with CIs. Findings are discussed in light of the potential role of auditory perception in mediating relations among cognitive and linguistic skill and spoken word recognition.

Patterns of phoneme perception errors by listeners with cochlear implants as a function of overall speech perception ability.

Many studies have noted great variability in speech perception ability among postlingually deafened adults with cochlear implants. This study examined phoneme misperceptions for 30 cochlear implant listeners using either the Nucleus-22 or Clarion version 1.2 device to examine whether listeners with better overall speech perception differed qualitatively from poorer listeners in their perception of vowel and consonant features. In the first analysis, simple regressions were used to predict the mean percent-correct scores for consonants and vowels for the better group of listeners from those of the poorer group. A strong relationship between the two groups was found for consonant identification, and a weak, nonsignificant relationship was found for vowel identification. In the second analysis, it was found that less information was transmitted for consonant and vowel features to the poorer listeners than to the better listeners; however, the pattern of information transmission was similar across groups. Taken together, results suggest that the performance difference between the two groups is primarily quantitative. The results underscore the importance of examining individuals' perception of individual phoneme features when attempting to relate speech perception to other predictor variables.