Motion and color processing in school-age children and adults: an ERP study

Stimuli designed to selectively elicit motion or color processing were used in a developmental event-related potential study with adults and children aged 6, 7 and 8. A positivity at posterior site INZ (P-INZ) was greater to motion stimuli only in adults. The P1 and N1 were larger to color stimuli in both adults and children, but earlier to motion stimuli only in adults. Finally, the P2 was larger to color stimuli in adults but larger to motion stimuli in children, and earlier to motion stimuli only in children. The findings across components indicate development from middle childhood to adulthood in aspects of both the motion and color processing systems indexed by this paradigm, but are consistent with an hypothesis of a more protracted time course of development for the motion as compared to the color processing system.     

Role of motor imitation in traversability of surfaces by walking infants.

The ecological approach by Gibson stressed the role of visual cues in toddlers' locomotor activities. In particular, a rigid surface offers more traversability "affordances" to walkers (13-16 mo. old) than a deformable surface. On the other hand, imitation plays a relevant role in human behaviors. In our study a group of 17 walking infants (12-19 mo.) were asked to choose between locomoting on a rigid versus a deformable surface after having seen an older child walking on the deformable surface. A control group of 19 infants were asked to do the same task without having seen a model. The task was repeated three times. No relevant differences appeared between the two groups as to the choice of surfaces: the rigid surface was preferred by both groups. Some slight differences in the behavior of the experimental group were seen as a result of observing the model. Clearly, however, social stimulus. such as the sight of an older child performing a specific task, does not overcome the affordances which induce infants not to walk on the deformable surface.     

Stress‐related exhaustion disorder – clinical manifestation of burnout? A review of assessment methods,sleep impairments,cognitive disturbances,and neuro‐biological and physiological changes in clinical burnout

The aim of this paper was to provide an overview of the literature on clinically significant burnout, focusing on its assessment, associations with sleep disturbances, cognitive impairments, as well as neurobiological and physiological correlates. Fifty‐nine English language articles and six book chapters were included. The results indicate that exhaustion disorder (ED), as described in the Swedish version of the International Classification of Diseases, seems to be the most valid clinical equivalent of burnout. The data supports the notion that sleep impairments are causative and maintaining factors for this condition. Patients with clinical burnout/ED suffer from cognitive impairments in the areas of memory and executive functioning. The studies on neuro‐biological mechanisms have reported functional uncoupling of networks relating the limbic system to the pre‐frontal cortex, and decreased volumes of structures within the basal ganglia. Although there is a growing body of literature on the physiological correlates of clinical burnout/ED, there is to date no biomarker for this condition. More studies on the role of sleep disturbances, cognitive impairments, and neurobiological and physiological correlates in clinical burnout/ED are warranted.     

Disability and Life Satisfaction in Italy

During the last decades, the socio-economic policy agenda has devoted an increasing attention to the inclusion of disabled people into society. It follows that understanding the drivers of life outcomes and conditions of disabled people is essential to analyze the sources of disadvantaged positions.This paper brings evidence on the predictors of life satisfaction of disabled people in Italy, focusing on four specific dimensions (relations with relatives and friends, economic conditions, and leisure time) and analyzing information on people with functional limitations and health problems, as provided by the 2011 ISTAT survey.Estimation results show that household structure, health and disability status affect life satisfaction more significantly than personal and income variables. Education attainments significantly affect satisfaction with the economic conditions. In addition, support in daily activities may increase satisfaction with economic conditions and leisure time, suggesting that providing non-monetary support would be effective in increasing life satisfaction, especially in those domains requiring freedom of movement. Finally, we find that older disabled people are, on average, more satisfied than younger disabled people, while gender is relevant when interacted with the household type.     

ANOTHER HISTORY: FAMILY,NATION AND THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE EGYPTIAN JEWISH PAST IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI LITERATURE

In this article I will focus on how Egyptian Jews who migrated to Israel after 1948 and their descendants remember Egypt and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis Israeli society and culture. I will base my analysis on three semi-autobiographical novels published between 2003 and 2011 by Israeli writers of Egyptian descent belonging to three subsequent generations: Baderekh la'itztadion by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Kol tze‘adenu by Ronit Matalon, and Yolanda by Moshe Sakal. By analysing specific passages from these books, I will argue that even after the decline of the Jewish presence in Egypt in the 1950s, the cultural and social worlds to which their families belonged did not vanish completely but, rather, struggled for survival at a very intimate level. This ultimately produced a multifaceted archive in which the written narrative of the family's past became an alternative homeland where historical memories and fictional details are inextricably blended.     

Stress-Induced Cardiomyopathy and Psychological Wellbeing 1 Year After an Acute Event

Stress cardiomyopathy (SCM) typically presents similar symptoms to acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, these symptoms differ when it comes to a transient and completely reversible myocardial dysfunction, which is frequently precipitated by acute stressful events, occurring in the absence of plaque rupture and coronary thrombosis. The purpose of this study was to investigate health-related quality of life (HRQL) and emotional burden subsequent to cardiac events in SCM patients. Thirty-seven SCM patients were compared with 37 matched AMI patients. All selected patients were assessed for HRQL and psychological distress at baseline and 1-year after the acute event. After controlling for covariates, scores on the Psychological General Well Being Index indicated that depressed mood had increased in both groups, but the increase for SCM patients was greater than for AMI patients. The AMI group displayed greater decreases than the SCM in physical quality of life and in total cardiac-related health quality of life. The percentage of patients with psychological distress increased significantly more in the SCM group than in the AMI group, and it made no difference whether the triggering event was emotional or physical. Our results suggest that, despite the more favorable medical prognosis of SCM patients, their cardiac condition being transient and resolving completely in few weeks, the psychological impact associated with their condition is more negative 1 year later than in the case of AMI patients whose medical prognosis is less favorable, and this difference is independent of type of trigger event.     

Correction to: Effects of Parental Acceptance-Rejection on Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors: A Longitudinal,Multicultural Study

Journal of Child and Family Studies -     

A Computational Evaluation of Two Models of Retrieval Processes in Sentence Processing in Aphasia

Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependency completion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation-based model and the direct-access model (DA; McElree, 2000). These models' predictive performance is compared using data from individuals with aphasia (IWAs) and control participants. The data are from a self-paced listening task involving subject and object relative clauses. The relative predictive performance of the models is evaluated using k-fold cross-validation. For both IWAs and controls, the activation-based model furnishes a somewhat better quantitative fit to the data than the DA. Model comparisons using Bayes factors show that, assuming an activation-based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs, although slowed syntax and lexical delayed access may also play a role. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired and unimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing.     

War experiences and emerging rights claims in postwar former Yugoslavia: The role of generalized conflict exposure and collective anomie

Violent conflicts have often been observed to generate social environments in which human rights violations are more easily tolerated and legitimized. However, recent research has documented cases in which communities exposed to violence react with increased condemnations of human rights violations. In this article, we focus on the distinction between generalized and particularized violence. Our findings show that, in the postwar ex-Yugoslavia context, when local communities have been exposed to violence that was generalized across different ethno-national groups, they strongly condemn human rights violations. Multilevel structural equation models show that the relationship between generalized victimization and the condemnation of human rights violations is mediated by a collective sense of anomie. The processes that move from collective exposure to violence to the collective reaffirmation of human rights are more likely to unfold in communities where violence transcended group boundaries than in communities where particular groups were disproportionately affected by the violence.     

Modeling Misretrieval and Feature Substitution in Agreement Attraction: A Computational Evaluation

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model.