Aaron S. Wallen

A Three-Country Randomized Controlled Trial of a Psychosocial Intervention for Caregivers Combined With Pharmacological Treatment for Patients With Alzheimer Disease: Effects on Caregiver Depression

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of a combination of cholinesterase inhibitor therapy for patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) and psychosocial intervention, for their spouse caregivers compared with drug treatment alone in three countries simultaneously. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. Structured questionnaires were administered at baseline and at regular follow-up intervals for 24 months by independent raters blind to group assignment. SETTING Outpatient research clinics in New York City, U.S., Manchester, U.K. and Sydney, Australia. PARTICIPANTS Volunteer sample of 158 spouse caregivers of community dwelling patients with AD. INTERVENTIONS Five sessions of individual and family counseling within 3 months of enrollment and continuous availability of ad hoc telephone counseling were provided for half the caregivers. Donepezil was prescribed for all patients. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Depressive symptoms of spouse caregivers measured at intake and follow-up assessments for 24 months using Beck Depression Inventory (revised). RESULTS Depression scores of caregivers who received counseling decreased over time, whereas the depression scores for caregivers who did not receive counseling increased. The benefit of the psychosocial intervention was significant after controlling for site, gender and country was not accounted for by antidepressant use and increased over 2 years even though the individual and family counseling sessions occurred in the first 3 months. CONCLUSION Effective counseling and support interventions can reduce symptoms of depression in caregivers when patients are taking donepezil. Harmonized multinational psychosocial interventions are feasible. Combined drug and supportive care approaches to the management of people with AD should be a priority.

Understanding the MBA Gender Gap: Women Respond to Gender Norms by Reducing Public Assertiveness but Not Private Effort:

Women’s underperformance in MBA programs has been the subject of recent debate and policy interventions, despite a lack of rigorous evidence documenting when and why it occurs. The current studies document a performance gap, specifying its contours and contributing factors. Two behaviors by female students that may factor into the gap are public conformity and private internalization. We predicted that women conform to the norm associating maleness with technical prowess by minimizing their public assertiveness in class discussions and meetings, but that they do not internalize the norm by reducing private effort. Data from multiple cohorts of a top-ranked MBA program reveal female underperformance occurred in technical subjects (e.g., accounting), but not social subjects (e.g., marketing). As predicted, the gender effect ran not through private effort but through public assertiveness, even controlling for gender differences in interests and aptitudes. These findings support some current policy interventions while casting doubt on others.

Temporal Distance and Negotiation Issue Preference Ambiguity

Negotiators must determine the relative importance of issues sometime prior to beginning negotiations. However, social psychological research suggests that the timing of such consideration, relative to the commencement of bargaining, may affect the importance attached to different issues. Because decision construal-level, decision-maker overconfidence, and situational effects on decision-making vary with the point in time before the start of negotiations at which decisions are made, it follows that when a negotiator decides on the relative importance of negotiation issues has an important effect on the shaping of preference structure. This paper argues for increased attention to these social cognitive processes in research on negotiator preferences and attempts to highlight the commonalities amongst these processes in order to stimulate increased investigational effort in this area amongst conflict researchers.