Influence of Symptom Expectancies on Stair-Climbing Performance in CFS: Effect of Study Context

[Shell]

Catastrophising implies making out the results to be worse than they really would be. But most of us facing stairs are well aware of what actually happens when we get to the top. I know for a fact I wouldn't actually be able to climb two flights of stairs, so is that catastrophising or is that just a fact of life for me?
Unless the researchers (I use that word loosely) included previous stair climbing experience in the variables - the data doesn't mean much does it??

btw I am another one with hypertension with sudden BP plunges and POTS. it's pretty yuk really.

 

[Snow Leopard]

Enid - it's the cognitive lot who are behind this - NOT behaviourists.
The whole field of psychology needs to drop the last 40-odd years "worth" of dualist, top-down, cognitive garbage, and return to proper behaviourism - which is good, proper, bottom-up science.

Except they haven't yet observed behavioural changes in CFS patients after CBT.

 

[alex3619]

Except they haven't yet observed behavioural changes in CFS patients after CBT.

Oh, I don't know about that Snow Leopard. They have shown changes in survey answering behaviour. Bye, Alex

 

[August59]

All the references at the bottom are very out dated. There is one or two from the early to mid 2000, but most of them are from the 1990's. It's a wasted study and wasted money.

 

[peggy-sue]

The cognitive lot don't recognise behaviourists or the importance of behavior.
There's even what they describe as "the seminal paper which put the final nail in the coffin of behaviourism".
It's a load of utter garbage written by a pair I called Foetor and Pollution - Fodor and Pylyshyn - however, I'm absolutely DELIGHTED on googling, to find that this cr*p has been refuted.

 

[user9876]

The cognitive lot don't recognise behaviourists or the importance of behavior.
There's even what they describe as "the seminal paper which put the final nail in the coffin of behaviourism".
It's a load of utter garbage written by a pair I called Foetor and Pollution - Fodor and Pylyshyn - however, I'm absolutely DELIGHTED on googling, to find that this cr*p has been refuted.

From memory behaviorism as developed by skinner was the idea that you could study psychology with no recourse to developing models of mental reasoning and internal state. Where as cognitive scientists try to observe the internal state and representations of knowledge and process. They tend to hypothesis a model or pieces of a model and derive an experiment to try to support their hypothesis. For example psycholinguists will postulate models of mental representations and processes for language and inference and then look at times taken to answer questions or eye movements as people read to understand the mental processes involved. An example is with spacial reasoning where people are given a piece of text to read and asked questions over the spacial relationships. Conclusions have been drawn that spacial models are formed in the brain on reading as the time taken to infer spacial relationships not specified in the text are the same as those specified in the text.

I thought Fodor and Pylyshin came from the cognitive science school but I've not followed the research for the last 15 or so years. They produced a paper that critisised a connectionist (neural network) approach to cognitive science since they said that the techniques being used were not capable of forming compositional representations. Many researchers showed that their theories were wrong but there work did help in clarifying the needs of a connectionist approach to cognitive science.

Having said all that I cannot relate the psychology research I have read with what psychiatrists do and how they think. The two seem totally unrelated. I find it particularly surprising that they ignore a lot of the psycologists theory when constructing questionaires on which they base their clinical results. There is some very interesting work Tverskey (who is an economist) about the way you ask questions bringing different answers and how decisions are framed by the recent events that people have thought about (that work might be by Payne and Payne).

 

[peggy-sue]

The professors of my psychology department were cognitive "scientists".

I wandered into a lab one day to find a "researcher" with subjects sitting at computers. They had to press a button to say whether or not a word flashed at them on the screen was a real word or a non-word.

From the errors, this "eminent researcher" told me, he would be able to work out if the "mind" stored the symbols for words, dumped in a bin or in a lexicon.
There is no point in theorising about such stuff in a manner that is completely incompatible with the brain!

Big bins full of word symbols in my head??? ... give me strength!
And who would read the symbols? How many homunculi would be needed?

 

[BEG]

It must be tough for those with high BP and NMH. How do you cope? You need the meds for the high BP but I can't imagine what it does to you when you you are upright. That's got to be the worst.

As regards to steps. I have a stair-lift chair. I want to emphasize to all the ignorant psycho's, I didn't have it installed because I was afraid of climbing stairs and the aftermath. I used to run up and down stairs for excercise. It felt great. No, that chair is there because if it weren't, I'd never see the 2nd story of my home. I physically can't climb the stairs. There is nothing psychological about it.

 

[Doogle]

Free link to this article.
Influence of Symptom Expectancies on Stair-Climbing Performance in CFS: Effect of Study Context
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d1732014xm733xx3/fulltext.pdf

 

[Dolphin]

I have just read the full text now.

This study largely relates to the speed of doing a task. I think kinesiophobia if it is a problem is more a problem if people don't do an activity, rather than if they do it a bit slower than others. You might not be an olympic athlete if you do relatively demanding things (like going up and down 32 steps) a little slower than others, but from a health point of view, it shouldn't make that much of a difference I would have thought: it's sedentary activity/lack of activity that is the big problem.

Also, I think intense activity that can be a big problem in ME. I remember reading in Dr. Anne Macintyre's book that a man had a relapse that put him in bed for 3 months from sprinting for 100 metres to catch a bus (or something like that). Similarly I think if one gets over-hyper, from pushing oneself intensely, it can be hard to get one's heartbeat down and generally calm down in this illness.

If one looks at it from the way some US researchers are looking at it, doing such an activity a little slower might be like ensuring that the activity remains aerobic rather than going over the anaerobic threshold.

I don't see why it should be particularly held against somebody with the illness if, when faced with a relatively daunting task they might not have tried before, they might ease back a bit to ensure they do it, without overdoing it. Indeed, going in with a gun ho attitude and going too quickly, seems a less optimum way of doing things if one wants to ensure maximum activity levels across the day (rather than "boom and bust" which they claim is bad in other occasions).

 

[alex3619]

It looks like the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine has an impact factor of 0.9, placing it just slightly ahead of a newsletter with results of the high school science fair.

I have been thinking about this. I don't know that a low impact factor is important if the field in question is small. Its impact could be huge in that field, while being ignored everywhere else.

 

[alex3619]

The professors of my psychology department were cognitive "scientists".

I wandered into a lab one day to find a "researcher" with subjects sitting at computers. They had to press a button to say whether or not a word flashed at them on the screen was a real word or a non-word.

From the errors, this "eminent researcher" told me, he would be able to work out if the "mind" stored the symbols for words, dumped in a bin or in a lexicon.
There is no point in theorising about such stuff in a manner that is completely incompatible with the brain!

Big bins full of word symbols in my head??? ... give me strength!
And who would read the symbols? How many homunculi would be needed?

Shades of Searle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

 

[Seven7]

Here is my experience, My scale varies per the day a lot i go from 3 to 7. When I start the flight of steps I dont think that I am not gonna make it but half way up, I know if it will be an easy climb or not. The more the legs start feeling like jello and i get like muscle fatigue then I know the type of things I can do, and doing a second flight of stairs is not on my list!!

The same with shower, I can tell you when I start the day and a shower is easy I know I am doing better than when shower is a big chore. We have little things that give us warnings. So it is not fatalistic view, I know how to read my body by now.

 

[Shell]

Here is my experience, My scale varies per the day a lot i go from 3 to 7. When I start the flight of steps I dont think that I am not gonna make it but half way up, I know if it will be an easy climb or not. The more the legs start feeling like jello and i get like muscle fatigue then I know the type of things I can do, and doing a second flight of stairs is not on my list!!

The same with shower, I can tell you when I start the day and a shower is easy I know I am doing better than when shower is a big chore. We have little things that give us warnings. So it is not fatalistic view, I know how to read my body by now.

Inester will you please stop talking common sense, it has no place in modern science. Shame on you

 

[user9876]

Shades of Searle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Searle just never made any sense to me. I always preferred McCarthy's thermostat argument. Steve Harnard had an interesting varient of the chinese room argument where he talks about the symbol grounding problems suggesting you need the physical sensation to make language semantics anymore than manipulating symbols about symbols. Although I don't know how all these fit into mind - body duelism.

 

[user9876]

I have been thinking about this. I don't know that a low impact factor is important if the field in question is small. Its impact could be huge in that field, while being ignored everywhere else.

Impact factors seem important with the university research review process. But I'm not convinced of their value some journals seem to have quite low impact ratings but are well read within their small target community.

 

[maryb]

Here is my experience, My scale varies per the day a lot i go from 3 to 7. When I start the flight of steps I dont think that I am not gonna make it but half way up, I know if it will be an easy climb or not. The more the legs start feeling like jello and i get like muscle fatigue then I know the type of things I can do, and doing a second flight of stairs is not on my list!!

The same with shower, I can tell you when I start the day and a shower is easy I know I am doing better than when shower is a big chore. We have little things that give us warnings. So it is not fatalistic view, I know how to read my body by now.

Honestly sometimes I just sit here nodding like pot dog. My daily experience is totally the same, I know if I can go to the shops/for a short walk etc later in the day on how my legs feel on the first stair climb of the day, and for me too its half way up that gives me clue, jello or heavy log like legs and its a no. Shower the same.
We have the same illness

Stupid doctors talking about pacing to increase fitness, why don't they listen? we do know our own bodies, for me its walk to gate, tree, bridge, field - all 4 and I'm punching the air, I may do this for 5 days and then the next day even that gate is hard to do. Fitness/de-conditioning is not related to ME.

 

[Katherine]

Honestly sometimes I just sit here nodding like pot dog. My daily experience is totally the same, I know if I can go to the shops/for a short walk etc later in the day on how my legs feel on the first stair climb of the day, and for me too its half way up that gives me clue, jello or heavy log like legs and its a no. Shower the same.
We have the same illness

Stupid doctors talking about pacing to increase fitness, why don't they listen? we do know our own bodies, for me its walk to gate, tree, bridge, field - all 4 and I'm punching the air, I may do this for 5 days and then the next day even that gate is hard to do. Fitness/de-conditioning is not related to ME.

Sure, but I don't think it's ever advisable to be sedentary in any illness. I always felt I benefited from keeping active even though it was hard at times. I suppose every case is different. Even though I suffered profound exhaustion, I never lay flat for a whole day for example. I try to keep reassessing my physical limits.

 

[taniaaust1]

Another ridiculous study... if they just had to do a study such as this, I would of loved them to use a control group of MS patients to compare us to.

If all the money that is wasted on stupid studies towards decent studies.. maybe we'd know exactly what this illness was and have a cure.

 

[Dolphin]

Sure, but I don't think it's ever advisable to be sedentary in any illness. I always felt I benefited from keeping active even though it was hard at times. I suppose every case is different. Even though I suffered profound exhaustion, I never lay flat for a whole day for example. I try to keep reassessing my physical limits.

As long as you recognise that some patients with ME don't have a choice.