ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2084-2929
Current Organisation
University of Queensland
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 23-01-2022
DOI: 10.1111/TME.12849
Abstract: Diversification of blood collection agencies' (BCAs) core business requires donors to donate substances of human origin (SoHO) beyond whole‐blood. Whole‐blood donors are assumed to be willing to convert to donate other SoHO as well as whole‐blood. However, no reviews consider the evidence on conversion (i.e., willingness/intention, behaviour, retention, attrition). This rapid review provides a narrative synthesis of whole‐blood donors' conversion to another SoHO, characteristics contributing to conversion, motives and deterrents, and interventions encouraging conversion. Sixty‐five studies were reviewed. Most were cross‐sectional and examined whole‐blood donor conversion to organ (willingness ledge for deceased donation), plasma or stem cell donation. Most examined conversion rather than characteristics contributing to conversion, motives, deterrents or interventions. Whole‐blood donors appear willing to donate another SoHO, yet conversion rates are unclear. Besides self‐efficacy, there is little consistency in reported characteristics of donors converting, and few theories applied to understand characteristics encouraging conversion. Intrinsic (altruism, self‐esteem, curiosity) and extrinsic (perceived need, service experience, direct requests) motives and barriers (lifestyle, fearing reduced health) appear important and require further research. Interventions encouraging conversion need replication and may include in‐person, in‐centre approaches, raising awareness of the functional benefits of other SoHO (high need, usefulness), and developing promotional materials that pique donors' curiosity, invite questions, and encourage donor‐initiated conversations about conversion. Centralising BCAs as a single business or partnering with other organisations appears mutually beneficial to encourage conversion and sustainable panels/resources. Research is needed to understand the impact of encouraging conversion on donors and organisations, and identify optimal management strategies for multi‐SoHO donors.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 20-05-2020
DOI: 10.1017/S1355617720000478
Abstract: A large literature now shows that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) disrupts a number of social cognitive abilities, including social perceptual function and theory of mind (ToM). However, less well understood is how the specific subcomponents of ToM as well as both the broader and specific subcomponents of empathic processing are affected. The current study provides the first meta-analytic review of AD that focuses on both empathy and ToM as broad constructs, as well as their overlapping (cognitive empathy and affective ToM) and distinct (affective empathy and cognitive ToM) subcomponents. Aggregated across 31 studies, the results revealed that, relative to controls, AD is associated with large-sized deficits in both cognitive ToM ( g = 1.09) and affective ToM/cognitive empathy ( g = 0.76). However, no statistical differences were found between the AD participants and controls on affective empathic abilities ( g = 0.36). These data point to a potentially important disconnect between core aspects of social cognitive processing in people with AD. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
Publisher: S. Karger AG
Date: 24-05-2023
DOI: 10.1159/000531193
Abstract: Introduction: Age-related decline in executive functioning has been found to negatively impact one’s capacity to make prudent financial decisions. The broader literature also speaks to the importance of considering interrelatedness in older spouses’ functioning, as these in iduals typically represent one’s longest and closest relationship that involves an extended history of shared experiences. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to provide the first examination of whether older adults’ financial decision-making capacity is impacted not only by their own but also by their partner’s, level of cognitive functioning. Method: Sixty-three heterosexual spousal dyads comprising older adults aged 60–88 participated. The contribution of executive functioning and perceptions of partner’s cognitive decline on financial decision-making behavior and financial competency was assessed through two actor-partner interdependence models. Results: As predicted, for both genders, one’s own executive functioning was predictive of one’s own financial decision-making capacity. However, of particular interest was the finding that for females (but not males) perceiving greater cognitive decline in their spouse predicted their own (greater) financial competency. Conclusion: Examining whether partner interdependence extends to the realm of financial decision-making is not only a theoretically but also practically important question. These data provide initial insights that such a relationship does exist and highlight further important avenues for future research.
Publisher: University of Queensland Library
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.14264/761E0FD
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-01-2022
DOI: 10.1111/BJC.12354
Abstract: Emotion recognition is a fundamental neurocognitive capacity that is a critical predictor of interpersonal function and, in turn, mental health. Although people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often exhibit difficulties recognizing emotions, almost all studies to date have focused on basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust), with little consideration of how more cognitively complex self‐conscious emotions such as contempt, embarrassment, and pride might also be affected. Further, the few studies that have considered self‐conscious emotions have relied on high intensity, static stimuli. The aim of the present study was to therefore provide the first examination of how self‐conscious emotion recognition is affected by PD using a dynamic, dual‐intensity measure that more closely captures how emotion recognition judgements are made in daily life. People with PD ( n = 42) and neurotypical controls ( n = 42) completed a validated measure of self‐conscious facial emotion recognition. For comparative purposes, in addition to a broader clinical test battery, both groups also completed a traditional static emotion recognition measure and a measure of self‐conscious emotional experience. Relative to controls, the PD group did not differ in their capacity to recognize basic emotions but were impaired in their recognition of self‐conscious emotions. These difficulties were associated with elevated negative affect and poorer subjective well‐being. Difficulties recognizing self‐conscious emotions may be more problematic for people with PD than difficulties recognizing basic ones, with implications for interventions focused on helping people with this disorder develop and maintain strong social networks. This is the first direct investigation into how the recognition of self‐conscious emotion is affected in Parkinson’s disease using dynamic, dual‐intensity stimuli, thus providing an important extension to prior literature that has focused solely on basic emotion recognition and/or relied on static, high‐intensity stimuli. Results revealed preserved basic facial emotional recognition coexisting with impairment in all three self‐conscious emotions assessed, therefore suggesting that the latter stimuli type may function as a more sensitive indicator of Parkinson’s disease‐related social cognitive impairment. Problems with self‐conscious emotion recognition in people with Parkinson's disease were associated with poorer broader subjective well‐being and increased negative affect. This aligns with the broader literature linking interpersonal difficulties with poorer clinical outcomes in this cohort
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2021
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUBIOREV.2019.07.011
Abstract: Social perceptual impairment is a common presenting feature of Parkinson's disease (PD) that has the potential to contribute considerably to disease burden. The current study reports a meta-analytic integration of 79 studies which shows that, relative to controls, PD is associated with a moderate emotion recognition deficit (g = -0.57, K = 73), and that this deficit is robust and almost identical across facial and prosodic modalities. However, the magnitude of this impairment does appear to vary as a function of task and emotion type, with deficits generally greatest for identification tasks (g = -0.65, K = 54), and for negative relative to other basic emotions. With respect to clinical variables, dopaminergic medication, deep brain stimulation, and a predominant left side onset of motor symptoms are each associated with greater social perceptual difficulties. However, the magnitude of social perceptual impairment seen for the four atypical parkinsonian conditions is broadly comparable to that associated with PD. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 03-10-2022
Abstract: Social frailty poses a major threat to successful aging, but its social cognitive and psychological well-being correlates remain poorly understood. This cross-sectional study provides initial insights into whether social cognitive difficulties in older age are associated with social frailty, as well as how social frailty is linked to psychological characteristics known to be important for health and well-being. Ninety community-dwelling older adults completed measures of social frailty and social cognition (social perception, theory of mind, affective empathy, and informant-rated social behavior) as well as measures of psychological function known to be important for health and well-being, both positively (resilience and life satisfaction) and negatively (demoralization, social anxiety, and apathy). Measures of cognitive frailty, physical frailty, and depression were also administered to test the specificity of any observed relationships with social frailty. Both affective empathy and social behavior were predictive of increased social frailty, but social behavior emerged as the only unique predictor after controlling for covariates. Social frailty also predicted unique variance in all five measures of psychological well-being, and for three of these measures (demoralization, resilience, and life satisfaction), the effects remained significant even after adjusting for covariates. Findings are discussed in relation to models of socioemotional aging and frailty. Potential mechanisms linking social behavior to social capital in older age are identified, as well as how loss of social resources might both directly and indirectly impact well-being.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-09-2023
DOI: 10.1111/BJC.12390
Abstract: The aim of this study was to examine what factors make people with Parkinson's disease more susceptible to stereotype threat (i.e., the concern of being evaluated in line with negative group‐based stereotypes) and the clinical consequences of this. Forty‐nine people with Parkinson's disease completed a measure of stereotype threat, as well as measures that indexed potential antecedents and clinical consequences of stereotype threat. Younger age and greater communication difficulties emerged as significant predictors of stereotype threat. Higher stereotype threat was also associated with increased emotional distress. These findings are an important first step in understanding stereotype threat in Parkinson's disease and may help to guide the development of intervention and educational efforts aimed at countering its effects.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-06-2018
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Date: 04-2018
DOI: 10.5406/AMERJPSYC.131.1.0041
Abstract: Both alcohol misuse and the externally oriented thinking (EOT) facet of alexithymia are associated with deficits in facial emotion recognition and emotional empathy. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether EOT mediates the association of drinking with these deficits, and to test the hypothesis that impaired facial emotion recognition mediates the relationship between EOT and low emotional empathy, in a nonclinical s le. The s le consisted of 161 men and women who completed an online survey that included the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), Depression Anxiety Stress Scales, Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), and Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). In addition to replicating associations between TAS-20 and other measures, EOT was found to mediate relationships between potential alcohol misuse (as indexed by AUDIT) and facial emotion recognition (as indexed by RMET) as well as emotional empathy (as indexed by the corresponding subscale of the IRI) after controlling for mood and demographic variables. The negative relationship between EOT and emotional empathy was mediated by impaired facial emotion recognition. Present findings point to a likely role of the EOT trait in the reported associations of alcohol misuse with both poor emotion recognition and low emotional empathy, and a mediating role of poor emotion recognition in the relationship of EOT to the latter.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUBIOREV.2019.10.016
Abstract: Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders, and is associated with prominent motor deficits. However, neurocognitive impairment is also a common clinical feature that can contribute greatly to the overall disease burden. In the current study, a meta-analysis was conducted to gain a clearer understanding of how PD affects one of the most functionally important domains of cognition: prospection. The results indicate that, relative to controls, PD is associated with a large deficit in the capacity to engage in planning (g = -0.81, K = 25) and a moderate-sized deficit in prospective memory (g = -0.57, K = 16). Sub-analyses indicated that these deficits are evident for both time and event-based prospective memory, as well as for prospective memory tasks that have relatively limited ecological validity. Significant impairment was also evident for both medicated and non-medicated PD sub-groups, but for planning, these deficits were substantially greater in the unmedicated sub-group. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 04-05-2023
DOI: 10.1017/S1355617722000182
Abstract: While Parkinson’s disease is associated with impairments in many aspects of prospective cognition, no study to date has tested whether these difficulties extend to problems using episodic foresight to guide future-directed behavior. To provide the first examination of whether people with Parkinson’s disease are impaired in their capacity to initiate and apply episodic foresight. People with Parkinson’s disease ( n = 42), and a demographically matched neurotypical comparison group ( n = 42) completed a validated behavioral assessment that met strict criteria for assessing episodic foresight (Virtual Week-Foresight), as well as a broader neurocognitive and clinical test battery. People with Parkinson’s disease were significantly less likely than the comparison group to acquire items that would later allow a problem to be solved and were also less likely to subsequently use these items for problem resolution. These deficits were largely unrelated to performance on other cognitive measures or clinical characteristics of the disorder. The ability to engage in episodic foresight in an adaptive way is compromised in Parkinson’s disease. This appears to be a stable feature of the disorder, and one that is distinct from other clinical symptoms and neurocognitive deficits. It is now critical to establish exactly why these difficulties exist and how they impact on real-life functional capacity.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2021
DOI: 10.1037/BUL0000353
Abstract: Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets that are presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multilevel approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of the assessed task and cue features, indicating that others' eye gaze reliably directs observers' attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets and the cue's facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUBIOREV.2019.12.030
Abstract: In contrast to well-documented deficits in the core social cognitive domains of social perception and theory of mind (ToM), how Parkinson's disease (PD) affects one's empathic capacity remains poorly understood. The current study provides the first meta-analytic review of both ToM and empathy as broad constructs, and also breaks these constructs down to clearly differentiate their overlapping (affective ToM and cognitive empathy) and distinct (affective empathy and cognitive ToM) components. A total of 38 studies contributed to these analyses, with results revealing that, relative to controls, PD is associated with significant and substantial deficits in the domain of cognitive ToM (g = -0.78), as well as the overlapping domains of affective ToM/cognitive empathy (g = -0.69). However, no group differences were identified for affective empathy (g = -0.08). These data speak to there being a potential preservation of affective empathic processing in PD, but because of the relatively limited research base on this topic, recommendations for future research are highlighted.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 08-06-2023
DOI: 10.1017/S1355617722000388
Abstract: While emotional responses experienced in-the-moment appear to remain intact in Parkinson’s disease (PD), no study has tested whether this extends to the prediction of future emotional responses. The present study aimed to provide the first assessment of affective forecasting capacity in this cohort. A positively and negatively valenced affective forecasting task and broader clinical battery were completed by a PD group ( ns = 28 and 37, respectively) and a demographically matched neurotypical control group ( ns = 38 and 39, respectively). No group differences emerged on the two tasks, with the two groups underestimating their level of happiness and overestimating their level of negative affect to a similar degree. Affective forecasting error scores were unrelated to clinical characteristics. Given that affective forecasting relies on self-projection into the future, a skill shown to often be disrupted in this cohort, impairments were expected. However, this study provides initial evidence that this may not be the case. These findings are potentially important given that how we think about and envisage the future affectively is a major determinant of goal-directed behavior. Further work is now needed to establish whether these findings are robust and generalize to other types of affective stimuli.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 12-02-2022
Abstract: Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others’ eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze, has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multi-level approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of all assessed task and cue features, indicating that others’ eye gaze reliably directs observers’ attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not the cue-target Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets and the cue’s facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system.
No related grants have been discovered for Sarah Coundouris.