College students with congenital heart disease: A critical time for transition

As medical and surgical advances improve, more young adults with congenital heart disease (CHD) are attending college. This case study illustrates some of the issues that these young adults may face as they attend college and discusses the role that college health practitioners can play in easing that transition. Participants: A case of a male with CHD presenting to the college health clinic with a new onset headache. Methods: The authors discuss some of the unique challenges that college health practitioners may face when caring for students with CHD. In addition, they make recommendations on how best to care for these patients and how best to coordinate care with CHD students other care providers. Results: This student with a history of coarctation of the aorta presented with new onset headaches and was found to have high blood pressure. He was diagnosed with recurrent coarctation, underwent percutaneous treatment with stenting and quickly resumed classes. Conclusions: As more students with CHD enter college, college health providers will need to understand some of the health risks that CHD students face. In addition, understanding some of the optimal ways to coordinate care with CHD providers can ease the transition that CHD students face as they enter college.     

Measuring and Analysing the Wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous Population

According to most standard socioeconomic indicators (for example employment, income and education), Indigenous Australians tend to have worse outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Most objective health indicators including life expectancy also tend to be worse. Traditionally, these two domains and associated objective indicators have been the focus of research, government policy and evaluation. There has been less research, however, on differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in subjective measures of wellbeing. In this paper, I attempt to answer three related research questions on Indigenous wellbeing—What is the average level of emotional wellbeing and satisfaction with life for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population of Australia? How do the differences between the two populations change once other characteristics have been controlled for? What are the factors associated with emotional wellbeing within the Indigenous population? With regards to the first two questions, Indigenous Australians are less likely to report frequent periods of happiness and more likely to report periods of extreme sadness than the non-Indigenous population. Surprisingly, given these results for emotional wellbeing, a major finding from the analysis was that Indigenous Australians were significantly more likely to report above-average satisfaction with their life. The main finding with regards to the third question is that using retrospective measures, those in remote areas report higher levels of happiness than those in non-remote areas. This is different to the results for socioeconomic status and objective measures of health found elsewhere and has important implications for government policy in Australia.     

More on the ontological status of autism and double empathy

This response to Milton’s recent article on the ontological status of autism and double empathy also explores, through the lens of ‘double empathy’ and ‘theory of mind’, the issues of relationality and interaction that researchers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psychology hardly acknowledge. I go on to consider Wittgenstein’s criteriological view of mind, propose a synthesis of theory to describe autism, and suggest that public criteria of a non-autistic ontology enable many autistic people to eventually develop the understanding of other (non-autistic) minds that, in turn, enables them to survive, and even thrive.     

The Inability of Self-affirmations to Decrease Defensive Bias Toward an Alcohol-Related Risk Message Among High-Risk College Students

Abstract

Objective: To examine the efficacy of a self-affirmation task in deterring college alcohol misuse and the importance of preexisting beliefs in predicting subsequent behavior change. Participants: Heavy-drinking undergraduates (N = 110) participated during the 2011–2012 academic year. Methods: Participants were randomized to complete an affirmation or control task before reading an alcohol risk message. Alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors were assessed. Participants completed a 2-week online follow-up assessing alcohol-related behaviors. Results: Both groups reported increased perceived problem importance, but neither group displayed changes in personal risk. Follow-up assessment revealed similar, significant declines in peak consumption in both groups, with no significant between-group differences. Preexisting beliefs accounted for 5% to 10% of variance in drinking outcomes. Conclusions: An affirmation task does not seem to decrease defensive processing or alter high-risk drinking behaviors among college students and should not be utilized in lieu of more effective strategies.     

The Effects of Multitasking on Operations Scheduling

This study considers a typical scheduling environment that is influenced by the behavioral phenomenon of multitasking. Under multitasking, the processing of a selected job suffers from interruption by other jobs that are available but unfinished. This situation arises in a wide variety of applications; for example, administration, manufacturing, and process and project management. Several classical solution methods for scheduling problems no longer apply in the presence of multitasking. The solvability of any scheduling problem under multitasking is no easier than that of the corresponding classical problem. We develop optimal algorithms for some fundamental and practical single machine scheduling problems with multitasking. For other problems, we show that they are computationally intractable, even though in some cases the corresponding problem in classical scheduling is efficiently solvable. We also study the cost increase and value gained due to multitasking. This analysis informs companies about how much it would be worthwhile to invest in measures to reduce or encourage multitasking.     

Ranking of the Most Prolific Authors,Universities, and Organizations in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management

ABSTRACT

Over the years, reviews in behavior analysis have sought to identify the most prolific researchers and institutions. The goal of these reviews was to offer one resource for behavior analysts to identify experts in behavior analysis and quality graduate programs. However, most of these reviews omitted the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM), making the results less relevant to those who work in organizational behavior management. The purpose of this review was to extend previous findings and identify the most published researchers, academic institutions, and organizations in JOBM since its inception. Furthermore, we calculated the citation rate (per year, per article) for each of the top 20 most published authors. The results, implications, and opportunities for further analysis are discussed.