Browsing by discipline "Psychology"

Music interventions carried out by caregivers of persons with dementia (PWDs) have lately become the focus of music rehabilitation in dementia research. Dementia can be burdening for caregivers and it may disrupt the relationship between PWDs and caregivers. The aim of this thesis was to determine whether 1) awareness deficits frequently observed in PWDs manifest in rating discrepancies between PWDs and their caregivers when rating mood and quality of life of PWDs or if these differences are primarily explained by caregiver burden and 2) a caregiver-based music intervention can attenuate the rating discrepancies. In the current study, 89 PWD-caregiver dyads were randomly allocated in three groups: singing group, music listening group, and control group. Cognition, mood, and quality of life of the PWDs were assessed at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and 6 months after intervention. Discrepancy scores were calculated between the PWDs' and caregivers' ratings in Cornell-Brown Scale for Quality of Life in Dementia (CBS) and Quality of Life in Alzheimer's Disease (QOL-AD). Correlations of the discrepancy scores to intervention outcomes and baseline PWD and caregiver characteristics were examined. Differences between intervention groups in CBS and QOL-AD discrepancies were analyzed with ANOVA. QOL-AD discrepancy was associated with dementia severity at baseline. CBS discrepancies were consistently associated with caregiver burden, higher discrepancies corresponding to higher burden. The intervention groups did not show any differences in change in the discrepancy scores in mixed-model ANOVAs. Further research with more focused measures is needed to determine whether music interventions can alleviate awareness deficits and/or PWD-caregiver discrepancies and, regarding the latter, to reveal the exact route of the effect.

Goals. The goal of this research was to find out, how the use of the non-identifying dynamic algorithm would affect fairness experience; and through it, behavioral intentions, in rebating context. Besides that, it was assessed how the provision of detailed information on algorithm's logic affects the fairness experience. Dynamic pricing, especially based on identification, has been shown to negatively affect fairness. The dynamic algorithms are better to companies due to their profitability potential. It is of vital importance to find out the conditions, on which they might be employed, while taking into account the possible reactions of the customers. A differential assessment of entity and event fairness through the lens of fairness heuristic theory is chosen as a backbone of this research to extend the mosaic empirical evidence of their mutual interaction paths. The fairness experience is also closely connected to affects; incidental affects and integral emotions, which are evoked by the fairness experience itself. Because of this close relationship, to complement general picture, the affects were assessed as well. Methods. The manipulations were performed on two levels. The first level, the exposure to dynamic algorithm or seeing the human-set pre-determined rebate rates, happened on the company's site when the algorithm trial was run. The second manipulation level, the amount of the available information, was performed during the gathering of the survey data. There were three conditions in the information manipulation: no information (the control), bare information about the ongoing trial and trial information including a detailed algorithm's logic description. The size of the final sample, used for the analysis, consisted of 404 participants. The main analysing technique employed was SEM. Results and conclusions. Effect paths between entity and event fairness areas were in accordance with the fairness heuristic theory - event fairness mediated the change in entity fairness partially. The subjects that were exposed to the algorithm, event fairness was affected negatively by the bare trial information as expected. The provision of the detailed information did not affect fairness. Entity fairness was connected to both, incidental affects and integral emotions. There were no analogous connection between event fairness, and affects and emotions. Fairness mediated only partially the change from incidental affects to integral emotions. Integral emotions were not connected to the behavioral intentions. Entity fairness mediated fully the effect of event fairness on the behavioral intentions. The provision of the detailed information affected directly positively on pro-active behavioral intentions without a mediation of fairness. None of the manipulations affected directly complaining intentions. The results provide important information about the dynamic algorithm exposure in real life, outside the laboratories. Despite the dynamic pricing being seen as unfair in principle, the exposure to the detailed information might have positive effects on the outcomes. There was only a limited support for the role of affects in the pricing fairness context.

The aim of this study was to examine the associations of type D personality and its components with effort-reward imbalance based work stress and its components. Previously it has been found that both type D personality and effort-reward based work stress are associated with poorer health status and also to be a risk factor for numerous negative health outcomes. The association of Type D personality with effort-reward imbalance hasn't been previously studied. Based on the previous research, we set the following three hypotheses : 1) Higher effort-reward imbalance is associated with type D personality 2) Higher effort and lower rewards are associated with type D personality 3) Higher negative affectivity and higher social inhibition are associated with higher effort-reward imbalance. There were 1285 participants from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study, who were working full time when the study was conducted and didn't have missing values in the study variables. Work stress was measured with a questionnaire based on effort-reward imbalance model (ERI, Siegrist, 1996). Type D personality was measured with a questionnaire based on DS14-measure (Denollet, 2005). Age of the participants varied between 30-45 years. The hypotheses were tested with logistic and linear regression analyses controlling for age, gender, education and occupational status. In the study type D personality was associated with higher effort-reward imbalance, higher efforts lower rewards. Of the components of type D personality negative affectivity predicted higher work stress but social inhibition was not related to perceptions work stress. The results imply that type D personality is a risk factor for high work stress.

Objectives. Can individual differences in the way people manage their own lives (life management) be explained from the perspective of life history theory? Understanding these differences is important since life management has a great impact on the wellbeing of people. Life history theory has already been proven to explain many individual differences in the human cognition; this study aimed to expand this field of knowledge. Life history theory states, that the early-life environment of an individual shapes her life history strategies, adapting her to her environment. The events that serve as reminders of mortality in the environment of an individual (mortality cues) were hypothesised to activate different life history strategies in individuals with different childhood environments. This was hypothesised to be reflected as differences in life management. The study also sought to find out, if the observation that people can react differently to a similar mortality cue can be explained by their strategy's impact on their locus of control. Methods. The data used in this study came from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study. The relationship between early-life environment (childhood socioeconomic status, SES) and life management (the Self-directedness scale in the Temperament and Character Inventory and two items concerning coping) was explored in the study. Regression analysis was used to analyse whether mortality cues moderated the relationship between SES and self-directedness. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyse whether they moderated the relationship between SES and coping. Sample size was 2 103 for analyses concerning self-directedness (mean age = 31.48 years) and 773 for those concerning coping (mean age = 20.66 years). Results and conclusions. Individuals with lower childhood SES felt that things outside their control were influencing their life more than did those with higher childhood SES. Lower SES was also connected with lower self-directedness in general. The tendency to use one way of coping over another after facing the death of a friend or a family member seemed to depend on childhood SES. Individuals with lower childhood SES used more approach coping; those with higher childhood SES used more avoidance coping. Life history theory seems to be a relevant scientific framework for studying individual differences in life management. Differences in life management might help to understand why people with different backgrounds might react differently to a similar mortality cue. However, no interaction effect on life management was found between the other mortality cues used in the study and childhood SES. Sporadic incidences that are a natural part of life do not seem to activate life history strategies permanently. It is advised then, that especially when the activation of life history strategies is explored using an experimental study design, the results should be interpreted keeping in mind the possibility that single cues might only activate strategies temporarily.

Despite decades of research, knowledge and training in the area of Child sexual abuse (CSA) interviews, studies internationally have shown that forensic child interviewers still relay on inappropriate questioning. Suggestive questions should not be used in CSA interviews as they can be very harmful for the witness reports of children. The previous and only Finnish study assessing the quality of CSA interviews is from the beginning of the 2000s. The study showed that the quality of Finnish CSA interviews was poor. In the present study, the CSA interviews from Helsinki and Uusimaa hospital district area in 2014 and 2015 are examined. All the interviews in this study are conducted in the forensic psychology center for children and adolescent. The aim for this study is to evaluate the questions asked by the interviewers in the investigative interviews with alleged CSA victims. The results are compared with the previous findings in Finland to find out whether the interview quality has improved. The sample, consisting of 96 transcribed forensic interviews with 55 alleged CSA victims (aged 3-18 years), was anonymised and analysed. Interviews were coded for questions types. The results were compared with the previous Finnish study. Detailed analyses of the interview transcripts showed that 47% of all the questions asked were facilitators, 12% were invitations, 27% were directive, 11% were option-posing and 0.3% were suggestive. The amount of questions encouraging the child to freely recall the events was almost 60 %, whereas in the previous study they reached only just over 20% of all questions asked. The amount of suggestive questions had decreased notably. Most of the interviews did not include any suggestive questions and the overall quite modest amount of suggestive questions was posed to a small proportion of the interviewed children. The results show that interview practice has improved notably since the previous study and this analysis provides viable arguments for encouraging the guidelines used in the Helsinki and Uusimaa hospital district.

Objectives: Optimism is usually defined as a stable outcome expectancy. Optimism is known to be positively connected to well-being and health but there are few studies to examine the development of optimism. Traumatic experiences are known to have various negative effects on well-being and mental health. There are also studies that show an association between traumas and personality development and change. Because optimism and pessimism are thought to be concepts similar to personality traits, it is justifiable to study if traumas are also related to optimism and/or pessimism. There are no studies to investigate this earlier. The aim of this study is to examine whether lifetime trauma experiences are associated with optimism-pessimism in early adulthood and whether different traumas or the age of trauma experience have differential effects. Methods: This study is part of the Arvo Ylppö Longitudinal Study (AYLS). All newborns born between 1985 and 1986 in the county of Uusimaa, Finland, who needed hospital care during ten days after birth were invited to participate. Also controls not admitted to the hospital wards were recruited. The current 25-year-old follow-up study consisted of 902 participants who completed a self-report questionnaire for optimism (LOT-R) and a retrospective self-report for traumatic experiences (TEC). The associations between lifetime traumas and optimism-pessimism in early adulthood were analyzed statistically using linear regression and analysis of variance and t tests when examining different groups for the amount of traumas and for different age groups. Results and conclusions: Reporting of any traumatic experience was associated to lower optimism and higher pessimism. The more traumatic experiences one had the lower was optimism and the higher was pessimism. By contrast, the age of traumatic experiences was not statistically significantly associated with the trait of optimism-pessimism. These results remained after controlling demographic variables. However, after controlling neuroticism, only the connection between emotional traumas and optimism-pessimism remained statistically significant. Because optimism and pessimism are known to have an impact on well-being and coping in future adversities, the association between traumas and optimism-pessimism can be considered noteworthy. The results of this study give ground for discussion about whether optimism interventions could be targeted to people who have experienced traumatic events to reduce the negative effects of trauma.

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.

Objectives Attitudes towards natural products are remarkably positive considering the limited evidence for their benefits . Our current understanding of these attitudes is mainly limited to studies of demographic factors and reasons for consumption. Research on the cognitive, affective and motivational factors underlying the attitudes is scant. In this study, the relation of the following cognitive and affective-motivational factors to attitudes towards natural food and cosmetics was examined: intuitive thinking (REIm), analytical thinking (REIm, CRT), open-minded cognition (OMC-G), belief in health myths, modern health worries (MHW), disgust sensitivity, avoidance motivation (BIS) and approach motivation (BAS). Methods A browser-based survey (application: E-lomake) was distributed online and self-administered on a personal device. The 317 participants were aged 16–71 years, and 74.4% were women. The participants reported their attitudes by means of a semantic-differential evaluation of natural food and cosmetics, and an estimate of their use of these products. Various self -report scales and tasks were used to assess cognitive and affective-motivational factors. The factors were used to predict semantic-differential evaluation with linear regression and product use with ordinal regression, controlling for age, gender, education and diet. Results and conclusions Modern health worries and intuitive thinking were the best predictors of positive attitudes towards natural food and cosmetics; for the other factors, only sporadic, weaker associations were observed. Based on these results, the appeal of natural products can be partly explained by a tendency to trust intuitions and feelings when evaluating products, and appraisals of health risks in the production of food and cosmetics. Both the general style of cognitive processing and the emotions and motives affecting it are important for understanding the psychological background of attitudes towards natural products.

The internal structure of the NEPSY-II, a developmental cognitive test, was examined by explorative factor analyses (EFAs). The EFAs were conducted employing the NEPSY-II Finnish standardization sample. The structure of the NEPSY-II, as presented in the manual, is divided into six cognitive domains: Attention and Executive Functioning, Language, Memory and Learning, Sensorimotor Functions, Social Perception and Visuospatial Processing. The objectives of the current study were: 1) To explore what are the best fitting factor structures for 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, and 7- to 15-year-old children; and 2) To compare the resulting factor structures to the NEPSY-II six cognitive domains. Four-factor structures were found best fitting for all the age groups. These structures shared three roughly similar factors: Language, Visuospatial/Motor Functions, and Processing Speed, although the exact set of subtests loading on each factor differed from one group to another. The four-factor structures considerably differed from the NEPSY-II six cognitive domains. Further, although there were similarities between the factor structures, there were also notable differences in how the subtests related together. The thesis produces scientific knowledge on the relations between the subtests that may also be employed in clinical assessment. The presented psychometrical knowledge might clarify how the problems that present themselves in distinct subtest in an assessment setting are related. Thus, it provides an additional perspective to clinical assessment alongside the prevailing neuropsychological knowledge.