An environmental scan of impacts and interventions for women with methamphetamine use in pregnancy and their children.

BACKGROUND: Indigenous women are overrepresented among people who use (PWU) methamphetamine (MA) due to colonialism and intergenerational trauma. Prenatal methamphetamine exposure (PME) is increasing as the number of PWUMA of childbearing age grows. Yet impacts of MA in pregnancy and effective interventions are not yet well understood. OBJECTIVE: We conducted an environmental scan of published and grey literature (2010-2020) to determine effects of MA use in pregnancy for mothers and their offspring, effective interventions and implications for Indigenous women. SEARCH STRATEGY: A strategic search of Ovid Medline, Embase, ProQuest-Public Health and CINAHL databases identified academic literature, while Google and ProQuest-Public Health identified grey literature. SELECTION CRITERIA: Article selection was based on titles, abstracts and keywords. The time frame captured recent MA composition and excluded literature impacted by coronavirus disease 2019. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Data extracted from 80 articles identified 463 results related to 210 outcomes, and seven interventions. Analysis focused on six categories: maternal, neonatal/infant, cognitive, behavioral, neurological, and interventions. MAIN RESULTS: Maternal outcomes were more congruent than child outcomes. The most prevalent outcomes were general neonatal/infant outcomes. CONCLUSION: A lack of Indigenous-specific research on PME and interventions highlights a need for future research that incorporates relevant historical and sociocultural contexts.

Cognitive and personality factors in the prediction of health behaviors: an examination of total, direct and indirect effects.

Conscientiousness reliably predicts health behavioral patterns, and the same is true of executive function. However, few investigations have examined their relative predictive power, or probed for possible indirect effects and age-moderated effects. In the current study, we examined the predictive validity of all Big Five personality traits, executive function and IQ in relation to an index of health behaviors in an age-stratified community sample. Results indicated that conscientiousness, neuroticism and executive function were significant predictors of health behavior in age-corrected regression analyses. Using bootstrapping methods, we found that executive function partially explains the relationship between both personality dimensions and health behavior. Moderational analyses revealed that effects of personality traits on health behavior were uniformly modest across the age span, whereas the predictive power of executive function became more amplified with increasing age. Both conscientiousness and neuroticism predict health behavior patterns, though their magnitude of association is significantly weaker than executive function and some of their effects are explained by executive function.

Executive function moderates the intention-behavior link for physical activity and dietary behavior.

Dominant theories of health behavior posit that social-cognitive and conative variables are sufficient to explain health behavior tendencies. The current studies challenge this assumption in two ways: (1) by demonstrating that unique variance in health protective behavior is predictable by knowing about individual differences in executive functioning, and (2) by demonstrating that executive function moderates the association between intention and behavior. In Studies 1 and 2, participants completed a computer-based task of executive function (Go/NoGo task) and articulated 1-week behavioral intentions for physical activity (Study 1) and dietary behavior (Study 2). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that executive function predicts unique variance in both behaviors, and strongly moderates the association between behavioral intention and behavioral performance. Together behavioral intention and executive function explain more variance in health protective behavior than 'rational actor' models that have been widely adopted and disseminated.

An encoding-complex approach to numerical cognition in Chinese-English bilinguals.

We present a model of the cognitive architecture of basic numerical skills in adult Chinese-English bilinguals. The model is based on data reported by Campbell, Kanz, and Xue (1999) and combines Dehaene and Cohen's triple-code theory with Campbell and Clark's encoding-complex approach to modeling number processing. Participants were required to name, add or multiply Arabic or Mandarin numerals and to respond in English or Chinese. They also performed magnitude comparisons on pairs of Arabic or Mandarin numerals. The proposed model of their performance on this set of tasks assumes 1) that number processing is modular with respect to representational code (e.g., visual, visuo-spatial, verbal) rather than with respect to numerical function, 2) task-specific communication between representational codes is interactive rather than additive, and 3) memory for arithmetic facts is at least partially language-based and our Chinese-English bilinguals possessed both Chinese and English-language number-fact representations. We provide new analyses of the arithmetic data and a review of research on the role of language in simple arithmetic to substantiate our claims about linguistic codes for number-fact memory.