Anxiety and Related Symptoms in Older Persons With Dementia: Directions for Practice

Anxiety disorders and related symptoms commonly occur in older people with cognitive impairment or dementia, significantly worsening functioning and reducing quality of life. This review of the literature outlines the extent of the problem, and focuses on current best practices in psychosocial interventions anxiety in persons with dementia. Discussion follows on promising nonpharmacological interventions that are recommended for further consideration and future research.     

Integrating Mental Health Parity for Homebound Older Adults Under the Medicare Home Health Care Benefit

Despite high rates of mental illness, very few homebound older adults receive treatment. Comorbid mental illness exacerbates physical health conditions, reduces treatment adherence, and increases dependency and medical costs. Although effective treatments exist, many home health agencies lack capacity to effectively detect and treat mental illness. This article critically analyzes barriers within the Medicare home health benefit that impede access to mental health treatment. Policy, practice, and research recommendations are made to integrate mental health parity in home health care. In particular, creative use of medical social work can improve detection and treatment of mental illness for homebound older adults.     

Justice in an uncertain world: Evidence on donations to cancer research

The paper uses information on actual and hypothetical charitable contributions to cancer research in the United Kingdom to elicit information on justice principles endorsed by donors. They face a choice between fund-raising contributions for several hereditary and lifestyle-related cancers. Donors’ choices of how much to donate to different cancers reveal how they view luck vis-a-vis risky individual choices. The estimation results reveal that donations are smaller for cancers with higher prevention rates, which is the probability that the potential cancer victim can avoid the cancer in question by some choice. We also find that provision of information on lifestyle-related causes of cancer adversely affects contributions. In contrast, information on hereditary causes has a positive effect on donations. Furthermore, a large share of donors indicated in their feedback that they chose donations to a hereditary over a lifestyle-related cancer to “punish” poor individual choices. These findings suggest that many donors lean toward choice egalitarianism, which conditions donations on the potential beneficiaries’ choices.

     

Anxiety and related symptoms in older persons with dementia: directions for practice

Anxiety disorders and related symptoms commonly occur in older people with cognitive impairment or dementia, significantly worsening functioning and reducing quality of life. This review of the literature outlines the extent of the problem, and focuses on current best practices in psychosocial interventions anxiety in persons with dementia. Discussion follows on promising nonpharmacological interventions that are recommended for further consideration and future research.     

FROM FARMERS TO MERCHANTS,CONVERSIONS AND DIASPORA: HUMAN CAPITAL AND JEWISH HISTORY

From the end of the second century CE, Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions of Jews that account for a share of the reduction from 4.5 to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the urbanization in the Abbasid empire in the Near East (8th and 9th centuries) and they did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education—a precondition for the mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora within the Muslim Empire and later to Western Europe. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm, and hence converted, as it had happened centuries earlier. (JEL: J1, J2, N3, O1, Z12, Z13)     

Schur convexity,quasi-convexity and preference for early resolution of uncertainty

This paper deals with decision makers who choose among information systems. It shows that the properties of Schur convexity and of quasi-convexity are equivalent, even when general preferences are considered. Since Schur convexity is closely related to having a willingness to accept information and since quasi-convexity is closely related to having a preference for early resolution of the uncertainty about which information system prevails, then it follows that the equivalence implies that decision makers prefer more information to less if, and only if, they prefer early resolution of uncertainty to later resolution.     

The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism and nonexpected utility: A testable approach

The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism is widely used to elicit decision makers' selling prices of lotteries. This mechanism leads, however, to the preference reversal phenomenon, which seemed to indicate nontransitive preferences. To solve this puzzle, Karni and Safra (1987) introduced a new interpretation of this mechanism based on two-stage lotteries without the independence axiom. In this article, we suggest a set of empirically testable hypotheses based on their interpretation of the mechanism. One of these tests can be used to find the utility and the probability transformation functions of an anticipated utility maximizer.This article consists of an earlier paper with a similar title (University of Toronto WP #8809) and the paper Elicitation of Certainty Equivalents and the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak Mechanism.     

A score test for monotonic trend in hazard rates for grouped survival data in stratified populations

Models for monotone trends in hazard rates for grouped survival data in stratified populations are introduced, and simple closed form score statistics for testing the significance of these trends are presented. The test statistics for some of the models understudy are shown to be independent of the assumed form of the function which relates the hazard rates to the sets of monotone scores assigned to the time intervals. The procedure is applied to test monotone trends in the recovery rates of erythematous response among skin cancer patients and controls that have been irradiated with a ultraviolent challenge.     

Dialogic directions: Conflicts in Israeli/Palestinian education for peace

In this article, I examine issues of identity, representation, multiculturalism, etc. as they relate to the Israeli context. I argue that, in order to move towards a sustainable peace in Israel, Israeli must become very critical of the dominant Western epistemologies. A radical change is needed in the way difference is perceived. Appreciating existing differences and histories in Israel can provide possibilities for enriching dialogue and occasion for collaboration.