Prenatal patient perceptions of receiving difficult news over the telephone

Difficult news has been described as any news that adversely and seriously affects an individual's view of their future. Research in oncology genetic counseling demonstrated that individuals do not prefer in-person or telephone delivery of their genetic test results. However, in the prenatal setting, there is limited research examining how patients prefer news related to their pregnancies be disclosed. This study aimed to assess the experiences and preferences of prenatal patients who received difficult news by telephone. A semi-structured interview guide was developed to assess patients' personal definitions of difficult news and their experiences receiving the news by telephone. Fifteen patients seen prenatally by a genetic counselor were interviewed. Interviews were transcribed and consensus-coded, using inductive content analysis to identify several themes. The most common definition of difficult news included unexpected, life-changing, or devastating information. Participants described aspects of their experience and strategies employed by their genetic counselor that was helpful when receiving the news, which was found to align with the SPIKES protocol, a six-step process of delivering difficult news to patients. Additional techniques that participants identified as beneficial and satisfactory included the genetic counselor's use of empathy, non-directiveness, and continuity and coordination of care. Participants also provided recommendations for improvement, including a discussion of the mode of result disclosure during pretest counseling, an option to follow up with their genetic counselor, personalized resources, and a summary of the results call. The findings of this study demonstrate that a patient-centered approach is preferred by patients who receive difficult news by telephone in the prenatal setting. Patients' identification of beneficial communication techniques and suggestions for improvement can be implemented by any healthcare provider responsible for delivering difficult news to prenatal patients.

Does prestige bias influence the recall and transmission of COVID-19-related information? Protocol registration for an experimental study conducted online

In epidemic and pandemic contexts, such as that of COVID-19, epidemiological changes are continuous, and many people do not have access to accurate, up-to-date information. In this context, social learning can be an advantageous survival strategy. We investigate whether people remember and communicate information attributed to someone prestigious more often than that attributed to family members, politicians, and people with experience in public health. The experimental phase will include a recall stage and an information transmission stage, which will be based on a fictitious text containing an opinion about a drug treatment for COVID-19. There will be four versions of the text, and each participant will be assigned one of these versions for the investigation. The participants will be instructed to read the fictional story and then complete a distraction exercise. Subsequently, a recall test will be performed, where they will be asked to recount the story as accurately as possible. The second stage of the experiment is aimed at testing the transmission of information where we will conduct a linear chain transmission experiment, where eight chains of four participants will be used for each story. They will be asked to write down their recollection of the material. This text will undergo spelling error correction and then be sent to the next participant in the chain through the platform. At the end of the experiment, there will be a self-reporting questionnaire for the participants; this allows for triangulation of the data.

Pseudo-Contamination and Memory: Is There a Memory Advantage for Objects Touched by "Morphologically Deviant People"?

Memory plays an important role in the behavioral immune system (BIS; Schaller in Psychological Inquiry, 17(2), 96-101, 2016a), a proactive immune system whose ultimate function is to make organisms avoid sources of contamination. Indeed, it has been found that objects presented next to sick people are remembered better than objects shown next to healthy people-representing a contamination effect in memory. In the present studies, we investigated this memory effect in relation to "pseudo-contaminated" sources, that is to say, people exhibiting cues ultimately evoking the threat of contamination but objectively posing no such threat in terms of disease transmission. Common objects were shown next to photographs of people having three kinds of morphological deviations-obesity (study 1), scars and burns (study 2), strange eyes (study 3)-or no morphological deviation. Contrary to our expectations, we found that "pseudo-contaminated objects" were not remembered better than "non-contaminated objects," whereas discomfort ratings of the idea of touching the same objects were clearly higher with morphologically deviant people. Memory mechanisms do not seem to be mobilized by "pseudo-contamination" sources which are not directly related to infection risk.

COVID-19 and Memory: A Novel Contamination Effect in Memory

The Behavioral Immune System (BIS, Schaller & Park, 2011) is a defense system whose function is to protect against pathogen exposure. Memory is an important component of this system (Fernandes et al., 2017). We investigated "contamination effects" in memory in relation to COVID-19. Photographs of everyday objects were shown to adults (N = 80) in the hands of either a healthy or a contagious person who had contracted SARS-CoV-2. "Contaminated objects" were recalled better than "non-contaminated objects" suggesting that a contamination effect in memory in humans is easily acquired in the absence of apparent visual cues of disease.

Adaptive Education: Learning and Remembering with a Stone-Age Brain

Educators generally accept that basic learning and memory processes are a product of evolution, guided by natural selection. Less well accepted is the idea that ancestral selection pressures continue to shape modern memory functioning. In this article, I review evidence suggesting that attention to nature's criterion-the enhancement of fitness-is needed to explain fully how and why people remember. Thinking functionally about memory, and adopting an evolutionary perspective in the laboratory, has led to recent discoveries with clear implications for learning in the classroom. For example, our memory systems appear to be tuned to animacy (the distinction between living and nonliving things) which, in turn, can play a role in enhancing foreign language acquisition. Effective learning management systems need to align with students' prior knowledge, skill, and interest levels, but also with the inherent content biases or "tunings" that are representative of all people.

The lrd package: An R package and Shiny application for processing lexical data

Recall testing is a common assessment to gauge memory retrieval. Responses from these tests can be analyzed in several ways; however, the output generated from a recall study typically requires manual coding that can be time intensive and error-prone before analyses can be conducted. To address this issue, this article introduces lrd (Lexical Response Data), a set of open-source tools for quickly and accurately processing lexical response data that can be used either from the R command line or through an R Shiny graphical user interface. First, we provide an overview of this package and include a step-by-step user guide for processing both cued- and free-recall responses. For validation of lrd, we used lrd to recode output from cued, free, and sentence-recall studies with large samples and examined whether the results replicated using lrd-scored data. We then assessed the inter-rater reliability and sensitivity and specificity of the scoring algorithm relative to human-coded data. Overall, lrd is highly reliable and shows excellent sensitivity and specificity, indicating that recall data processed using this package are remarkably consistent with data processed by a human coder.

Metamemory that matters: judgments of importance can engage responsible remembering

Adaptive memory refers to the memory advantage for information processed in a survival and/or reproduction context while metacognition involves the awareness of what we can later remember. The notion of "responsible remembering" captures how memory functions to prioritise important information that will need to be remembered and how metacognitive processes may be more precise in situations involving consequences for forgetting. In 5 experiments, we examined whether judgments of learning and judgments of importance affect recall selectivity for information with negative consequences if forgotten. We presented participants with lists of children, each with 2 foods they like, 2 foods they dislike, and 2 foods they are allergic to. When making no metacognitive judgments or making JOLs for each food preference, participants best recalled foods the children liked, likely resulting from serial remembering (recalling information according to where it was presented). However, when judging the importance of remembering items, participants were strategic in their memory for the food preferences such that they best recalled information they rated as important to remember (allergies). These results suggest that when forced to consider the importance of remembering, participants engage in responsible remembering by deeming information with consequences for forgetting as most important and subsequently best remembering this information.

Infection threat shapes our social instincts

We social animals must balance the need to avoid infections with the need to interact with conspecifics. To that end we have evolved, alongside our physiological immune system, a suite of behaviors devised to deal with potentially contagious individuals. Focusing mostly on humans, the current review describes the design and biological innards of this behavioral immune system, laying out how infection threat shapes sociality and sociality shapes infection threat. The paper shows how the danger of contagion is detected and posted to the brain; how it affects individuals’ mate choice and sex life; why it strengthens ties within groups but severs those between them, leading to hostility toward anyone who looks, smells, or behaves unusually; and how it permeates the foundation of our moral and political views. This system was already in place when agriculture and animal domestication set off a massive increase in our population density, personal connections, and interaction with other species, amplifying enormously the spread of disease. Alas, pandemics such as COVID-19 not only are a disaster for public health, but, by rousing millions of behavioral immune systems, could prove a threat to harmonious cohabitation too.

Adaptive Memory: Generality of the Parent Processing Effect and Effects of Biological Relatedness on Recall

The adaptive memory framework posits that human memory is an evolved cognitive feature, in which stimuli relevant to fitness are better remembered than neutral stimuli. There is now substantial evidence that processing a neutral stimulus in terms of its relevancy to an imagined ancestral survival scenario enhances recall, although there is still disagreement concerning the proximate mechanisms responsible for this effect. Several other mnemonic biases have recently been discovered that similarly appear to reflect evolutionary pressures, including a bias to remember items relevant to an imagined parenting scenario. We tested the generality of this parent processing effect by varying the biological relatedness of the imagined child. We also varied the biological relatedness of a child during an imagined third-person survival processing scenario. Across four experiments, we found evidence that simply altering the described biological relatedness of a child in the parenting scenario and third-person survival processing scenario can affect recall, such that items are better remembered when made relevant to a biological child compared to an adopted child. How these findings inform the general adaptive memory framework is discussed.