Personality characteristics in primary benzodiazepine-dependent patients: Comparison with controls and polydrug users

The present study applied Karolinska Scales of Personality (KSP) to study (i) if patients with benzodiazepine dependence have a characteristic personality profile, (ii) if the personality characteristics in patients with benzodiazepine dependence differ from those of polydrug users and normal controls, (iii) if differences in treatment outcome existed between the groups, and (iv) if the possible difference in treatment outcome was associated with any particular personality characteristic shown by the patients. The personality characteristics of primary benzodiazepine dependent patients (BDZ) and a group of polydrug users (MIX) were studied initially (during the first week in project as an inpatient) and approximately one year after drug discontinuation, and a comparison was made with healthy controls on both test occasions. The results showed that the personality of both groups of patients differed significantly from the Controls in the following characteristics: Detachment, Socialization, Somatic Anxiety, Muscular Tension, Psychic Anxiety, and Psychasthenia. Significant differences existed between the polydrug and benzodiazepine users in Somatic and Psychic Anxiety as well as in Socialization. The MIX group differed significantly from the BDZ group and from the Controls in Suspicion. Results of treatment outcome indicated that the benzodiazepine dependent patients were significantly more successful in quitting their drug use compared to polydrug users. Further, the results demonstrated that patients scoring high in the investigated personality characteristics are those who fail the treatment goal of quitting their drug use, especially the patients with a high level of anxiety and detachment.     

Public events and flashbulb memories in Parkinson's disease

Public events and Flashbulb memories were investigated in 12 non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 12 controls. Knowledge of public events and flashbulbs memories were assessed using a Famous Events Test (EVE 30). Contributions of semantic, episodic, as well as executive functioning and anterograde memory were examined. Results primarily showed that the performances of patients with PD were lower than these of controls in 4 tasks: free recall, specific questions, dating events and date recognition. They also had difficulties in finding the temporal order of 8 events. In contrast, the PD group benefited from events recognition themselves to the same extent as the controls. Secondly, the recall of flashbulb memories (FBM) was lower in the PD group than in the controls. Finally, correlations appeared in PD between the detailed recall of the events with the "recall" abilities of the MATTIS scale, possibly reflect an impairment in rebuilding memories. A positive correlation is also observed with the initiation score of the MATTIS (executive component), suggesting that the difficulties of rebuilding can be related to a dysfunction in accessing information because of a certain degree of frontal amnesia.     

Assessment of self-conscious emotions: a Swedish psychometric and structure evaluation of the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA)

The Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA) is a well-established scenario-based questionnaire assessing self-conscious emotions, such as shame and guilt, which have been shown to be differentially associated with a variety of functional, motivational, behavioral and health outcomes. The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties and internal structure of a Swedish version of TOSCA in a sample of 361 healthy adults. The psychometric properties and internal consistency of the Swedish version were at level with the original US TOSCA version for shame, guilt and detachment. The internal structure of the Swedish version was acceptable for shame, guilt and detachment but contained shortcomings in assessment of externalization.     

Individual differences in phonological learning and verbal STM span

A relationship between phonological short-term memory tasks (e.g., nonword repetition, digit span) and vocabulary learning in both experimental and real-life conditions has been reported in numerous studies. A mechanism that would explain this correlation is, however, not known. The present study explores the possibility that it is the quality of phonological representations that affects both short-term recall and long-term learning of novel wordlike items. In Experiment 1, groups with relatively good and poor span for pseudowords were established. The good group was found to perform better at explicit memory tasks tapping the incidental learning of a limited stimulus pool used in an auditory immediate serial pseudoword recall task. In Experiment 2, the results of Experiment 1 were replicated when experience of correct recall was controlled. In Experiment 3, the immediate recall performance of the good group was found to benefit more than that of the poor group from syllable repetition within stimulus pools. It is concluded that the efficiency of a process that creates phonological representations is related both to short-term capacity for verbal items, and to long-term phonological learning of the structure of novel phonological items.     

Time for Values: Responding Educationally to the Call from the Past

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from the past by returning to (a) the moral character of our existence and (b) our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not (yet) common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study.     

Spatial interference and response control in sequence learning: the role of explicit knowledge

In several sequence learning studies it has been suggested that response control shifts from the stimuli to some internal representation (i.e., motor program) through the learning process. The main questions addressed in this paper are whether this control shift is related to explicit knowledge and whether the formation of these internal representations depends on the stimulus attributes. In one experiment we compared the learning of a response sequence triggered by either spatial location or location symbol (left-right) by using a serial response task (SRT). Symbols were presented at either a centered or random location. The results showed that in the symbolic conditions the shift of response control correlated with the emergence of explicit knowledge. Only participants with complete explicit knowledge seemed to learn the sequence structure beyond probabilistic information (response time "RT" did not depend on the frequency of the response). Moreover, these participants were able to overcome, when needed, spatial interference (RT was the same for both spatially corresponding and non-corresponding trials). However, when spatial location was relevant, RT was always faster, especially for more frequent responses. These results suggest that the relevant stimulus dimension (location or symbol) seems to engage different sequence learning mechanisms.