Associations between financial strain and the diurnal salivary cortisol secretion of long-term unemployed individuals

Objective: The study investigated the associations between self-rated financial strain and overall diurnal salivary cortisol levels, as well as secretory patterns among long-term unemployed individuals.Methods: Psychosocial and life-style variables were assessed by means of questionnaires among 85 participants (mean age 42±9 years; 56% females). Salivary cortisol was sampled on four occasions during a 24-hour period and data was analysed separately for men and women.Results: Among females, high financial strain was related to higher overall cortisol levels, and to elevated levels in the evening. These associations did not reach significance among men. Multivariate analyses showed that evening levels of cortisol were positively associated with financial strain, but largely unrelated to life-style variables and psychological distress.Conclusions: The results suggest that high financial strain influences the diurnal cortisol secretion of unemployed individuals in terms of elevated cortisol levels in the evening. The mediating mechanisms are in need of further investigation.     

Rudimental numerical competence in 5-day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus): identification of ordinal position

Numerical competencies were investigated for the 1st time in very young nonhuman animals. Chicks (Gallus gallus) learned to identify the 3rd, 4th, or 6th positions in a series of 10 identical positions (Experiment 1). Use of spatial information (i.e., distances) was ruled out in Experiment 2 (chicks generalized the reinforced response to an array of stimuli rotated by 90 degrees as compared with training) and Experiment 3 (chicks generalized their response to a series in which distances between the single positions had been manipulated). Chicks found the correct position even when both identity and distance of each position changed from trial to trial (Experiment 4). Overall, young chicks seemed to use ordinality when required to identify a target by its numerical serial position.     

The Myth of Reductive Extensionalism

Extensionalism, as I understand it here, is the view that physical reality consists exclusively of extensional entities. On this view, intensional entitities must either be eliminated in favor of an ontology of extensional entities, or be reduced to such an ontology, or otherwise be admitted as non-physical. In this paper I argue that extensionalism is a misguided philosophical doctrine. First, I argue that intensional phenomena are not confined to the realm of language and thought. Rather, the ontology of such phenomena is intimately entwined with the ontology of properties. After providing some evidence to the popularity of extensionalism in contemporary analytic philosophy, I investigate the motivating reasons behind it. Considering several explanations, I argue that the main motivating reason is rooted in the identification of matter with extension, an identification which is one of the hallmarks of the mechanistic conception of nature inherited from the founding fathers of our modern scientific outlook. I then argue that such a conception is not only at odds with a robust ontology of properties but is also at odds with our best contemporary physics. Rather than vindicating extensionalism contemporary science undermines the position, and the lesson to be drawn from this surprising fact is that extensionalism needs no longer be espoused as a regulative ideal of naturalistic philosophy. I conclude by showing that the ontological approach to intensional phenomena advocated throughout the paper also gains support from an examination of the historical context within which ‘intension’ was first introduced as a semantic notion.

Artificial grammar learning is facilitated by distributed practice: Evidence from a letter reordering task

Cognitive Processing - Previous studies have shown that distributed practice—a training strategy that is known to facilitate memory—is likely to result in greater learning than massed...     

Does the Survey Mode Affect the Association Between Subjective Well-being and its Determinants? An Experimental Comparison Between Face-to-Face and Web Mode

Journal of Happiness Studies - Subjective well-being research increasingly uses web surveys to understand how subjective well-being indicators are related to other concepts of interest. Although we...     

Cornerstones: You’d better believe them

Crispin Wright??s ??Unified Strategy?? for addressing some familiar sceptical paradoxes exploits a subtle distinction between two different ways in which we can be related to a proposition: (full-blown) belief and (mere) acceptance. The importance of the distinction for his strategy stems from his conviction that we cannot acquire any kind of evidence, either empirical or a priori, for the ??cornerstones?? of our cognitive projects, i.e., for those basic presuppositions of our inquiries that we must be warranted to endorse if we are to claim warrant for any of the beliefs formed as a result of such inquiries: regarding the idea of a non-evidential warrant to believe a proposition as a kind of ??conceptual solecism??, he doesn??t set himself the task of showing that we are evidentially warranted to believe such presuppositions, but only that of showing that we are non-evidentially warranted to accept them. In the present paper, I argue that such choice involves a fatal departure from a basic principle governing doxastic commitment??a principle that requires that we regard cornerstones propositions as propositions we are rationally committed to believe, not just entitled to accept. I press the point by presenting the Acceptance Argument, a sceptical paradox whose consideration leads to the conclusion that the Unified Strategy is caught between the Scylla of incoherently invoking a rather dubious form of epistemic alchemy and the Charybdis of placing an unexpected and apparently ad hoc restriction on the doxastic commitments we undertake by believing the things we believe. My final suggestion is that the Unified Strategy might be spared this dilemma only by undergoing a rather radical revision??a revision that would require setting aside the distinction between belief and acceptance to re-conceptualise its goal unabashedly in terms of (non-evidentially) warranted belief.     

A Case of Partial Biotinidase Deficiency Associated With Autism

We report the case of a child with partial biotinidase deficiency and autistic developmental disorder. We arrived at the diagnosis of biotinidase deficiency when the child was almost 4 years of age. Consequently, he began cofactor biotin treatment (10 mg daily) which did not resolve his autistic behavior. His younger brother was affected by partial biotinidase deficiency diagnosed at birth through our neonatal screening program. He was precociously treated with cofactor biotin therapy (10 mg daily) and did not show any behavioral abnormality or developmental delay. Since the brain is quite vulnerable to biotin deficiency, delayed biotin therapy could result in neurological damage. Our patient is the first case of partial biotinidase deficiency associated with autism. We hypothesize that the low biotinidase activity could have caused biotin deficiency in his brain and cerebrospinal fluids and consequently serious neurological problems, such as stereotyped and autistic behaviors, which were irreversible in spite of biotin supplementation.     

The cradle of causal reasoning: newborns’ preference for physical causality

Perception of mechanical (i.e. physical) causality, in terms of a cause–effect relationship between two motion events, appears to be a powerful mechanism in our daily experience. In spite of a growing interest in the earliest causal representations, the role of experience in the origin of this sensitivity is still a matter of dispute. Here, we asked the question about the innate origin of causal perception, never tested before at birth. Three experiments were carried out to investigate sensitivity at birth to some visual spatiotemporal cues present in a launching event. Newborn babies, only a few hours old, showed that they significantly preferred a physical causality event (i.e. Michotte's Launching effect) when matched to a delay event (i.e. a delayed launching; Experiment 1) or to a non‐causal event completely identical to the causal one except for the order of the displacements of the two objects involved which was swapped temporally (Experiment 3). This preference for the launching event, moreover, also depended on the continuity of the trajectory between the objects involved in the event (Experiment 2). These results support the hypothesis that the human system possesses an early available, possibly innate basic mechanism to compute causality, such a mechanism being sensitive to the additive effect of certain well‐defined spatiotemporal cues present in the causal event independently of any prior visual experience.     

Discrimination of small quantities by fish (redtail splitfin, Xenotoca eiseni)

Discrimination of quantity has been argued to rely on two non-verbal representational systems: an object file system (OFS) for representing small values (≤3–4) and an analog magnitude system (AMS) for representing large magnitudes (>4). Infants’ ability to discriminate 1 versus 2, 1 versus 3, 2 versus 3, but not 1 versus 4 or 2 versus 4 seems to prove the independence of such systems. Here, we show that redtail splitfin fish (Xenotoca eiseni) performed relative quantity estimations preferring to approach the location previously occupied by the larger in number between two groups of conspecifics (no longer visible at test) in sets of 1 versus 2 and 2 versus 3 items, but failed at 3 versus 4 items, thus showing the same set-size limit as infants for discrimination of small quantities. However, when tested with quantities that spanned the boundary of the two systems, that is, 1 versus 4 and 2 versus 4, fish succeeded. These results thus point to either the use of continuous physical variables and/or the use of the AMS also for small numerousness in fish in this task.