A rating scale was designed to measure dysfunctional discipline practices in parents of young children. Three stable factors of dysfunctional discipline style were identified: (a) Laxness, (b) Overreactivity, and (c) Verbosity. The Parenting Scale exhibited adequate internal consistency and test–retest reliability. Mothers of clinic children reported more dysfunctional parenting than did mothers of nonclinic children. Parenting Scale scores were related to maternal ratings of child behavior and marital discord. Most important, Parenting Scale scores correlated significantly with observational measures of dysfunctional discipline and child misbehavior.

The Parenting Scale: A measure of dysfunctional parenting in discipline situations.

Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in determining its functional outcomes. Examination of the information-processing demands of the mind-wandering state suggests that it involves perceptual decoupling to escape the constraints of the moment, its content arises from episodic and affective processes, and its regulation relies on executive control. Mind wandering also involves a complex balance of costs and benefits: Its association with various kinds of error underlines its cost, whereas its relationship to creativity and future planning suggest its potential value. Although essential to the stream of consciousness, various strategies may minimize the downsides of mind wandering while maintaining its productive aspects.

The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness

Depression and anxiety are the most common psychiatric conditions in late life. Despite their prevalence, we know relatively little about their unique manifestation in older adults. And, Although the most common intervention for late-life depression and anxiety continues to be medication, research on psychosocial interventions for late-life depression and anxiety has burgeoned in the past several years. Unfortunately, this growing body of intervention research has yet to be widely translated into improved systems of care for late-life depression. This article is one step toward synthesizing the knowledge in this growing area of research. The review of literature presents the conclusions of several meta-analyses that have reviewed psychosocial interventions for late-life depression and anxiety. In addition, intervention studies concerning the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, reminiscence therapy, and alternative therapies with depressed and/or anxious older adults are reviewed. A brief description of various approaches to psychosocial intervention with anxious and/or depressed older adults is also presented.

Depression and anxiety.

Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind

Ketamine, a racemic mixture consisting of (S)- and (R)-ketamine, has been in clinical use since 1970. Although best characterized for its dissociative anesthetic properties, ketamine also exerts analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and antidepressant actions. We provide a comprehensive review of these therapeutic uses, emphasizing drug dose, route of administration, and the time course of these effects. Dissociative, psychotomimetic, cognitive, and peripheral side effects associated with short-term or prolonged exposure, as well as recreational ketamine use, are also discussed. We further describe ketamine’s pharmacokinetics, including its rapid and extensive metabolism to norketamine, dehydronorketamine, hydroxyketamine, and hydroxynorketamine (HNK) metabolites. Whereas the anesthetic and analgesic properties of ketamine are generally attributed to direct ketamine-induced inhibition of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors, other putative lower-affinity pharmacological targets of ketamine include, but are not limited to, γ-amynobutyric acid (GABA), dopamine, serotonin, sigma, opioid, and cholinergic receptors, as well as voltage-gated sodium and hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channels. We examine the evidence supporting the relevance of these targets of ketamine and its metabolites to the clinical effects of the drug. Ketamine metabolites may have broader clinical relevance than was previously considered, given that HNK metabolites have antidepressant efficacy in preclinical studies. Overall, pharmacological target deconvolution of ketamine and its metabolites will provide insight critical to the development of new pharmacotherapies that possess the desirable clinical effects of ketamine, but limit undesirable side effects.

https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/pharmrev/70/3/621.full.pdf

Ketamine and Ketamine Metabolite Pharmacology: Insights into Therapeutic Mechanisms

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~oops/publish/cognit1923.pdf

Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~oops/publish/yccog-06-149.pdf

Everyday attention lapses and memory failures: the affective consequences of mindlessness.

Mind wandering, in which cognitive processing of the external environment decreases in favor of internal processing (Small-wood & Schooler, 2006), has been consistently associated with errors on tasks requiring sustained attention and continu-ous stimulus monitoring (e.g., Cheyne, Carriere, & Smilek, 2006; Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997; Smallwood et al., 2004). Consistent with this finding, recent neuroimaging studies suggest that mind wandering engages the default neural network (Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, & Schooler, 2009; Mason et al., 2007; Smallwood, Beach, Schooler, & Handy, 2008; Weissman, Roberts, Viss-cher, & Woldorff, 2006) and is associated with decreased neu-ral analysis of incoming information (Christoff et al., 2009; Smallwood, Beach, et al., 2008; Weissman et al., 2006). Here, we propose that mind wandering also involves overt embodied components whereby external input is blocked at the sensory endings. We demonstrate that during an extended period of reading, episodes of mind wandering, compared with on-task periods, contain more eye closures (blinks) and fewer fixa-tions on the text―even as subjects continue to scan the text.The present investigation is based on the idea that blink rate might serve to modulate trade-offs between attention to mind-wandering thoughts and to external task-related stimuli. Blinks reduce processing of external stimuli in two ways―by physi-cally closing the eyelid and by generating cortical suppression of visual processing both before and after the time of actual lid closure (Bristow, Frith, & Rees, 2005; Bristow, Haynes, Syl-vester, Frith, & Rees, 2005; Ridder & Tomlinson, 1997; Volk-mann, 1986). Increasing the rate of such visual interruptions may facilitate a shift in the balance of processing from exter-nal stimuli to internal thoughts. Consistent with these consid-erations, evidence suggests that an increase in eye blinks is associated with errors in vigilance to external stimuli (Papadelis et al., 2007; Poulton & Gregory, 1952; Van Orden, Jung, & Makeig, 2000) and with conflict between internal and external workload (Recarte, Perez, Conchillo, & Nunes, 2008).To assess the relation between eye blinks and mind wandering, we compared blink rates during probe-caught epi-sodes of mind wandering and on-task periods of reading. Mind-wandering episodes during reading are relatively fre-quent; everyone has experienced interfering thoughts that compromise reading (Reichle, Reineberg, & Schooler, in press; Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008), and it is possible to even find oneself at the end of a page with no recollection of having processed the material just “read.” Such

/pdf/out-of-mind-out-of-sight-eye-blinking-as-indicator-and-2fgadtddyi.pdf

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Eye Blinking as Indicator and Embodiment of Mind Wandering

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare.

http://affinity.uwaterloo.ca/~oops/publish/nsy_3666.pdf

J. Allan Cheyne

Papers

Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors

Everyday attention lapses and memory failures: the affective consequences of mindlessness.

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Eye Blinking as Indicator and Embodiment of Mind Wandering

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare.

Failures of sustained attention in life, lab, and brain: ecological validity of the SART.