Psychology & Health

Objective: Parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers) make decisions for their children's medical care. However, many caregivers of children with asthma struggle to understand their child's illness. We used the psychometric paradigm to investigate how caregivers conceptualize, or mentally represent, asthma triggers and symptoms and how these representations are linked to perceived asthma exacerbation risk. Methods: We asked 377 caregivers of children with asthma across the U.S. to rate 20 triggers or 20 symptoms along 15 characteristics. Caregivers also indicated their perceived risk of their child having an asthma exacerbation (hereafter interpersonal risk perceptions). Using principal components analysis, we extracted key dimensions underlying caregivers' ratings on the characteristics. Then we related the triggers' and symptoms' scores on the dimensions to caregivers' interpersonal risk perceptions. Results: Interpersonal risk perceptions were higher for triggers with high ratings for the dimensions severe and relevant, and negative affect-yet manageable, but not chronic-yet unpredictable. Risk perceptions were also higher for symptoms with high ratings for the dimensions severe and unpredictable, and relevant and common, but not self-blame or manageable despite unknown cause. Conclusion: By identifying key dimensions underlying caregivers' mental representations of asthma triggers and symptoms, these findings can inform a new approach to asthma education.

Objectives: Previous operationalisations of bedtime procrastination were incongruent with its definition. We addressed this gap in knowledge by testing a new operationalisation that incorporates the three necessary and sufficient conditions of bedtime procrastination. We investigate the motivational antecedents of bedtime procrastination in daily life with this new operationalisation. Methods and Measures: Participants (n = 336) self-reported goal motives, chronotype, and typical sleep metrics on a Sunday evening. For the following 7-days, participants self-assessed their 24-hour sleep metrics, goal-regulatory variables, and psychological needs. Results: The bedtime discrepancy scores from the new assessment correlate in expected direction with sleep quantity and chronotype. However, our findings pertaining to motivational correlates of bedtime procrastination showed low compatibility with our expectations. Discussion: We introduced a new operationalisation of bedtime procrastination that aligns with its definition, and which can complement existing approaches that primarily encompass trait-like elements. Incorporating all three necessary and sufficient conditions of bedtime procrastination at the daily level suggests previous prevalence estimates of this sleep-related behaviour obtained with trait-like operationalisations may be overestimated. The low compatibility between our expectations regarding the motivational antecedents of bedtime procrastination suggest a need for congruence between the levels at which antecedents are captured with this sleep-related behaviour.

Asynchronous multimodal telerehabilitation has not only demonstrated efficacy on physical variables in post-COVID patients, but also improves psychosocial variables such as depression and stress, compared to conventional formats. In this study, it has also been shown to improve social support, which indicates that a multimodal approach with rehab plus therapeutic education has great potential for the improvement of these patients.