The roles of carbon monoxide and nitric oxide in the control of the neuroendocrine stress response: complementary or redundant

There is widespread evidence in favour of nitric oxide (NO) acting as a gaseous neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, diffusing from its cells of origin and affecting surrounding neuronal tissue in evanescent three-dimensional waves. This is also true of the hypothalamus, where amongst other activities NO inhibits stimulation of corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) and vasopressin release by inflammatory stressors, effects thought to be mediated by binding with soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC). Carbon monoxide is being increasingly recognised as another gaseous neuromodulator, but with principal effects on other hemoproteins such as cyclo-oxygenase, and a distinctly different profile of localisation.NO is predominantly a pro-inflammatory agent in the periphery while CO is often anti-inflammatory. In the hypothalamus, the actions of CO are also distinct from those of NO,with marked antagonistic effects on the inflammatory release of vasopressin, both in vitro and in vivo, but with little involvement in the regulation of CRH. Thus, it would appear that these apparently similar gases exert quite distinct and separate effects, although they cause broadly similar overall changes in the secretion of neuroendocrine stress hormones. We conclude that these two gases may play significant but different roles in the control of the neuroendocrine stress response, but one common feature may be attenuation of inflammation-induced release of stress hormones.     

Millon's Evolutionary Model of Personality Assessment: A Case for Categorical/Dimensional Prototypes

Theodore Millon (1928–2014) was arguably one of the most influential figures in conceptualizing and detailing personality styles and disorders in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries. A prominent member of the Axis II Work Group of DSM–III, III–R, and IV, Millon continued refining his evolutionary model long after his active involvement with these committees, and remained focused on the future of personality assessment until his death in 2014. This article is an exploration of his latter works, critiques of recent DSM–5 developments, and commentary on the usefulness of his deductive methodology as it continues to apply to the study, classification, and clinical application of personality assessment.     

Attentional resource and processing speed limitations during sentence processing in Parkinson's disease

Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task demands in order to evaluate attentional and processing speed resources during the comprehension of simple sentences without subordinate clauses and sentences containing subject-relative and object-relative center-embedded subordinate clauses. We found that PD patients have poor sensitivity to phonetic errors embedded in unbound grammatical morphemes, regardless of the clausal structure of the sentence, suggesting difficulty attending to grammatical morphemes. We also found that PD patients are significantly slowed in their sensitivity to phonetic errors in content words embedded in object-relative center-embedded sentences. Slowed sensitivity to content words in object-relative sentences was correlated with timed executive measures of planning. On a traditional measure of comprehension, these PD patients were impaired for sentences containing object-relative center-embedded clauses compared to sentences with subject-relative center-embedded clauses, and comprehension of object-relative sentences was correlated with executive measures. Our findings are consistent with the claim that limited executive resources for strategic attention and processing speed contribute to the sentence comprehension difficulties of PD patients.     

Achtsamkeit

Within the last three decades western psychology, psychotherapy and medicine have become increasingly enamored by the perception of “mindfulness” as a form of unbiased, judgment-free awareness of perceptible experience. Derived from earliest forms of Buddhist psychology, mindfulness is, however, also integral to a particular set of ethical values and may be seen as a practice or process that tangibly embodies the Buddhist ethical stance. Buddhist psychology, similar to psychodynamic and other psychotherapeutic approaches, aims at the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. We believe that the intentional practice of mindfulness (as defined above) adds a new (very old) dimension by implicit cultivation of a consistent set of ethical attitudes that include kindness, patience, tolerance, generosity, compassion and courage. Sustained awareness of the spectrum of momentary experience may, otherwise, be inaccessible. These benevolent attitudinal qualities often allow eudemonic mental and physical states to be experienced, even in the face of unpleasant circumstances. A relational process unfolds that reinforces, in both bodily and mental domains, a synergy of awareness and ethical intentions literally representing an embodied ethical presence. We discuss the implications of such an understanding of mindfulness for current psychotherapeutic approaches.     

Constructing Profiles of Religious Agreement and Disagreement Between Adolescents and Mothers: A Research Note

This research note describes the use of latent class analysis to examine how three dimensions of religiosity—the importance of religion (religious salience), attendance at religious services, and frequency of prayer—cluster together to form unique profiles. Building upon recent research identifying different profiles of religiosity at the level of the individual, we used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to identify dyadic profiles of religious concordance or discordance between 14,202 adolescents and their mothers. We identified five profiles: one concordant (27% of sample), two discordant (25% of sample), and two of mixed concordance/discordance (49%). The profiles distinguish between various levels of adolescent/mother relations, suggesting that they may represent distinct family dynamics. They also distinguish between several variables (race, adolescent age, geographical region) in predictable ways, providing additional demonstration of the categories’ meaningfulness.     

Speech Rate and Syntactic Complexity as Multiplicative Factors in Speech Comprehension by Young and Older Adults

An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard short English sentences that differed in syntactic complexity and speech rate. The syntactic contrast pitted center-embedded sentences with a subject-relative clause against sentences with center-embedded object-relative clauses. Speech rate was varied using computer time-compression of the speech signal. Both young and older adults showed poorer comprehension accuracy for the more complex object-relative clause sentences than subject-relative sentences, with an age difference appearing only when sentences were presented at a very rapid rate. By contrast to accuracy scores, older adults took longer than the young adults to give their comprehension responses at all speech rates tested, with this age difference amplified by both speech rate and syntactic complexity.     

The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Parkinson’s disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic patients with LBSD, and we related their narrative impairments to gray matter (GM) atrophy using voxel-based morphometry. We found that patients with PDD and DLB have significant difficulty organizing their narrative speech. This was correlated with deficits on measures of executive functioning and speech fluency. Regression analyses associated this deficit with reduced cortical volume in inferior frontal and anterior cingulate regions. These findings are consistent with a model of narrative discourse that includes executive as well as language components and with an impairment of the organizational component of narrative discourse in patients with PDD and DLB.     

Age-related declines in general cognitive abilities of Balb/C mice are associated with disparities in working memory, body weight, and general activity

A defining characteristic of age-related cognitive decline is a deficit in general cognitive performance. Here we use a testing and analysis regimen that allows us to characterize the general learning abilities of young (3-5 mo old) and aged (19-21 mo old) male and female Balb/C mice. Animals' performance was assessed on a battery of seven diverse learning tasks. Aged animals exhibited deficits in five of the seven tasks and ranked significantly lower than their young counterparts in general learning abilities (aggregate performance across the battery of tasks). Aging added variability to common core performance (i.e., general learning ability), which translated into increased variability on the individual cognitive tasks. Relatedly, general learning abilities did not differ between the two ages among the best quartile of learners (i.e., cognitive abilities were spared in a subsample of the aged animals). Additionally, working memory capacity (resistance to interference) and duration (resistance to decay) accounted for significantly more of the variability in general learning abilities in aged relative to young animals. Tests of 15 noncognitive performance variables indicated that an increase in body weight (and an associated decrease in general activity) was characteristic of those aged animals which exhibited deficient general learning abilities. These results suggest the possibility that general cognitive deficits in aged animals reflect a failure of specific components of the working memory system, and may be related to variations in body weight and an associated decrease in activity.