Correlations between Dual-Pathway White Matter Alterations and Language Impairment in Patients with Aphasia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Neuropsychology Review - While converging evidence suggests linguistic roles of white matter tracts, detailed associations between white matter alterations of dual pathways and language abilities...     

Attentional characteristics of different types of individuals with high self-esteem in self-threatening situations

The high self-esteem (HSE) heterogeneity hypothesis provides a new research perspective for investigating differences in the quantity and quality of different types of self-esteem. The present study adopted the emotional Stroop paradigm and the odd-one-out search task to explore how individuals with different types of self-esteem process social information in self-threatening situations. The results showed that individuals with different types of self-esteem had an attentional bias toward negative information and had different attentional biases toward angry faces in self-threatening situations. Individuals with fragile HSE and low self-esteem showed facilitated attention to angry faces and had difficulty drawing attention away from them; secure HSE individuals only showed difficulty disengaging attention from angry faces.

     

Integrated learning communities as a peer support initiative for first year university students

Peer Mentoring schemes tend to be developed as retention strategies, however, they can also serve other purposes (psychosocial or career-related). However, evidence of the effectiveness of these presents mixed results and less is known about the horizontal peer support schemes which may help students capitalize on existing peer relationships. We developed an integrated learning communities (ILC) peer support scheme, building on the theoretical principles of social identity theory, which we embedded within our existing teaching framework and designed functional activities. Collective activities were undertaken to promote the processes of social identity with the intention that these may foster social and academic integration experiences. This intervention was undertaken with an entire cohort of first year undergraduate psychology students. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a self-selected sample of these students (N = 17). Thematic analysis revealed two main themes, each with two sub-themes. These were: “Divergent Experiences” with the sub-themes of “dependent on people” and “types of support”, and “Good idea in principle” with the sub-themes of “Theory ≠ Practice” and “Dependent on student engagement”. Although identifying with a peer group was not transparent in the interviews, the existence of a peer support scheme was perceived positively by students which might explain the success of the newly developed student-led Psychology Society. Indeed, this Psychology Society can provide a lasting framework for further amplification of the student voice. We conclude that our embedded ILC was both feasible and potentially valuable, but it is crucial for the peer support approach to have transactional significance.     

What Spirituality Means for Patients and Families in Health Care

This research focuses on the spiritual care experiences of patients and families at a hospital in Australia. Twenty-four patients and 10 family members were interviewed. Results indicate the importance of relatedness: being treated as a person, reminded of your capabilities and conversations about what matters. Maintaining contact with friends and family, sustaining religious and spiritual practices, music therapy and pet therapy were also significant and contact with the natural world and shared activities. The results indicate the importance of spirituality offered through pastoral care, and that all those involved in health care can contribute to the spiritually nurturing environment that reinforces healing.

     

Decision-makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves

People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' preferences: none at all, general information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a specific partner's preference. We found that participants' decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent's, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants did, however, adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information.     

Towards Transparency by Design for Artificial Intelligence

Science and Engineering Ethics - In this article, we develop the concept of Transparency by Design that serves as practical guidance in helping promote the beneficial functions of transparency...     

Gibbons exploit information about what a competitor can see

Animal Cognition - How much nonhuman animals understand about seeing has been the focus of comparative cognition research for decades. Many social primates (and other species) are sensitive to cues...     

Insensitivity to reward shifts in zebrafish (Danio rerio) and implications for assessing affective states

Animal Cognition - Theory and empirical findings predict that individuals in a negative affective state are more sensitive to unexpected reward loss and less sensitive to unexpected reward gain...     

The lexical constituency model: some implications of research on Chinese for general theories of reading

The authors examine the implications of research on Chinese for theories of reading and propose the lexical constituency model as a general framework for word reading across writing systems. Word identities are defined by 3 interlinked constituents (orthographic, phonological, and semantic). The implemented model simulates the time course of graphic, phonological, and semantic priming effects, including immediate graphic facilitation followed by graphic inhibition with simultaneous phonological facilitation, a pattern unique to the Chinese writing system. Pseudocharacter primes produced only facilitation, supporting the model's assumption that lexical thresholds determine phonological and semantic, but not graphic, effects. More generally, both universal reading processes and writing system constraints exist. Although phonology is universal, its activation process depends on how the writing system structures graphic units.     

Life in school: narratives of resiliency among Vietnamese-Canadian youths

This qualitative study examined eleven Vietnamese refugees' self-reported experiences of discrimination in urban schools in British Columbia, Canada. The students reported experiencing or witnessing racial conflict, harassment, and unfair treatment. The boys reported experiencing more racism than did the girls. However, most of the students felt confident that racism would not present insurmountable obstacles for them in the future.