Enhancing challenged students' recognition of mathematical relations through differential outcomes training

Previous studies have reported that the differential outcomes procedure enhances learning and memory in special populations with cognitive deficits (see Goeters, Blakely, & Poling, 1992, for a review). In the present study we extend these findings to healthy adults who were asked to discriminate between the symbols " > " and " < " in mathematical statements. In Experiment 1, the performance of participants who showed difficulties in discriminating between these symbols was better (shorter response times) for the differential outcomes condition than for the nondifferential outcomes condition. In Experiment 2, the difficulty of the task was increased by using signed decimal numbers. Similar to Experiment 1, participants who initially had difficulties in discriminating between the symbols showed better performance (higher accuracy) for the differential outcomes condition than for the nondifferential outcomes condition, but only when both numbers were negative. These findings suggest that the differential outcomes procedure can be used to improve performance of challenged healthy adults on discrimination tasks with mathematical symbols and relations.     

Moving Beyond Computational Cognitivism: Understanding Intentionality,Intersubjectivity and Ecology of Mind

The emergence of the Cognitive Sciences, in the middle of the 20th Century, was initially based on an abstract model of the mind: the computer metaphor. The human mind was understood in analogy to the digital computer, as a rule-based, symbol processor. As a consequence, the human being was envisioned as logically-rationally guided, radically disembodied and isolated from culture. Over the last few decades, several disciplines, such as Biology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience, have begun to address the study of intentionality, intersubjectivity and natural cognition. Searching for a better understanding of these complex issues, a number of approaches have been developed with the promise of capturing the specific qualities of human cognition, radically omitted from a computationalist view of mind. Nevertheless, since these research programs are rather recent, concrete methodological designs and empirical approaches in the form of experimentally testable hypotheses are still scarce. This special issue brings together several perspectives in order to propose alternative research approaches in the topics of Intentionality, Intersubjectivity and Ecology of Mind. We believe it is necessary to discuss and advance towards explicit empirical frames in the form of actual experiments, specific predictions and formal models. The essays presented here constitute an attempt to move in this direction, with the specific aim of reconsidering the study of some forgotten properties of brain and mind.     

Clinical Mutual Attunement and the Development of Therapeutic Process: A Preliminary Study

Despite the identification of many factors that play a central role in the development of the psychotherapy process, there is still a lack of evidence about the basic relational mechanisms that pave the way to its working. In this pilot study, we focus on nonverbal microprocessual attunement as the basic mechanism grounding the displacing of discrete factors in shaping the clinical process. Two single sessions of two short-term psychodynamic treatments, selected respectively from a good- and a poor-outcome treatment, have been coded in terms of patient and therapist speech rate, coordination in ruptures, resolution of the therapeutic alliance, and patient's displayed thinking processes. Two dynamic structural equation models focusing on clinical attunement as a factor able to activate the interplay of the assessed clinical dimensions have been theoretically designed and tested in both cases. The driven theoretical structural equation models fit the data, suggesting a different role of nonverbal attunement as a moderating factor. The obtained results are consistent with the hypothesis claiming that a good-outcome psychotherapy session is characterized by a mechanism of clinical attunement that enforces the therapist–patient relationship and promotes the integration of formal thinking processes that affect emotional and cognitive domains.     

Academic performance,popularity, and depression predict adolescent substance use

Eighty-nine high school seniors completed a questionnaire on their feelings and activities, including their use of drugs. Adolescents with a low grade point average, high popularity, and high depression were more likely to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and smoke marijuana than were their peers. Cigarette and alcohol use predicted marijuana use, which in turn predicted cocaine use.     

Trends in Hanging and Firearm Suicide Rates in Australia: Substitution of Method?

This study examined the increase in the rate of suicide by hanging and an apparently simultaneous decrease in the rate of suicide by firearm as hypothetical evidence that Australian males have substituted one method of suicide for another. Trends in hanging and firearm suicide rates were examined from 1975 to 1998 for all Australian males and from 1971 to 1998 for a subset of Australian male youth, as well as a group of Australian males aged over 64 years at the time of their death. When the firearm suicide rate for Australian males declined the hanging rate increased simultaneously, with no statistical difference in the rate of change of the two methods. A similar pattern of simultaneous divergence in hanging and firearm suicide rates of a 15- to 24-year-old subgroup occurred at a not dissimilar rate over a longer time period. Rates of suicide by hanging were found to have begun increasing prior to the decline in firearm suicide. The declining rate of firearm suicide in the 15- to 24-year-old subgroup coincided with an increase in the overall suicide rate. Relationships between trends in hanging and firearm suicide differed between states and between urban and non-urban areas within Queensland, with the firearm suicide rate falling more rapidly in urban areas, especially following the introductions of restrictions to weapon purchases. Individual suicide method choice may be related to independent changes in the social acceptability of each method, as well as to an increasing prevalence of suicide in younger males, who are more likely to use the hanging method. The functioning and effect of social acceptability remains unclear, however. Intervention and prevention strategies should focus on challenging the social acceptability of hanging, especially among males aged 15 to 24 years.     

Risk factors and stress variables that differentiate depressed from nondepressed pregnant women

Eight hundred ten pregnant women (N=340 depressed and N=470 nondepressed) were recruited at prenatal clinics at around 20 weeks gestational age. The women were diagnosed as depressed based on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D) and the Structured Clinical Interview for Depression (SCID). They were interviewed on several demographic variables, risk factors and stress questionnaires. On average, the depressed pregnant women were younger, had lower education levels and socioeconomic status and were less often married. Fewer of the depressed women and their partners were happy when they were told they were pregnant, a greater number of the depressed women experienced a stressful situation during pregnancy, more of the depressed women were prescribed antibiotics during pregnancy, the depressed women had less optimal obstetric complications scores, and a greater percentage of them delivered prematurely. Finally, the scores of the depressed pregnant women on the stress questionnaires suggested greater depression (CES-D), anxiety (STAI), anger (STAXI), pregnancy anxieties (PAAS) and daily hassles.     

Unconscious symmetrical inferences: A role of consciousness in event integration

Explicit and implicit learning have been attributed to different learning processes that create different types of knowledge structures. Consistent with that claim, our study provides evidence that people integrate stimulus events differently when consciously aware versus unaware of the relationship between the events. In a first, acquisition phase participants sorted words into two categories (A and B), which were fully predicted by task-irrelevant primes-the labels of two other, semantically unrelated categories (C and D). In a second, test phase participants performed a lexical decision task, in which all word stimuli stemmed from the previous prime categories (C and D) and the (now nonpredictive) primes were the labels of the previous target categories (A and B). Reliable priming effects in the second phase demonstrated that bidirectional associations between the respective categories had been formed in the acquisition phase (A<-->C and B<-->D), but these effects were found only in participants that were unaware of the relationship between the categories! We suggest that unconscious, implicit learning of event relationships results in the rather unsophisticated integration (i.e., bidirectional association) of the underlying event representations, whereas explicit learning takes the meaning of the order of the events into account, and thus creates unidirectional associations.     

Phosphorylation state of CREB in the rat hippocampus: a molecular switch between spatial novelty and spatial familiarity?

The activation of cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) after a learning experience is a common feature in the formation of several associative memories. We recently demonstrated that the increase in the hippocampal phosphorylated CREB (pCREB) levels 1 h after a short exploration of an open field (OF) was associated to detection of spatial novelty and was not related to the memory formation of habituation in this non-associative learning paradigm. Moreover, after a long training of three OF sessions, hippocampal pCREB levels were below to that observed in control rats. The present results show that such decrease does not correlate with memory retrieval or improvement in long-term memory of habituation. Instead, it is associated with the familiarity to the arena. Our experiments revealed that the relevant variable to induce CREB deactivation was the prolonged exploration of the arena (30 min). A 15 min OF exploration was ineffective. Furthermore, the last 5 min period of a prolonged exploration was crucial to change CREB phosphorylation state: when exploration took place in a novel arena the level of pCREB increased; in contrast, when it was performed in the familiar OF, pCREB levels decreased. Taken as a whole, our results suggest that CREB phosphorylation state in the hippocampus switches in response to exposure to a novel or to a familiar spatial environment.     

The worried mind: autonomic and prefrontal activation during worrying

To study the psychophysiological correlates of worrying, the authors recorded heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), skin conductance level, and alpha electroencephalographic asymmetry in healthy males during baseline, relaxation, worry induction, and anticipation of an impromptu speech task. Compared with baseline, relaxation, and anticipation, worrying was associated with greater heart rate and lower RSA. Worrying was further characterized by higher skin conductance levels compared with baseline but lower levels than during anticipation. Finally, worrying was associated with relatively greater left frontal activity compared with anticipation. Trait public speaking anxiety was positively correlated with left frontal activity during worrying. These results support the notion that worrying is a unique emotional state that is different from fearful anticipation.     

Aggressive adolescents benefit from massage therapy

Seventeen aggressive adolescents were randomly assigned to a massage therapy group or a relaxation therapy group to receive 20-minute therapy sessions, twice a week for five weeks. The massaged adolescents had lower anxiety after the first and last sessions. By the end of the study, they also reported feeling less hostile and they were perceived by their parents as being less aggressive. Significant differences were not found for the adolescents who were assigned to the relaxation group.