Positive Personality Traits as Predictors of Psychotherapy Progress

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - The objectives of this paper were to study if the traits of the Positive Personality Model (PPM; de la Iglesia and Castro Solano, in Front Psychol 9:2025,...     

Philosophy of medicine in 2021

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Age-Specific Effects of Lexical–Semantic Networks on Word Production

The lexical–semantic organization of the mental lexicon is bound to change across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the effects of lexical–semantic factors on word processing are usually based on studies enrolling young adult cohorts. The current study aims to investigate to what extent age-specific semantic organization predicts performance in referential word production over the lifespan, from school-age children to older adults. In Study 1, we conducted a free semantic association task with participants from six age-groups (ranging from 10 to 80 years old) to compute measures that capture age-specific properties of the mental lexicon across the lifespan. These measures relate to lifespan changes in the Available Richness of the mental lexicon and in the lexical–semantic Network Prototypicality of concrete words. In Study 2, we used the collected data to predict performance in a picture-naming task on a new group of participants within the same age-groups as for Study 1. The results show that age-specific semantic Available Richness and Network Prototypicality affect word production speed while the semantic variables collected only in young adults do not. A richer and more prototypical semantic network across subjects from a given age-group is associated with faster word production speed. The current results indicate that age-specific semantic organization is crucial to predict lexical–semantic behaviors across the lifespan. Similarly, these results also provide cues to the understanding of the lexical–semantic properties of the mental lexicon and to lexical selection in referential tasks.     

Perception of pictorial eye gaze by baboons (Papio papio)

Pictorial faces looking left or right were presented to baboons (Papio papio) before the display of a target letter in the left or right hemifield of a monitor screen. Baboons had to provide go or no-go responses taking into account the identity of the target letter. The 1st 6 experiments showed no reliable effect of eye gaze on discrimination speed, using either schematic gazes or pictures of real gazes. Experiment 7 showed that eye gazes facilitated target processing when eye cues were perfect predictors of target location. Findings suggest that baboons do not spontaneously process eye-gaze direction but can learn to do so if the gaze has a predictive value. Implications of these findings on baboons' perspective-taking abilities are discussed.     

Transfer of newly acquired stimulus valence between identities in dissociative identity disorder (DID)

Patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) frequently report episodes of interidentity amnesia, that is amnesia for events experienced by other identities. The goal of the present experiment was to test the implicit transfer of trauma-related information between identities in DID. We hypothesized that whereas declarative information may transfer from one identity to another, the emotional connotation of the memory may be dissociated, especially in the case of negative, trauma-related emotional valence. An evaluative conditioning procedure was combined with an affective priming procedure, both performed by different identities. In the evaluative conditioning procedure, previously neutral stimuli come to refer to a negative or positive connotation. The affective priming procedure was used to test the transfer of this acquired valence to an identity reporting interidentity amnesia. Results indicated activation of stimulus valence in the affective priming task, that is transfer of emotional material between identities.     

Biased language use in stereotype maintenance: the role of encoding and goals

In 4 studies, the authors investigated the relative impact of biased encoding of information and communication goals on biased language use. A category label (linguistic expectancy bias, Study 1) or a group label (linguistic intergroup bias, Study 2) was presented either before or after a story that participants were asked to communicate. Biased language use only emerged when participants learned about the group membership of the actor or the category label before hearing the story. However, communication goals had an effect on language use at the retrieval stage, independent of encoding (Studies 3 and 4). Although communication goal effects seemed to overwhelm encoding effects, encoding still influenced language use under externally imposed time pressure (Study 3) and self-imposed time constraints (Study 4). This research reaffirms the importance of both cognitive and communicative processes in stereotype maintenance and highlights the conditions under which they each operate.     

Interidentity amnesia for neutral,episodic information in dissociative identity disorder

Interidentity amnesia is considered a hallmark of dissociative identity disorder (DID) in clinical practice. In this study, objective methods of testing episodic memory transfer between identities were used. Tests of both recall (interference paradigm) and recognition were used. A sample of 31 DID patients was included. Additionally, 50 control subjects participated, half functioning as normal controls and the other half simulating interidentity amnesia. Twenty-one patients subjectively reported complete one-way amnesia for the learning episode. However, objectively, neither recall nor recognition scores of patients were different from those of normal controls. It is suggested that clinical models of amnesia in DID may be specified to exclude episodic memory impairments for emotionally neutral material.