Browsing by discipline "Psykologi"

Negative child-rearing environment has been associated with substance use in previous studies. Although, temperament has been shown to moderate the effects of parenting, only few studies have taken this into account when examining the relationship between family environment and substance use. Participants (n=1878; 56,8 % women) were selected from the longitudinal Young Finns study that began in 1980. The association between temperament trait emotionality and three child rearing attitudes dimensions (i.e., tolerance, significance and discipline) with alcohol consumption and smoking were examined using multinomial and logistic regression analysis. Higher emotionality and negative child rearing attitudes were associated with increased risk of smoking. Interaction between emotionality and tolerance was found: negative tolerance was associated with increased risk of drinking among boys who were high in emotionality. The results indicate that parenting has far-reaching consequences for substance use. The effect is partly moderated by emotionality, which helps to understand why people in the same kind of growth environment drift into different pathways.

Goals: The emphatizing-systemizing theory (E-S theory) states that emphatizing and systemizing helps us understand gender differences in normal population and the causes of autism spectrum disorders. Emphatizing is the capacity to recognize and predict other people's emotions and thoughts and to respond appropriately. Systemizing is the drive to analyze nonagentive systems and create if-then rules in order to predict their behavior. In general, women have a stronger drive to emphatize and men have a stronger drive to systemize. Extreme male brain theory (EMB Theory) is an extension to the E-S theory. According to the EMB Theory, autism is a result of the extreme of the normal male cognitive profile. In recent years, it has been noticed that autistic traits can also be found in normal population. One might expect that the relationship between emphatizing, systemizing and autistic traits would also be found in healthy individuals. However, not much research has been done on this subject and the results have been somewhat mixed. There have also been some weaknesses in the methods used in previous research. In this paper, I examine the relationship between emphatizing, systemizing and autistic traits in normal population using a wide variety of measurements. The hypothesis is that low emphatizing and high systemizing are related to the amount of autistic traits. Method: 3084 participants took part in an online study. The study consisted of questionnaires and computerized tests. Results and Discussion: Low emphatizing and high systemizing were related to the amount of autistic traits. The negative relationship between emphatizing and autistic traits was bigger than the relationship between systemizing and autistic traits. Tests that measured emphatizing and systemizing abilities correlated only weakly to the amount of autistic traits. Low emphatizing was related to autism's social difficulties. High systemizing was related to the interest toward numbers and patterns associated with autism. It seems that emphatizing and systemizing are linked to different parts of the autistic phenotype.

Supervisors’ role in implementing pay systems has become important part of pay systems that aim at supporting the strategy of the organization. This thesis studied supervisor’s role in implementing individual performance-based pay. The study focused on the processes by which supervisors can affect the functionality of a pay system. A pay system is well functioning when the employees and supervisors are satisfied with it and the effects are in line with the objectives for the system. Strategic pay is implemented through performance management processes where goals of the work are aligned with the strategy of the organization. The objective of the research was to create a structural model of the processes by which supervisors could improve the functionality of a pay system. The model is based on theories of knowledge of pay, meaning of pay and procedural justice. To test the model, six hypotheses were generated to study whether knowledge of pay, meaning of pay and procedural justice mediate the relations between supervisor’s role and activity and functionality of the pay system. The data for the study was collected with a survey (N=109) in one Finnish organization from the public sector. The data was analysed by structural equation modelling (LISREL 8.53). The results show that supervisors can improve the functionality of the pay system by performance management process, which is based on mutual trust and open communication. The role of the supervisor is to give feedback and tell how performance is connected to the pay raises. When this is done the pay system is experienced as meaningful, the employees are satisfied with it and it induces effects aspired. In addition, fair procedures in performance appraisal are important for employees to be satisfied with their pay. It is discussed whether power to make decisions and the responsibilities of the supervisors are in balance in this organization.

Aims. There is a growing body of research indicating that childhood experiences interact with genetic vulnerabilities in the development of depression. Parent-child relationship quality has been shown to have a critical role in the development of depression later in life. Moreover, research has shown that the quality of parenting can also have long-term and persistent effects on various neurobiological systems, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Indeed, the impaired function of HPA axis has been the most consistently found association with depression. This makes genes related to HPA axis regulation of particular interest to researchers. One possible candidate gene is FK506 binding protein 51 (FKBP5) gene, which has been shown to interact with adverse childhood experiences in predicting future risk of depression. This study examines whether perceived quality of parent-child relationship predicts depressive symptoms in adulthood and whether this association is moderated by the FKBP5 polymorphisms. Methods. This study is part of The Helsinki Birth Cohort Study. Total of 1 667 subjects completed a psychological questionnaire in 2004, including the Beck Depression Inventory (21 item, BDI) and the Parental Bonding Instrument (25 item, PBI). This study utilised the three factor structure of PBI; care, denial of psychological autonomy and encouragement of behavioral freedom, which were measured separately for mother and father. The study looked at three FKBP5 gene polymorphisms: rs1360780, rs9394309 and rs9470080 extracted from the genome-wide data genotyped with modified Illumina 610k array. The study utilised two models 1 and 2; model 1 adjusted for age and gender and additionally model 2 adjusted for childhood and adulthood socioeconomic status (SES) as well as separation experiences. Results and conclusions. As hypothesised and in line with previous studies the quality of parenting predicted depressive symptoms in adulthood. Participants, who perceived having received more care and encouragement of behavioral freedom reported fewer depressive symptoms. Whereas denial of psychological autonomy resulted in reporting more depressive symptoms. None of the polymorphisms predicted depressive symptoms. More importantly, this is the first study to show that FKBP5 polymorphisms modify the relationship between perceived mother-child relationship and depressive symptoms. Among participants with two minor alleles, perceived lack of maternal care and maternal denial of psychological autonomy were most strongly associated with more depressive symptoms. Participants with one minor allele had similar results. Whereas among participants with two major alleles, perceived parenting had a smaller effect on the amount of depressive symptoms. These findings indicate that in addition to adverse experiences and traumas, also deficiencies in parenting can predispose to depression depending on the amount of minor alleles in FKBP5 polymorphisms.

Background and purpose: Newborn visual alertness (NVA) and orientation (NVO) are established clinical markers of brain health and maturation. They are thought to reflect the early form of attentional alerting and orienting networks and form the base for the development of more complex cognitive and executive functions that emerge later in infancy and early childhood. To examine this hypothesis, the present study aimed to find out if NVA and NVO are associated with attention regulation at the age of 7 months. Methods: This study was a part of two larger ongoing research projects. A total of 54 full term low risk infants were included in the study. The infants' NVA and NVO were assessed as part of a regular neurological assessment of a newborn infant. Later, at the age of seven months, the infants participated in an eye-tracking study. Four alternating stimuli (fearful, happy and neutral face and noise stimulus) were presented as the central stimulus and a geometrical shape (black and white balls or checker board) as the overlapping peripheral target. The gaze shift latencies from central stimulus to the peripheral target and the effect of the central stimulus' content on the gaze shift latencies were analyzed and then compared between the different NVA and NVO groups. Results: NVA: Infants with good and intermediate NVA shifted gaze fast and showed the bias towards a fearful face. Infants who looked only briefly at the moving target as newborns (poor NVA) were also fast but had no bias towards fearful faces. NVO: Infants with good NVO were also fast in shifting gaze and fearful faces modified the gaze behavior. Infants who followed moving targets only with gaze without a head turn as newborns (intermediate NVO) were slower than the other infants in gaze shifting at the age of seven months. Additionally, these infants did not show the bias towards fearful faces. Infants with poor NVO were not different from the infants with the best NVO showing fast and flexible gaze behavior. Conclusions: These results suggest a continuum of gaze behavior from the newborn period to the late infancy. Good alertness and orientation were associated with good attentional and perceptual competence at the age of seven months. Weak alertness was associated with fast and less flexible gaze behavior than in the other infants at the age of seven months. Following with eye movements only was associated with slow and less flexible gaze behavior than in the other infants. The differences in the gaze behavior of the infants who followed only with the gaze or had a poor alertness when compared to the other infants can reflect typical but slower maturation of an infant or more persistent difference in the development.

Objective: Low-grade inflammation underlies a wide variety of long term diseases. Serum level of C-reactive protein (CRP) is a widely used biomarker of inflammation. Its associations with different risk factors of inflammation e.g. psychological stress, depression and health behavior are well known. Previous research suggests that personality is a potential factor underlying several of these risk factors of inflammation. According to Cloninger's model of temperament and character, temperament trait harm avoidance is related to vulnerability for psychological stress and character trait self-directedness is related to maturation of personality and various aspects of well-being. However little is known about the relationship between these personality traits and inflammation. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether harm avoidance and self-directedness was able to predict changes on serum levels of CRP in prospective 11-year follow-up study design. Methods: The present study included 1191 participants (aged 35-50 years) from the longitudinal and population-based Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns -study (CRYFS) started in 1980. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between CRP and personality dimensions harm avoidance and self-directedness assessed by Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) in 2001 and 2012. CRP levels from 2012 assessment were used as a dependent variable and mean scores from 2001 and 2012 studies of harm avoidance and self-directedness were used as independent variables in analysis. CRP levels from 2001 were used for baseline adjustment of CRP. Other covariates adjusted in analysis were assessed in 2012. Results and conclusions: The results showed that only self-directedness was weakly associated with serum levels of CRP, partly contrary to prime hypothesis. However, the main finding was that neither harm avoidance nor self-directedness predicted changes on serum levels of CRP over eleven years after adjusting CRP baseline and covariates. The current findings are mainly inconsistent with previous research. These findings suggest that harm avoidance and self-directedness are not independent risk factors of inflammation from an epidemiological perspective.

Objectives of the study: Multidiscipline knowledge is needed in evaluation of person's functional capacity in work: physical and psychosocial factors must be considered. Generic models and tools are needed to provide common practices to evaluate work-ability (or demands of the work) and to understand the relevance of multifaceted factors underneath. Reflective processing of one's own knowledge and intuitions is seen to improve a person's ability to understand the relevance of unfamiliar information and to achieve a higher cognitive congruence in a multi-professional group. That can be achieved through group-learning practices. In a current research effect of IMBA- methods training is studied. It is assumed that training will increase the cognitive congruence between professionals evaluating work-ability. Methods: Three training groups were arranged in 2005. 51 professionals of vocational rehabilitation participated (43 women and 8 men). They evaluated both the functional capacities of a person and the demands of work before and after their IMBA-training. Evaluations were done on the basis of written case-information. The data of these evaluation tasks is data of this study. Both independent samples and repeated measures settings was used. The effect of training is analyzed as a measure of absolute agreement indexes (ICC and rrg) Results and conclusions: The results agreed with the hypothesis: After IMBA training the level of absolute agreement was higher in evaluating both the demands of work and the functional capacities of a person. Differences between training groups, features of the task or familiarity of the material didn't seem to influence the effect. Agreement got higher in evaluating physical and psychosocial factors of workability. The effect was very systematic. The evaluations were more congruent after training even though the effect was not strong enough to reach statistical significance with these samples. What was surprising was that demands of work were systematically evaluated lower after training as the functional capacities of persons were evaluated the same or a little higher after the training. Interesting question is: Do the professionals overestimate the demands of the work in general when making evaluations based on their intuitive thinking? If that's the case, the customers of vocational rehabilitation are seen as more disabled compared to demands the work than they are in real. The possibility of a systematic error like this in evaluating workability must be studied more in the future.

Locus of control of reinforcement is a concept which is embedded within Rotter's social learning theory. It is a generalized expectancy that reflects the consistent differences among individuals in the degree to which they perceive contingencies or independence between their behavior and subsequent events in social situations. If they expect that a reinforcement or an outcome is contingent on their behavior or their relatively permanent characteristics, it can be defined as a belief in internal control or, put differently, a belief in internal locus of control of reinforcement. Many essential things in adolescent's lives have been associated with internal locus of control. If they have an internal belief in the controllability of events in their lives it seems to lead to better health and greater academic achievement. One well known antecedent of internal control perception is a warm and nurturant family environment. Nevertheless the connection between breastfeeding and locus of control in adolescence is presumably never studied before. The purpose of this study was to explore, whether having been breastfed or duration of breastfeeding, predicts locus of control in adolescence. . In this study we used a sample (n=641) of The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study. The study project was started in 1979, and the aim of the project was to study the levels of coronary heart disease factors and their determinants in children and adolescents. Information concerning breastfeeding and its duration was collected from parents in year 1983. The adolescent locus of control was measured in year 1986 by a shortened inventory which consists of 23 items. The original inventory has 40 items. Linear and logistic regression analysis' were used as statistical methods. The result of the study was that there was no connection between breastfeeding and locus of control in adolescents. By reason of no connection, breastfeeding did not predict locus of control in adolescence. Interestingly, two statistically significant predictors of internal locus of control were age of adolescent and educational level of parents. Family income was connected to internal locus of adolescent but it did not predict it. It is impossible to make any firm conclusions on the basis of one study. More studies are needed.

It has been suggested that semantic information processing is modularized according to the input form (e.g., visual, verbal, non-verbal sound). A great deal of research has concentrated on detecting a separate verbal module. Also, it has traditionally been assumed in linguistics that the meaning of a single clause is computed before integration to a wider context. Recent research has called these views into question. The present study explored whether it is reasonable to assume separate verbal and nonverbal semantic systems in the light of the evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs). The study also provided information on whether the context influences processing of a single clause before the local meaning is computed. The focus was on an ERP called N400. Its amplitude is assumed to reflect the effort required to integrate an item to the preceding context. For instance, if a word is anomalous in its context, it will elicit a larger N400. N400 has been observed in experiments using both verbal and nonverbal stimuli. Contents of a single sentence were not hypothesized to influence the N400 amplitude. Only the combined contents of the sentence and the picture were hypothesized to influence the N400. The subjects (n = 17) viewed pictures on a computer screen while hearing sentences through headphones. Their task was to judge the congruency of the picture and the sentence. There were four conditions: 1) the picture and the sentence were congruent and sensible, 2) the sentence and the picture were congruent, but the sentence ended anomalously, 3) the picture and the sentence were incongruent but sensible, 4) the picture and the sentence were incongruent and anomalous. Stimuli from the four conditions were presented in a semi-randomized sequence. Their electroencephalography was simultaneously recorded. ERPs were computed for the four conditions. The amplitude of the N400 effect was largest in the incongruent sentence-picture -pairs. The anomalously ending sentences did not elicit a larger N400 than the sensible sentences. The results suggest that there is no separate verbal semantic system, and that the meaning of a single clause is not processed independent of the context.

Previous exploratory studies suggest that pre-attentive auditory processing of musicians differ depending on the strategies they use in music practicing and performance. This study aimed at systematically determining whether there are differences in neural sound processing and behavioral measures between musicians preferring and not-preferring aural strategies including improvising, playing by ear and rehearsing by listening recordings. Participants were assigned into aural (n = 13) and non-aural (n = 11) groups according to how much they employ aural strategies, as determined by a questionnaire. The amplitude, latency, and scalp topography of the memory-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related brain potentials were investigated with the so-called ‘optimal’ paradigm probing simple sound feature processing and with the ‘transposed-melody’ paradigm, probing complex sound pattern processing. Further, their behavioral accuracy in sound perception was tested with an attentive discrimination task in the transposed-melody paradigm and with the AMMA musicality test. Results showed that there were group differences both at the pre-attentive and behavioral levels of sound processing. First, in the optimal paradigm, the MMN morphology for the isolated sound features was similar between groups but its MMN amplitude, latency and topography for different sound features differed. Second, in the ‘transposed-melody’ paradigm, MMN was larger for the deviant that changed its contour as compared with the deviant that changed the last tone and thus the interval between the two last tones of the melody. The Contour-MMN amplitude as determined in the beginning of the recordings correlated with the subsequent behavioral discrimination accuracy in attentive condition. However, there were no group differences in the behavioral discrimination both deviants being detected equally well. The Interval-MMN amplitudes decreased especially in the aural group after the attentive condition. Moreover, the Interval-MMN latency in the non-aural group prolonged after the attentive condition as compared to the preceding condition whereas in the aural group the MMN latency shortened. No changes were seen in the Contour-MMN between conditions with either of the groups. Third, the non-aural group outperformed the aural group in the AMMA musicality test (Tonal subtest and Total scores). Additionally, AMMA scores (especially the Rhythm) correlated significantly with the Contour-MMN amplitudes after the attentive condition. Taken together, the present results suggest that practice strategies do not affect musicians' pre-attentive processing of simple sound features but might affect complex sound pattern processing. Complex sound pattern processing related also to the attentive behavioral performance in all musicians. While providing new insights into behavioral and neural differences between musicians preferring different practice strategies, results only partially support previous findings concerning discriminatory accuracy of violation within complex sound pattern learning.