Fathers’ Views and Understanding of their Roles in Families with a Child with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

This study explored how fathers of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) perceived and understood the roles they had within their family over the course of their child’s illness and treatment. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with five fathers. Transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). The major themes that emerged were: adjusting to the diagnosis; the experience of maternal gate-keeping; striving for normalization; experiences of giving and receiving support. Overall, the fathers perceived themselves as having significant responsibility in helping their child and family cope with the illness experience. Clinical implications, including the need for professionals to recognize and more openly acknowledge the father’s position, are considered.

Causal conjunction fallacies: The roles of causal strength and mental resources

In two experiments we tested the prediction derived from Tversky and Kahneman's (1983) work on the causal conjunction fallacy that the strength of the causal connection between constituent events directly affects the magnitude of the causal conjunction fallacy. We also explored whether any effects of perceived causal strength were due to graded output from heuristic Type 1 reasoning processes or the result of analytic Type 2 reasoning processes. As predicted, Experiment 1 demonstrated that fallacy rates were higher for strongly than for weakly related conjunctions. Weakly related conjunctions in turn attracted higher rates of fallacious responding than did unrelated conjunctions. Experiment 2 showed that a concurrent memory load increased rates of fallacious responding for strongly related but not for weakly related conjunctions. We interpret these results as showing that manipulations of the strength of the perceived causal relationship between the conjuncts result in graded output from heuristic reasoning process and that additional mental resources are required to suppress strong heuristic output.

Roles for the subiculum in spatial information processing, memory, motivation and the temporal control of behaviour

The subiculum is in a pivotal position governing the output of the hippocampal formation. Despite this, it is a rather under-explored and sometimes ignored structure. Here, we discuss recent data indicating that the subiculum participates in a wide range of neurocognitive functions and processes. Some of the functions of subiculum are relatively well-known-these include providing a relatively coarse representation of space and participating in, and supporting certain aspects of, memory (particularly in the dynamic bridging of temporal intervals). The subiculum also participates in a wide variety of other neurocognitive functions too. however. Much less well-known are roles for the subiculum, and particularly the ventral subiculum, in the response to fear, stress and anxiety, and in the generation of motivated behaviour (particularly the behaviour that underlies drug addiction and the response to reward). There is an emerging suggestion that the subiculum participates in the temporal control of behaviour. It is notable that these latter findings have emerged from a consideration of instrumental behaviour using operant techniques; it may well be the case that the use of the watermaze or similar spatial tasks to assess subicular function (on the presumption that its functions are very similar to the hippocampus proper) has obscured rather than revealed neurocognitive functions of subiculum. The anatomy of subiculum suggests it participates in a rather subtle fashion in a very broad range of functions, rather than in a relatively more isolated fashion in a narrower range of functions, as might be the case for