Prior experience as a moderator of disaster impact on anxiety symptoms in older adults

As participants in a panel study, 234 older adults were interviewed before, as well as after, serious flooding occurred in southeastern Kentucky. Floods are not uncommon in this area, but these were more widespread than most, and resulted in both previously exposed and newly exposed subsamples of disaster victims. Flood impact was measured at both personal and community levels. With preflood symptoms controlled, there were modest flood effects on both trait anxiety and weather-specific distress in older adults without prior flood experience, but no flood effects in older adults who had been in floods before. Thus, the study provides support for the "inoculation hypothesis" and other conceptualizations that emphasize the advantage of being familiar or experienced with a stressor that is at hand. An implication is that "experienced" victims could be a valuable resource in prevention efforts.     

The influence of a secondary task and type of feedback on adaptation to lateral displacement of the visual array

Summary This experiment was designed to investigate the influence of a secondary attention-demanding force-production task on adaptation to prismatic displacement. Recent suggestions by Finke (1979) lead to the prediction that a secondary task executed during adaptation would interfere with the central component of adaptation (as measured by intermanual transfer), but not the peripheral component (adaptation specific to adapted limb). There were three secondary task conditions (no task, easy task, difficult task). Other factors investigated were: type of feedback (continuous, terminal), hand adapted (right, left) and prism orientation (base right, base left). While negative aftereffect was not influenced by the secondary task manipulation, intermanual transfer results provide partial support for Finke's model. Correlational analyses indicate the importance of task-specific parameters in determining the nature of perceptual-motor adaptation.     

Memory of a speaker's voice: Reaction time to same- or different-voiced letters

Subjects were presented with a sequence of two letters, each letter spoken in either a male or female voice. On each trial, the subject was required to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether the two letters had the same name. Reaction times (RTs) were faster for letters spoken in the same voice for both “same” and “different” responses, even when letters were separated by 8 s. These results are incompatible with the notion of physical and name codes in auditory memory since a “different” response should always be based on a comparison of letter names and should not be influenced by voice quality. It was also found that RTs were not influenced by the phonemic distinctive feature similarity of the letters.     

Preface

Philosophical Studies -     

Couples' Disease: The Experience of Living with a Partner with Chronic Depression

This study is concerned with the impact of chronic depression on partners. Thirteen male and female participants who lived with a partner with chronic depression were interviewed. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings highlighted a need for caregivers to be more centrally involved in their partner's care, given that they face stigma, shifts in role identity, and uncertainty, which all potentially threaten the level of support they can give their partner. In this sense, depression might be described as a “couples disease,” suggesting that couples therapy and group support for partners should be more widely available to help reduce the burden on partners and potentially prevent relationship breakdown.     

The Trait Anxiety Scale for Children: A validation study for European Portuguese children and adolescents

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children is a self-report instrument inspired on the State-Trait theory extended by Spielberger that measures a momentary state of anxiety (state) and a stable tendency to experience anxiety (trait). This study presents an exploratory adaptation of the Trait Scale and provides its psychometric properties for European Portuguese children and adolescents. The influence of sex and age were also explored. Our sample, composed of 402 participants aged 8–14 years, revealed a mean anxiety value of 28.37 (SD = 5.99). As expected, females revealed higher levels of anxiety than boys. Higher anxiety was obtained in our youngest group as compared to the oldest group. The exploratory factor analysis led to retaining only 16-items that presented acceptable adjustment to a one-factorial solution. Good indexes were obtained in the confirmatory analysis. The results also revealed good internal consistency and good test-retest reliability. Our results provide initial evidence that this scale is adequate to measure trait-anxiety in European Portuguese young people.     

Biotechnologies that empower transgender persons to self-actualize as individuals,partners, spouses,and parents are defining new ways to conceive a child: psychological considerations and ethical issues

Today, thanks to biomedical technologies advances, some persons with fertility issues can conceive. Transgender persons benefit also from these advances and can not only actualize their self-identified sexual identities but also experience parenthood. Based on clinical multidisciplinary seminars that gathered child psychiatrists and psychoanalysts interested in the fields of assisted reproduction technology (ART) and gender dysphoria, philosophers interested in bioethics, biologists interested in ART, and endocrinologists interested in pubertal suppression, we explore how new biotechnical advances, whether in gender transition or procreation, could create new ways to conceive a child possible. After reviewing the various medical/surgical techniques for physical gender transition and the current ART options, we discuss how these new ways for persons to self-actualize and to experience parenthood can not only improve the condition of transgender persons (and the human condition as a whole through greater equity) but also introduce some elements of change in the habitual patterns of thinking especially in France. Finally, we discuss the ethical issues that accompany the arrival of these children and provide creative solutions to help society handle, accept, and support the advances made in this area.     

Partial Monotonic Protothetics

This paper has four parts. In the first part, I present Leniewski's protothetics and the complete system provided for that logic by Henkin. The second part presents a generalized notion of partial functions in propositional type theory. In the third part, these partial functions are used to define partial interpretations for protothetics. Finally, I present in the fourth part a complete system for partial protothetics. Completeness is proved by Henkin's method [4] using saturated sets instead of maximally saturated sets. This technique provides a canonical representation of a partial semantic space and it is suggested that this space can be interpreted as an epistemic state of a non-omniscient agent.     

Prehension movements in a patient (AC) with posterior parietal cortex damage and posterior callosal section

Prehension movements of the right hand were recorded in a right-handed man (AC), with an injury to the left posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and with a section of the left half of the splenium. The kinematic analysis of AC's grasping movements in direct and perturbed conditions was compared to that of five control subjects. A novel effect in prehension was revealed--a hemispace effect--in healthy controls only. Movements to the left hemispace were faster, longer, and with a smaller grasp aperture; perturbation of both object position and distance resulted in the attenuation of the direction effect on movement time and the time to velocity peak, with a reverse pattern in the time to maximum grip aperture. Nevertheless, the correlation between transport velocity amplitude and grasp aperture remained stable in both perturbed and non-perturbed movements, reflecting the coordination between reaching and grasping in control subjects. In contrast, transport and grasp, as well as their coordination in both direct and perturbed conditions, were negatively affected by the PPC and splenium lesion in AC, suggesting that transport and grasp rely on two functionally identifiable subsystems.