Cell-mediated immune hypersensitivity is stronger in the left side of the body than the right in healthy young subjects.

More frequent appearance of herpes zoster infection on the left side of the body has been noted. In women, breast cancer occurs more frequently on the left side. It has been suggested that the left neocortex is involved in neuroimmunomodulation via the dopaminergic system. In this study, our purpose was to investigate the possible difference in cell-mediated hypersensitivity between right and left body sides using the tuberculin test with 22 male and 36 female healthy high school students. In the present study, the cell-mediated hypersensitivity was higher in the left side of the body than the right. This difference was slightly more apparent in the girls and may be related to brain asymmetry in neuroimmunomodulation.     

Blood lactate recovery and perceived readiness to start a new run in middle-distance runners during interval training.

The aim of this study was to establish to what extent ratings of perceived readiness to start a new run are dependent on recovery of blood lactate and heart rate during passive recovery between interval runs (4 x 2000 m) of increasing intensity by 15 male college-level middle-distance runners. The Perceived Readiness Rating scale was administered at each minute of recovery. Blood lactate concentration was measured immediately after runs at Min. 3 of recovery after the first and second runs, and, in addition, at Min. 6 of recovery after the third and fourth runs. Heart rate was recorded continuously during the runs and during recovery. The obtained correlation between blood lactate recovery and perceived readiness ratings after the third and fourth runs were -.36 and -.56, respectively (p<.05). Consequently, blood lactate concentration recovery appears to influence the middle-distance runners' perceived readiness estimation to begin a new run. The Perceived Readiness Rating applied by us appears useful in the training of middle-distance runners.     

Zum Matching bei ambulanter Psychotherapie mit Psychosepatienten

In an outpatient setting the matching of patient and psychotherapist is essential as there is – in most cases – no protecting institutional frame. Because of the disturbance in his symbolic function the psychotic patient tends to act out his basic conflict between self- and object-related tendencies. As the patient strives for differentiation and separation, naturally, struggle is involved on various levels. The therapist must feel up to all aspects of this struggle including the more concrete ones. Also psychotic patients always induce an intricate interplay of narcissistic transference and countertransference. The psychotherapist should have the capacity to gain distance from his narcissistic countertransference, which as a rule should find support through supervision. It is necessary that in the patient there exist remnants of relatedness to his fellow-men and also a minimum amount of ego-strength and structure that enables him to cope with a cycle of more or less periodical appointments.     

Examination of adolescents' negative thoughts, depressive mood, and family environment.

The focus of this study was the relationship among adolescents' negative thoughts, depressive mood, and family environment. Three hundred eleven students (aged 16 and 17 years) in public and private schools served as subjects. They were administered the Family Environment Scale, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory. Family cohesion was found to be related to the degree of negative thoughts and depressive mood of the adolescents, but perceived control within the family was not.     

The effect of familiarity on visual-search performance: Evidence for learned basic features

In this study, the effects of familiarity on visual search were investigated. To avoid any confounding between familiarity and visual-feature differences between item pairs,Ns and mirror-Ns were presented as target and as distractors to a group of German participants and to a group of Slavic participants. For the Germans onlyN was familiar, whereas for the Slavs bothN and mirror-N were familiar. The results show that search was difficult only when the Germans had to find anN among mirror-Ns. In any other case, search was efficient. Therefore, our results demonstrate that, contrary to earlier suggestions, search for a familiar item among familiar distractors can be easy. This supports the hypothesis that familiarity improves distractor grouping. However, the data are also compatible with the idea that letters are standard or basic features, which implies that basic features can be learned.     

Is there an internal association of numbers to hands? The task set influences the nature of the SNARC effect

The SNARC effect refers to the association of smaller numbers with the left and of larger numbers with the right side of extracorporal space (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). We tested the assumption that, in addition to these associations, numbers are also related to participants' hands. We report two experiments with vertically arranged buttons in which the nature of the SNARC effect depended on whether the task set was button or hand related: In the first case, a vertical location-related SNARC effect occurred, whereas in the second a hand-related SNARC effect was found. Our third experiment confirmed that space-related number representations dominate the SNARC effect when the buttons are arranged horizontally. We concluded that both effector- and space-related number representations can influence and modify the SNARC effect.     

Automatic activation of task-related representations in task shifting

Stimulus displays consisting of a target and a distractor can produce task conflicts when target and distractor are associated with different tasks. The present study examined whether these stimulus-induced task conflicts are affected by priming the irrelevant task or by increasing the salience of the distractor. In a series of three experiments, we employed a task-shifting paradigm in which subjects had to apply one of two judgments to either the global or the local level of a hierarchical stimulus. In each block, the target level and the judgment were either constant or mixed. Stimulus-induced judgment conflicts were measured by comparing performance for stimuli associated with two judgments and stimuli associated with only one. It turned out that only mixing the target level and not mixing the judgment increased the conflicts. These findings indicate that only the salience of the distractor modulates stimulus-induced conflicts.     

Tone sequences with conflicting fundamental pitch and timbre changes are heard differently by musicians and nonmusicians

An Auditory Ambiguity Test (AAT) was taken twice by nonmusicians, musical amateurs, and professional musicians. The AAT comprised different tone pairs, presented in both within-pair orders, in which overtone spectra rising in pitch were associated with missing fundamental frequencies (F0) falling in pitch, and vice versa. The F0 interval ranged from 2 to 9 semitones. The participants were instructed to decide whether the perceived pitch went up or down; no information was provided on the ambiguity of the stimuli. The majority of professionals classified the pitch changes according to F0, even at the smallest interval. By contrast, most nonmusicians classified according to the overtone spectra, except in the case of the largest interval. Amateurs ranged in between. A plausible explanation for the systematic group differences is that musical practice systematically shifted the perceptual focus from spectral toward missing-F0 pitch, although alternative explanations such as different genetic dispositions of musicians and nonmusicians cannot be ruled out. ((c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).