A development of Freudian metapsychology for schizophrenia

The author states that psychoanalysis has much to contribute to schizophrenia. Beginning with a development of Freudian metapsychology, he addresses the in‐depth psychopathological study of a session (the first on the couch) with a schizophrenic patient who hears voices and feels that he is being watched. Since the symptoms appear at the level of the heard word and the visual image – key to Freudian metapsychology – he delineates a circuit for the word and one for the image, describing a blockage in both and the consequences of these. Furthermore, with regard to the patient's progress, he demonstrates first a quantitative improvement in symptoms, and later qualitative changes in his functioning. He shows how, over a time, functioning is improved in a once‐a‐week on‐the‐couch setting after two years of face‐to‐face treatment.     

Choking under pressure and working memory capacity: When performance pressure reduces fluid intelligence

Recent findings (Beilock & Carr, 2005) have demonstrated that only individuals with a high working memory capacity (WMC) “choke under pressure” on math problems with high working memory demands. This suggests that performance pressure hinders those who are the most qualified to succeed, because it consumes the WMC they usually rely on to achieve superior performance. This puts into question the use of performance in high-pressure situations as a means of distinguishing individuals with lesser or greater WMC potentials. While addressing several limitations of past research, we offer evidence that such choking (1) occurs only in individuals with high WMC, because of their anxiety-ridden perceptions of high-stakes situations, and (2) is not confined to tasks involving acquired skills and knowledge, but encompasses fluid reasoning abilities or intelligence (Gf). These findings have strong implications for assessments of people’s intellectual capacities in academic, clinical, work, and research settings.     

Humans’ folk physics is not enough to explain variations in their tool-using behavior

Two experiments examined adult humans’ folk physics (i.e., their naturally occurring and spontaneous understanding of the physical world) using variations of trap-table problems used to study chimpanzees’ folk physics. When presented with these problems, people unnecessarily avoided retrieving a reward by pulling a rake on the side of a table with a trapping hole—even though it was highly unlikely that the hole would trap the reward. However, when the distance between the reward and the trap was sufficiently large and the distance that the reward had to travel to be retrieved was sufficiently short, people preferred to retrieve a reward by pulling the rake on the side of the table with the trap. These results underscore that behavior during tool-use tasks has many possible causes, only one of which might be a subject’s folk physics.     

Dependency in consumer media relations: an application to the case of teleshopping

• This paper analyses the teleshopping issue in terms of the Media Dependency Theory. The objective is to verify whether dependency relations between television shoppers and the television medium and television shopping are key variables to explain watching and buying behaviour. A model is proposed that integrates the dependency‐viewing‐purchase relation, tested on a sample of Spanish television shoppers. The results of the study confirm the direct relationship between the antecedents of dependency, dependency and future intentions of behaviour.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anxiolytic-like activity of SB-205384 in the elevated plus-maze test in mice

Recent studies point to a major role for alpha2-containing GABA-A receptors in modulating anxiety. However, the possible implication of GABA-A receptors containing the alpha3 subunit on anxiety is less known. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of SB-205384 (0.5-4 mg/kg, i.p.), an alpha3 subunit positive modulator of GABA-A receptor, on anxiety tested in the elevated plus-maze in male mice, using classical and ethological parameters. Mice treated with SB-205384 showed an increase in the frequency of entries and the time spent in open arms, as well as a reduction in the time spent in closed arms, as compared with the control group. A notable increase of "head-dipping" unprotected and a reduction of "stretched-attend posture" protected was also evident. These findings indicate that SB-205384 exhibits an anxiolytic-like profile in the elevated plus-maze test, suggesting that GABA-A receptors which contain the alpha3 subunit might be involved in regulation of anxiety.     

Directional preferences in turning behavior of girls and boys

Turning biases in humans and animals are known to be related to dopaminergic asymmetry between the brain hemispheres. A laboratory method, in which turning preference was evaluated, was adapted based upon the turning of the subject toward a particular sound in a square room. One of the aims of this study was to investigate the reliability of this method with children, and the other aim was to research the turning preference in boys and girls. 31 children between 7 and 13 yr. old volunteered as subjects, and 17 subjects were retested. The subjects tended significantly to turn leftward (60.1%), and fewer girls (53.7%) turned to the left than boys (66.2%). The correlation between the test and the retest was significant (r=.79, p< .01). Most studies have indicated that humans in childhood and adulthood exhibit left-turning preference, but conflicts between the results obtained on different types of rotation tasks have suggested that hemispheric dopaminergic activity might affect preference. That needs study.     

Cortical memory mechanisms and language origins

We have previously proposed that cortical auditory-vocal networks of the monkey brain can be partly homologized with language networks that participate in the phonological loop. In this paper, we suggest that other linguistic phenomena like semantic and syntactic processing also rely on the activation of transient memory networks, which can be compared to active memory networks in the primate. Consequently, short-term cortical memory ensembles that participate in language processing can be phylogenetically tracked to more simple networks present in the primate brain, which became increasingly complex in hominid evolution. This perspective is discussed in the context of two current interpretations of language origins, the "mirror-system hypothesis" and generativist grammar.