Learning From Peers: A Survey of Perception and Utilization of Online Peer Support Among Informal Dementia Caregivers

Informal dementia caregivers are those who care for a person living with dementia (PLWD) without receiving payment (e.g., family members, friends, or other unpaid caregivers). These informal caregivers are subject to substantial mental, physical, and financial burdens. Online communities enable these caregivers to exchange caregiving strategies and communicate experiences with other caregivers whom they generally do not know in real life. Research has demonstrated the benefits of peer support in online communities, but they are limited in focusing merely on caregivers who are already online users. In this paper, we designed and administered a survey to investigate the perception and utilization of online peer support from 140 informal dementia caregivers (with 100 online-community caregivers). Our findings show that the behavior to access any online community is only significantly associated with their belief in the value of online peer support (p = 0.006). Moreover, 33 (83%) of the 40 non-online-community caregivers had a belief score above 24, a score assigned when a neutral option is selected for each belief question. The reasons most articulated for not accessing any online community were no time to do so (14; 10%), and insufficient online information searching skills (9; 6%). Our findings suggest that online peer support is valuable, but practical strategies are needed to assist informal dementia caregivers who have limited time or searching skills

Reconsidering frameworks of Alzheimer’s dementia when assessing psychosocial outcomes

The purpose of this introductory article to the special issue on psychosocial outcome measures in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions is to outline new frameworks to more effectively capture and measure the full range of how people living with Alzheimer’s dementia and their family caregivers experience the disease process. Specifically, we consider the strengths and weaknesses of alternative perspectives, including person‐centered, strength‐based, and resilience‐focused approaches that may complement and extend the dominant deficit paradigm to reflect the entirety of the dementia experience. Our aim is to encourage innovative methods to measure psychosocial aspects of Alzheimer’s dementia and caregiving that have not yet received sufficient attention, including resources (e.g., services and supports) and positive caregiver and care recipient outcomes (e.g., positive mood and adaptation).Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152840/1/trc2jtrci201902008.pd

Hearing Feelings: Affective Categorization of Music and Speech in Alexithymia, an ERP Study

Background: Alexithymia, a condition characterized by deficits in interpreting and regulating feelings, is a risk factor for a variety of psychiatric conditions. Little is known about how alexithymia influences the processing of emotions in music and speech. Appreciation of such emotional qualities in auditory material is fundamental to human experience and has profound consequences for functioning in daily life. We investigated the neural signature of such emotional processing in alexithymia by means of event-related potentials. Methodology: Affective music and speech prosody were presented as targets following affectively congruent or incongruent visual word primes in two conditions. In two further conditions, affective music and speech prosody served as primes and visually presented words with affective connotations were presented as targets. Thirty-two participants (16 male) judged the affective valence of the targets. We tested the influence of alexithymia on cross-modal affective priming and on N400 amplitudes, indicative of individual sensitivity to an affective mismatch between words, prosody, and music. Our results indicate that the affective priming effect for prosody targets tended to be reduced with increasing scores on alexithymia, while no behavioral differences were observed for music and word targets. At the electrophysiological level, alexithymia was associated with significantly smaller N400 amplitudes in response to affectively incongruent music and speech targets, but not to incongruent word targets. Conclusions: Our results suggest a reduced sensitivity for the emotional qualities of speech and music in alexithymia during affective categorization. This deficit becomes evident primarily in situations in which a verbalization of emotional information is required

Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception

It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another's facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White–Black morph continua and that were presented with high-status or low-status attire. Low-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as Black, whereas high-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as White; and this influence grew stronger as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 1). When faces with high-status attire were categorized as Black or faces with low-status attire were categorized as White, participants' hand movements nevertheless revealed a simultaneous attraction to select the other race-category response (stereotypically tied to the status cue) before arriving at a final categorization. Further, this attraction effect grew as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 2). Computational simulations then demonstrated that these effects may be accounted for by a neurally plausible person categorization system, in which contextual cues come to trigger stereotypes that in turn influence race perception. Together, the findings show how stereotypes interact with physical cues to shape person categorization, and suggest that social and contextual factors guide the perception of race

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM

Persistence of Self in Individuals with Alzheimer\u27s Disease: Evidence from Language and Visual Recognition

The persistence of self in individuals with probable Alzheimer\u27s disease was investigated via language and visual self-recognition. Seventy-eight adults (ages 66—103) participated: 26 with mild cognitive impairments, 26 with moderate cognitive impairments, and 26 without impairment. Although frequency of language usage (during an interview) declined across impairment levels, there were no significant differences in either rates or proportions of pronoun and attribute usage. When asked to identify themselves in photographs taken with an instant camera, cognitively impaired individuals — in spite of forgetting the photographic session only minutes earlier — exhibited unimpaired self-recognition, a dissociation consistent with a preserved self. Taken together, these findings indicate a persistence of self in individuals with dementia, and have implications for how Alzheimer\u27s is characterized and experienced, and how individuals are cared for

Measuring Strain Concentrations in Welded Junctions using Digital Image Correlation

status: publishe