Artificial syntactic violations activate Broca’s region

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this study was to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present study. Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45) or Broca’s region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca’s region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529].     

Long-term effects of lifestyle behavior change in coronary artery disease: effects on recurrent coronary events after percutaneous coronary intervention.

This study evaluated the effects of a behaviorally oriented cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention program on lifestyle changes and on coronary recurrence rates. Patients recently treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) were randomized to an intervention with an aggressive focus on lifestyle changes (smoking, diet, exercise, and stress; n=46) or to a standard-care control group (n=42). Results showed that the intervention group had significantly larger overall lifestyle changes than the control group after 12, 24, 36, and 60 months. The intervention group had significantly lower rates of all coronary events (acute myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass graft, PCI, cardiac death; 30.4% vs. 53.7%), and of cardiovascular mortality (2.2% vs. 14.6%). The need for future large-scale and long-term evaluations of lifestyle-oriented secondary prevention interventions of this kind is emphasized.     

The face of wrath: The role of features and configurations in conveying social threat

We examined the role of single features and feature configurations in the effect of schematic faces on rated threat. A total of 101 medical students rated their emotional impression of schematic facial stimuli using semantic differential scales (Activity, Negative Valence, and Potency). In different parts of the experiment, the ratings concerned single features, eyebrow‐mouth configurations, or complete faces. Although eyebrows emerged as the overall most important feature, the effect of features was modulated by configuration. Simple configurations of eyebrows and mouth appeared to convey threat and nonthreat in a way highly similar to that of complete faces. In most cases, the configurations of eyebrows and mouth could significantly predict the effect of the complete faces.     

Radical Orthodoxy on Catholicism,Protestantism and Liberalism/Liberality: On the Use of Historical Narratives and Quantitative Methods in Political Theology

Political theology assumes or depends, implicitly or explicitly, on historical narratives and empirical claims. For theologians making historical, socio‐cultural and economic claims an interdisciplinary use of several different methods is helpful, including a theologically and philosophically informed combination of historical narratives with social and economic quantitative methods. This argument is fleshed out by a critical analysis of historical and sociological claims about Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Protestantism in relation to liberalism and liberality, which are central to the argument of John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s book The Politics of Virtue. They find the roots of an increasingly untenable abstract atomistic liberalism both in late medieval and Protestant (especially Calvinist) theology as well as in the dissenting nonconforming traditions that worked for the disestablishment of the Church. This very disestablishment is part of what creates modern liberalism. This article both sketches a partly alternative history to the one Milbank and Pabst provide, pointing to the role of creative minorities in certain dissenting Protestant churches and movements for the emergence of the type of liberality Milbank and Pabst defend, and tests these claims against quantitative social science studies on democracy, social trust, and corruption.