The bit in the middle and why it’s important: a computational analysis of the linguistic features of body paragraphs

This study examines the relationship between the linguistic characteristics of body paragraphs of student essays and the total number of paragraphs in the essays. Results indicate a significant relationship between the total number of paragraphs and a variety of linguistic characteristics known to affect student essay scores. These linguistic characteristics (e.g., semantic overlap, syntactic complexity) contribute to two underlying factors (i.e., textual cohesion and difficulty) that are used as dependent variables in mixed-effect models. Results suggest that student essays with 5-8 paragraphs tend to be more linguistically consistent than student essays with 3, 4, and 9 paragraphs. Essays with totals of 5-8 paragraphs, considered by many educators to contain an optimal number of paragraphs, may include functionally and structurally similar paragraphs. These findings could aid writing researchers and educators in obtaining a clearer view of the relationship between the total number of paragraphs comprising an essay and the linguistic characteristics that affect essay evaluation. Consequently, writing interventions may become better equipped to pinpoint student difficulties and facilitate student writing skills by providing more detailed and informed feedback.     

Prime Filters, Normality and Irreducibility in Lattices

We recall some notions introduced and developed by António Aniceto Monteiro, and show how these notions have been used and generalised, thus establishing a direct and indirect influence of Monteiro??s work that extends to this day.     

On the syndrome of the "spare limb": one case

We describe a case of a brain-damaged patient who had a peculiar bodily illusion which could not be labelled an hallucination but seemed somatognosically and phenomenologically similar to the phantom limb without amputation. The patient, who showed left hemiplegia, felt a third upper limb (without seeing it) which he himself defined as "spare." The spare limb was not deformed; it could be moved and controlled by the patient, and there was no sensation of pain. The patient did not show psychopathological or cognitive disorders. A possible interpretation of the phenomenon is as a "phantom movement" of the paralysed limb: the mental representation of the movement of the limb was dissociated from the bodily representation of his own limb and so was still present in his consciousness despite the paralysis.     

Decoding speech prosody: do music lessons help?

Three experiments revealed that music lessons promote sensitivity to emotions conveyed by speech prosody. After hearing semantically neutral utterances spoken with emotional (i.e., happy, sad, fearful, or angry) prosody, or tone sequences that mimicked the utterances' prosody, participants identified the emotion conveyed. In Experiment 1 (n=20), musically trained adults performed better than untrained adults. In Experiment 2 (n=56), musically trained adults outperformed untrained adults at identifying sadness, fear, or neutral emotion. In Experiment 3 (n=43), 6-year-olds were tested after being randomly assigned to 1 year of keyboard, vocal, drama, or no lessons. The keyboard group performed equivalently to the drama group and better than the no-lessons group at identifying anger or fear.     

Identifying faking bad on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent with Mexican adolescents

This study examined the extent to which the validity scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent identified Mexican adolescents who were instructed to fake bad. Validity scales data were used to differentiate between nonclinical adolescents instructed to fake bad and both clinical and nonclinical adolescents who received standard instructions. Participants were 59 male and 87 female Mexican high school students and 59 male and 87 female Mexican adolescents from clinical settings. This is the first study onfaking with adolescents in Mexico. The F, Fl, and F2 Scales and the F-K index discriminated adequately between the three different groups. Results were similar to those previously reportedfor adults and adolescents in Mexico and the United States. High positive and negative predictive powers and overall hit rates were obtained in this study. Higher cut scores were needed to discriminate between the groups of girls than between the groups of boys.     

Pharmacological and physiological aspects of sexual exhaustion in male rats

The present article reviews the current findings on the interesting phenomenon of sexual satiety. Knut Larsson in 1956 reported on the development of sexual exhaustion in the male rat after repeated copulation. We have studied the process and found the following results. (1) One day after 4 hours of ad libitum copulation, two-thirds of the population showed complete inhibition of sexual behavior, while the other third displayed a single ejaculatory series from which they did not recover. (2) Several pharmacological treatments, including 8-OH-DPAT, yohimbine, naloxone and naltrexone, reverse this sexual satiety, indicating that the noradrenergic, serotonergic and opiate systems are involved in this process. Indeed, direct neurochemical determinations showed changes in various neurotransmitters during sexual exhaustion. (3) Given enough stimulation, by changing the stimulus female, sexual satiety was prevented, suggesting that there are motivational components of the sexual inhibition that characterizes sexual exhaustion. (4) The GABA antagonist bicuculline, or the electrical stimulation of the medial preoptic area, did not reverse sexual exhaustion. These data suggest, on the one hand, that sexual exhaustion and the postejaculatory interval (which is shortened by bicuculline administration) are not mediated by similar mechanisms and, on the other, that the medial preoptic area does not regulate sexual satiety. (5) The androgen receptor density in brain areas closely related to the expression of masculine sexual behavior, such as the medial preoptic nucleus, was drastically reduced in sexually exhausted animals. Such reduction was specific to certain brain areas and was not related to changes in the levels of androgens. These results suggest that changes in brain androgen receptors account for the inhibition of sexual behavior present during sexual exhaustion. (6) The recovery process of sexual satiety after 4 hours of ad libitum copulation reveals that, after 4 days, only 63% of the males are able to show sexual behavior while after 7 days all animals display copulatory activity.     

She Needs to See it to be it: The Importance of Same-Gender Athletic Role Models

Sex Roles - In four studies, we examined the importance of gender-matched athletic role models for women. Although both women and men may benefit most from exposure to high profile athletes in...     

Retirement Adjustment Quality: Optimism and Self-Efficacy as Antecedents of Resource Accumulation

The resource-based dynamic perspective posits that retirement adjustment quality is a direct result of an individual’s access to valuable resources during transition and in the post-retirement phase, while at the same time underscoring the need to explore the distal antecedents of adjustment quality. The present study aims to examine how distal antecedents—dispositional traits and motivational variables—influence older workers’ resource accumulation and, ultimately, how it affects retirement adjustment quality, under the resource-based dynamic perspective and Hobfoll’s resource theory. A three-wave study was designed with older Spanish workers (N = 455), who were still in active employment at time 1 and time 2 but who had retired within the last 4 months at time 3. Dispositional traits like optimism have predictive power as a gauge of resource accumulation in the short run, although not all of them were fully significant. Some unexpected findings are the limited impact of personal finances on retirement adjustment quality and the absolutely nugatory influence of cognitive resources on quality of life. The present study employs a widely validated measure of retirement adjustment quality, which should ensure comparability of findings with evidence obtained from other studies.