University of Massachusetts Boston

About: University of Massachusetts Boston is a education organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 6541 authors who have published 12918 publications receiving 411731 citations. The organization is also known as: UMass Boston.

Receptivity to volunteering in the immediate postretirement period

Abstract: Higher rates of volunteering might be expected of elders in the period immediately after retirement because they tend to be in relatively good health and have fewer competing obliga tions. Data from the Commonwealth Productive Aging Survey, a telephone survey of a repre sentative national sample of 2,999 people 55 years of age and older, confirmed findings of previous research that retirement is not associated with higher rates of volunteering. However, in the first and second years following termination of employment, nonvolunteers show a heightened receptivity to volunteering; that is, they indicate more willingness to take on volunteer assignments and an ability to do so than do elders who are employed or who have been out of the workforce for longer periods. The findings suggest that volunteer coordinators should focus volunteer recruiting efforts on elders who are about to leave jobs or who have recently left jobs.

Sentence Comprehension in Autistic Children.

Abstract: Comprehension and strategy use by autistic children were tested in two experiments. Eighteen autistic subjects were compared with thirty normal 3- and 4-year-olds, matched on the PPVT and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. In Experiment I subjects were asked to act out active and passive, biased and reversible sentences. The autistic group's overall comprehension was lower than that of the normal controls; although the autistic subjects did use a word-order strategy, they did not generally use a probable-event strategy. These findings were confirmed in Experiment II, in which the same procedure with anomalous three-word items was used. The results are interpreted as evidence that in autism there is a semantic-cognitive deficit in utilizing conceptual knowledge about relational aspects of the environment and that this deficit underlies the comprehension difficulties of autistic persons.

Online psychoeducational support for infertile women: a randomized controlled trial

Abstract: Background The study goal was to develop and test the effectiveness of a brief online education and support program for female infertility patients. Methods A randomized-controlled trial was conducted. Using a Solomon-four group design, 190 female patients were recruited from three US fertility centers and were randomized into two experimental and two no-treatment control groups. The psychological outcomes assessed included infertility distress, infertility self-efficacy, decisional conflict, marital cohesion and coping style. Program dosage and satisfaction were also assessed at four weeks follow-up. Results Women exposed to the online program significantly improved in the area of social concerns (P = 0.038) related to infertility distress, and felt more informed about a medical decision with which they were contending (P = 0.037). Trends were observed for decreased global stress(P = 0.10), sexual concerns (P = 0.059), distress related to child-free living (P = 0.063), increased infertility self-efficacy (P = 0.067) and decision making clarity (P = 0.079). A dosage response was observed in the experimental groups for women who spent >60 min online for decreased global stress (P = 0.028) and increased self efficacy (P = 0.024). Conclusions This evidence-based eHealth program for women experiencing infertility suggests that a web-based patient education intervention can have beneficial effects in several psychological domains and may be a cost effective resource for fertility practices.