Impaired emotion recognition in music in Parkinson’s disease

Music has the potential to evoke strong emotions and plays a significant role in the lives of many people. Music might therefore be an ideal medium to assess emotion recognition. We investigated emotion recognition in music in 20 patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 20 matched healthy volunteers. The role of cognitive dysfunction and other disease characteristics in emotion recognition was also evaluated.     

溶栓后PCI,从不行到可行

再灌注治疗STEMI的方法有直接PCI和溶栓。我国各地医疗条件差别较大,只有12%的STEMI患者能够及时接受直接PCI,超过半数的患者仍行溶栓治疗,故溶栓在我国再灌注策略中占有重要地位。虽然溶栓后即刻PCI即易化PCI被证实不如直接PCI,但溶栓并非STEMI治疗的终点。目前国外循证证据显示溶栓后早期转运PCI优于溶栓失败后再转运行补救PCI,值得我国借鉴学习。     

We remember the good things: Age differences in learning and memory

We combined a feedback-based learning task with a recognition memory paradigm to investigate how reward-based learning affects the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recognition memory in younger and older adults. We found that positive, but not negative learning improves memory and results in an increased early ERP old–new effect, which is typically associated with familiarity-based memory. This indicates that reward-based learning supports a fast and relatively automatic memory retrieval process. Furthermore, we found age-related impairments in reward-based learning, whereas memory for the learned information was intact in the elderly, suggesting that declarative memory might be less affected by aging.     

Violence et qualité de vie : étude de l’effet du genre dans un contexte tunisien

This study aims at a better understanding of concrete violence phenomena and their implication, particularly in matters of men's and women's health and quality of life. Our study was carried out in Tunisia with a sample population of 720 male and female adults from different age groups and various socio-economic contexts. Diverse forms of violence (physical, psychological, and sexual) undergone during different phases of life (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood) were measured in a bid to investigate their linkage with the quality of the population's personal life. The results tend to corroborate that the violence one undergoes at a specific moment in one's life affects the quality of one's personal life. It is more particularly women who are the ones most affected and the quality of their personal lives is of a poor quality in comparison with men's.     

Consumer response to tobacco smoke in service settings

• Establishing smoking policies which accommodate customers' smoking preferences is a major problem for restaurants, bars, hotels, and other firms in the service industry. This study is based on the premise that tobacco smoke can be considered a component of both the physical and ambient retail service environment. Because of legal and ethical concerns, the presence or absence of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in two types of eating facilities (bar and fine dining restaurant) was operationalized by the presentation to respondents of photographs which pictured customers in a setting where smoking was either present or absent. The success of this method of manipulation of the treatment variable was assessed with a thought listing procedure. Thought listing responses indicate that both treatments (type of facility and smoking policy) were adequately conveyed by the photographs. Results indicate that cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses were all negatively affected by the presence of tobacco smoke. The conclusion is that managers who permit smoking in their facilities risk losing non‐smoking patrons while smokers are little affected by either the presence or absence of smoke.
• The major contributions of this study include both the exploration of tobacco smoke as part of the retail service environment for eating establishments and the use of thought listings as a manipulation check for variables which were manipulated through use of photographs depicting the treatment conditions.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The co-evolution of tools and minds: cognition and material culture in the hominin lineage

The structuring of our environment to provide cues and reminders for ourselves is common: We leave notes on the fridge, we have a particular place for our keys where we deposit them, making them easy to find. We alter our world to streamline our cognitive tasks. But how did hominins gain this capacity? What pushed our ancestors to structure their physical environment in ways that buffered thinking and began the process of using the world cognitively? I argue that the capacity to engage in these behaviours is a by-product of increased tool investment and tool curation, which in turn was necessary because of increasingly heterogeneous environments. The minute tools are carried and cared for, they begin to undergo selection for added functions, becoming available as cognitive primers and as signals. I explore the trajectory of this co-evolutionary feedback loop of hominins and their tools, and demonstrate the role tools have in shaping our thinking.     

Disregarding Preliminary Information When Rating Job Applicants' Performance: Mission Impossible?1

Firms allocate considerable resources to test job applicants' skills and to ensure that hiring decisions are nondiscriminatory. Interpreting selection output in light of preliminary information may undermine the impartiality of personnel selection decisions. In this study, human resource managers were presented preliminary information about a candidate's performance and asked to rate him according to a detailed assessment‐center report of his performance. We examined several interventions for reducing reliance on preliminary information: retrieving assessment‐center information, generating a rating model, or both. Participants (N = 167) excluded preliminary information from the interventions, but relied on it when rating the candidate. The documented failure to control for the effects of preliminary information on subsequent judgments can contribute to improved selection procedures.