Painfulness decreases the discriminability of electric shock

Two experiments were designed to investigate the relation between the reported painfulness and the discriminability of pairs of electric shocks for which the ratio between the higher and the lower intensity was held constant. In both experiments, subjects first gave category ratings of the painfulness of single shocks in the range 40 to 4.8 mA. Then, in a discrimination experiment, they were required to identify the stronger of a pair of intensities presented in succession. The proportion of correct responses (Experiment 1) or the proportion of area under the receiver operating characteristic (Experiment 2) increased between a low-intensity pairing and a medium-intensity pairing and decreased between a medium-intensity pairing and a high-intensity pairing for subjects who rated the highest intensities as strongly painful. Subjects who gave moderate- or weak-pain ratings for the high-intensity shocks showed no significant increase or decrease in accuracy between the medium- and high-intensity pairings. Time-order errors were observed in Experiment 1. The proportion of trials on which the second stimulus of the pair was identified as the stronger increased monotonically as a function of stimulus magnitude. The results are discussed in the context of psychological assessment of analgesic procedures.     

Religion as a support component in the health behavior of Black Americans

The use of religion as a support component in an effort to change the health behavior of Black Americans is historical and pervasive. The Black church's role as a social agent in the Black community has been a stabilizing factor in its overall health status. Political and social barriers that have deprived Black people of proper health care have been overcome through religious intervention. This intervention has been offered in the hope that proper health behavior would prevail. This article addresses the role of the Black church as an institution that uses different components of social support for the people in its surrounding community. Historical, theoretical, and health behavior are addressed in an effort to provide an explanation for the need to understand the marriage between social support and the Black church. In addition, related literature that provides support for the arguments of this article is also addressed.     

Depressed mothers’ infants show less negative affect during non-contingent interactions

Infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers were videotaped interacting with their mothers in the [Nadel, J., Carchon, I., Kervella, C., Marcelli, D., & Reserbat-Plantey, D. (1999). Report: Expectancies for social contingency in 2-month-olds. Developmental Science, 2, 164–173] paradigm which consists of three segments including: (1) a free play, contingent interaction, (2) a non-contingent replay of the mothers’ behavior that had been videotaped during the first segment, and (3) a return to a free play, contingent interaction. As compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers showed less negative change (less increase in frowning) in their behavior during the non-contingent replay segment. This finding was interpreted as the infants of depressed mothers being more accustomed to non-contingent behavior in their mothers, thus experiencing less violation of expectancy in this situation.     

Parenting as a Mechanism of Change in Psychosocial Treatment for Youth with ADHD,Predominantly Inattentive Presentation

We investigated whether parenting and child behavior improve following psychosocial treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Predominantly Inattentive Presentation (ADHD-I) and whether parenting improvements mediate child outcomes. We analyzed data from a randomized clinical trial investigating the efficacy of a multicomponent psychosocial intervention (Child Life and Attention Skills, CLAS, n = 74) in comparison to Parent-Focused Treatment (PFT, n = 74) and treatment as usual (TAU, n = 51) for youth with ADHD-I (average child age = 8.6 years, range 7–11 years, 58 % boys). Child and parent/family functioning were assessed prior to treatment, immediately following treatment, and at follow-up into the subsequent school year using parent and teacher reports of inattention, organization, social skills, academic competency (teachers only), parenting daily hassles, and positive and negative parenting behaviors (parents only). Both treatment groups improved on negative parenting and home impairment, but only CLAS families also improved on positive parenting as well as academic impairment. Improvements in positive and negative parenting mediated treatment effects on child impairment independent of improvements in child inattention, implicating parenting as an important mechanism of change in psychosocial treatment for ADHD-I. Further, whereas parent-focused training produces improvements in negative parenting and impairment at home for children with ADHD-I, a multicomponent approach (incorporating child skills training and teacher consultation) more consistently produces improvements at school and in positive parenting, which may contribute to improvements in social skills into the next school year.     

Thought experiments in personal identity: A dialogue with Beck,Wagner and Wilkes

In a recent series of papers, Beck and Wagner have been arguing about the general role that thought experiments can play in the debate on personal identity, showing their disagreement about the famous criticisms that Wilkes’ launched against their use. In this article I come back to Wilkes’ criticisms to show that her position is deeply problematic. If we adopt instead the mental model account of thought experiments, we can accommodate Wilkes’ criticisms and justify the use of thought experiments in the debate of personal identity. This will allow us to see why Beck and Wagner were both half right and half wrong in their discussion.     

Working memory affects false memory production for emotional events

Whereas a link between working memory (WM) and memory distortions has been demonstrated, its influence on emotional false memories is unclear. In two experiments, a verbal WM task and a false memory paradigm for negative, positive or neutral events were employed. In Experiment 1, we investigated individual differences in verbal WM and found that the interaction between valence and WM predicted false recognition, with negative and positive material protecting high WM individuals against false remembering; the beneficial effect of negative material disappeared in low WM participants. In Experiment 2, we lowered the WM capacity of half of the participants with a double task request, which led to an overall increase in false memories; furthermore, consistent with Experiment 1, the increase in negative false memories was larger than that of neutral or positive ones. It is concluded that WM plays a critical role in determining false memory production, specifically influencing the processing of negative material.     

Mothers’ Prementalizing Psychic Functioning and Reactive Attachment Disorder: Two Clinical Cases

This article explores the relationship between maternal reflective functioning (MRF) and Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) from both a theoretical and clinical perspective. A new scoring system that evaluates the predominance in the mother of prementalizing modes of psychic functioning (psychic equivalence and pretend mode) has been developed and applied to the Parent Development Interview-Revised. The theoretical foundations of this system are presented and its scoring criteria are briefly described. The protocols of two mothers whose children suffer from RAD are analyzed using the RF scoring system (Slade, Bernbach et al., 2005) and the new scoring system developed for this study (Leroux & Terradas, 2012) in order to demonstrate their complementary use. Some theoretical and clinical thoughts about the impact of MRF on the development of RAD are revealed. This being a small-scale exploratory study, further research is needed to establish the psychometric properties of this new coding system.     

A mechanism for elliptic-like bursting and synchronization of bursts in a map-based neuron network

A system consisting of two Rulkov map-based neurons coupled through reciprocal electrical synapses as a simple phenomenological example is discussed. When the electrical coupling is excitatory, the square-wave bursting can be well predicted by the bifurcation analysis of a comparatively simple low-dimensional subsystem embedded in the invariant manifold. While, when the synapses are inhibitory due to the artificial electrical coupling, a fast–slow analysis is carried out by treating the two slow variables as two different bifurcation parameters. The main result of this paper is to present a mechanism for the occurrence of a kind of special elliptic bursting. The mechanism for this kind of elliptic-like bursting is due to the interaction between two chaotic oscillations with different amplitudes. Moreover, the generation of antiphase synchronization of networks lies in the different switching orders between two pairs of different chaotic oscillations corresponding to the first neuron and the second neuron, respectively.     

Electrophysiological differences in the processing of affective information in words and pictures

It is generally assumed that affective picture viewing is related to higher levels of physiological arousal than is the reading of emotional words. However, this assertion is based mainly on studies in which the processing of either words or pictures has been investigated under heterogenic conditions. Positive, negative, relaxing, neutral, and background (stimulus fragments) words and pictures were presented to subjects in two experiments under equivalent experimental conditions. In Experiment 1, neutral words elicited an enhanced late positive component (LPC) that was associated with an increased difficulty in discriminating neutral from background stimuli. In Experiment 2, high-arousing pictures elicited an enhanced early negativity and LPC that were related to a facilitated processing for these stimuli. Thus, it seems that under some circumstances, the processing of affective information captures attention only with more biologically relevant stimuli. Also, these data might be better interpreted on the basis of those models that postulate a different access to affective information for words and pictures.