Feeding characteristics of healthy infants without reported feeding impairments throughout the first month of life.

OBJECTIVE: Elucidate characteristics of feeding performance in healthy infants without reported feeding problems throughout the first month of life. STUDY DESIGN: Feeding was monitored in 61 healthy infants by caregiver report for 48 h a week from birth to 4 weeks old. Outcomes included feeding modality, how much they consumed, how long the feed lasted, and how many coughing episodes the infant exhibited. Data were analyzed with descriptive and non-parametric statistics. RESULT: The majority of infants (68%) exhibited at least one problematic feeding behavior. Infants consumed 68 ml/feed over 20 min, though the milk volumes and feed durations were highly variable. Coughing occurred an average of 2 feeds per day. No significant change in coughing was observed throughout the first month of life (p = 0.64). Infants coughed significantly less during breast feeds than bottle feeds (p = 0.02). CONCLUSION: Healthy term infants exhibit what appear to be normal developmental imperfections in feeding performance throughout the first month of life.

The temporal course of over-generalized conditioned threat expectancies in posttraumatic stress disorder.

One key conditioning abnormality in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is heightened generalization of fear from a conditioned danger-cue (CS+) to similarly appearing safe stimuli. The present work represents the first effort to track the time-course of heightened generalization in PTSD with the prediction of heightened PTSD-related over-generalization in earlier but not later trials. This prediction derives from past discriminative fear-conditioning studies providing incidental evidence that over-generalization in PTSD may be reduced with sufficient learning trials. In the current study, we re-analyzed previously published conditioned fear-generalization data (Kaczkurkin et al., 2017) including combat veterans with PTSD (n = 15) or subthreshold PTSD (SubPTSD: n = 18), and trauma controls (TC: n = 19). This re-analysis aimed to identify the trial-by-trial course of group differences in generalized perceived risk across three classes of safe generalization stimuli (GSs) parametrically varying in similarity to a CS+ paired with shock. Those with PTSD and SubPTSD, relative to TC, displayed significantly elevated generalization to all GSs combined in early but not late generalization trials. Additionally, over-generalization in PTSD and SubPTSD persisted across trials to a greater extent for classes of GSs bearing higher resemblance to CS+. Such results suggest that PTSD-related over-generalization of conditioned threat expectancies can be reduced with sufficient exposure to unreinforced GSs and accentuate the importance of analyzing trial-by-trial changes when assessing over-generalization in clinical populations.

The role of prospection in altruistic bone marrow donation decisions.

OBJECTIVE: The decision to become an unrelated allogeneic bone marrow or hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) donor is a consequential and complex one. Although new registry members pledge to donate if asked in the future, significant proportions ultimately reconsider when they are notified as a potential match for a patient and are asked to undergo confirmatory typing (CT), resulting in many patients failing to receive transplants. We consider the roles of prospection, or thinking about the future, and ambivalence, or having mixed emotions about an event, in this phenomenon. Prospection theory dictates that distant and improbable events are construed more abstractly than near-term and probable events. We hypothesized that construals about donation in new registry members versus those asked to undergo CT would differ in accordance with these patterns, and that variation in construals would be associated with decisions about whether to proceed toward donation. METHOD: In collaboration with the National Marrow Donor Program, we measured donation intentions and CT decisions in 516 new registry members and 213 members asked to undergo CT, respectively. Participants were asked to describe what they imagined would happen in the donation process. RESULTS: We found that the valence and heterogeneity with which registry members construed donation were significant predictors of donation-related decisions. Assuming the temporal ordering of cognitive processes, ambivalence about donation was a mediator of these relationships. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that encouraging a focus on positive central features of marrow and HSC donation may reduce ambivalence and decrease attrition from the registry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).