Does Maternal Prenatal Stress Adversely Affect the Child’s Learning and Memory at Age Six?

Prenatal maternal stress has been shown to affect postnatal development in animals and humans. In animals, the morphology and function of the offspring’s hippocampus is negatively affected by prenatal maternal stress. The present study prospectively investigated the influence of prenatal maternal stress on learning and memory of 112 children (50 boys, 62 girls, Age: M=6.7 years, SD=8.4 months), with the Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL). Maternal stress levels were determined three times during pregnancy by self-report questionnaires. Furthermore, maternal saliva cortisol samples were used as a measure of hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning. Results of hierarchical multivariate regression analyses showed that maternal life events measured during the first part of pregnancy were negatively associated with the child’s attention/concentration index, while controlling for overall IQ, gender, and postnatal stress. No associations were found between prenatal maternal cortisol and the offspring’s learning and memory.     

Catharsis: Psychoanalysis and the theatre

The notion of catharsis, in relation to tragedy, was introduced by Aristotle in his work Poetics. Over the centuries, Aristotle's innovative and enigmatic reference to this process has been widely commented on and given rise to intense controversy. In 1895, Freud and Breuer reconsidered this notion in their Studies on Hysteria, where they present the so-called cathartic therapeutic method. It is not, however, this aspect of psychoanalytical theory that the author of this article seeks to elucidate: drawing on a detailed study of the references to tragic catharsis in the work of Freud and Lacan, the author proposes to examine their implications for psychoanalytic treatment.With specific reference to Freud's article Psychopathic characters on the stage (1905) and Lacan's commentary on Sophocles' Antigone (1960), the author argues that catharsis is to be understood not so much as a mechanism of discharge linked to abreaction, but rather as the actual analytic process itself during which the Subject is 'unveiled' and thus faced with the enigma of his own desire.     

Psycholexical Value Factors in Spain and Their Relation with Personality Traits

The aim of the present study is to determine the structure of values in the Spanish population and its relation to the Big Five personality traits. Using a psycholexical approach, 566 words were identified as values and administered to a sample of participants who were instructed to rate the extent to which they were guided by each value. Principal components analysis revealed seven factors: Social Recognition, Competence, Love and Happiness, Benevolence, Idealism, Equilibrium and Family. The results show that there is no complete equivalence between these factors and those obtained in previous studies. However, the results are congruent with those obtained in other studies as far as the relation between values and personality traits is concerned. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

'Little Hans': From his phobic episode to becoming an opera director

‘Little Hans’ is one of the most highly commented cases in the psychoanalytic literature. His work as an opera director from 1925 in Europe and then in the United States of America is much less well known. This may seem especially surprising given that Freud very soon detects Hans’s emerging interest in this subject. Yet Freud does not mention it either in 1909 when he reports the case, or when Hans visits him in 1922, even though Hans had already decided to become an opera director at this point. The author of this article endeavours to show how this artistic choice could be understood as a way of accommodating, in a double transference relationship with Freud and with his father, the unanalysed residue of the ‘Krawall’ (a term invented by Hans) and ‘the black thing’, both of which appeared during the phobic period.     

Failure mechanism in porous materials under compression: crackling noise in mesoporous SiO2

The failure mechanism of porous materials under uniaxial stress has been investigated experimentally. Microporous SiO₂, Vycor, has been subjected to slowly increasing compressive uniaxial stress with stress rates between 0.2 and 12.2?kPa/s. With increasing stress the strain changes stepwise with acoustic emission correlated with each volume collapse. The acoustic emission followed the characteristics of ‘crackling noise’ with a power law distribution over an exceptionally large interval of 6 decades at the slowest stress rate. The power law exponent is ?1.39. Possible applications in mining industry and others are discussed.     

Does maternal prenatal stress adversely affect the child's learning and memory at age six?

Prenatal maternal stress has been shown to affect postnatal development in animals and humans. In animals, the morphology and function of the offspring's hippocampus is negatively affected by prenatal maternal stress. The present study prospectively investigated the influence of prenatal maternal stress on learning and memory of 112 children (50 boys, 62 girls, Age: M=6.7 years, SD=8.4 months), with the Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL). Maternal stress levels were determined three times during pregnancy by self-report questionnaires. Furthermore, maternal saliva cortisol samples were used as a measure of hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning. Results of hierarchical multivariate regression analyses showed that maternal life events measured during the first part of pregnancy were negatively associated with the child's attention/concentration index, while controlling for overall IQ, gender, and postnatal stress. No associations were found between prenatal maternal cortisol and the offspring's learning and memory.     

The judgment comes with healing in its wings: A call for rational detachment

The necessity to criticize Pellegrino and Thomasma's ‘A philosophical basis of medical practice’ on all methodological levels of scientific practice is defended; a transcendental critique such as their approach is inconsistent with the possibility of science, a theoretical refutation of their work which is internally inconsistent due to its phenomenological/pragmatic stand, an empirical critique of their readings of historical and sociological findings, and a rejection of the possible application of their approach as its social effects sustain or enhance ideological notions about health, healing and the medical practice. Due to the scope of the work under criticism and the breadth of our critique, we cannot give a detailed account on every issue mentioned here.