Investigation into Complementary and Integrative Health Approaches for Turkish Patients with Gastrointestinal Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health - The study was conducted to determine the levels of usage of complementary and integrative health (CIH) approaches and the symptoms experienced by Turkish patients...     

Gödel’s Natural Deduction

This is a companion to a paper by the authors entitled “Gödel on deduction”, which examined the links between some philosophical views ascribed to Gödel and general proof theory. When writing that other paper, the authors were not acquainted with a system of natural deduction that Gödel presented with the help of Gentzen’s sequents, which amounts to Ja?kowski’s natural deduction system of 1934, and which may be found in Gödel’s unpublished notes for the elementary logic course he gave in 1939 at the University of Notre Dame. Here one finds a presentation of this system of Gödel accompanied by a brief reexamination in the light of the notes of some points concerning his interest in sequents made in the preceding paper. This is preceded by a brief summary of Gödel’s Notre Dame course, and is followed by comments concerning Gödel’s natural deduction system.     

Spatiotemporal pattern of appraising social and emotional relevance: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

Social information is particularly relevant for the human species because of its direct link to guiding physiological responses and behavior. Accordingly, extant functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data suggest that social content may form a unique stimulus dimension. It remains largely unknown, however, how neural activity underlying social (versus nonsocial) information processing temporally unfolds, and how such social information appraisal may interact with the processing of other stimulus characteristics, particularly emotional meaning. Here, we presented complex visual scenes differing in both social (vs. nonsocial) and emotional relevance (positive, negative, neutral) intermixed with scrambled versions of these pictures to N = 24 healthy young adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to intact pictures were examined for gaining insight to the dynamics of appraisal of both dimensions, implemented within the brain. Our main finding is an early interaction between social and emotional relevance due to enhanced amplitudes of early ERP components to emotionally positive and neutral pictures of social compared to nonsocial content, presumably reflecting rapid allocation of attention and counteracting an overall negativity bias. Importantly, our ERP data show high similarity with previously observed fMRI data using the same stimuli, and source estimations located the ERP effects in overlapping occipitotemporal brain areas. Our novel data suggest that relevance detection may occur already as early as around 100 ms after stimulus onset and may combine relevance checks not only examining intrinsic pleasantness/emotional valence but also social content as a unique, highly relevant stimulus dimension.     

The semantic organization of the animal category: evidence from semantic verbal fluency and network theory

Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life-specific experiences. How humans organize semantic information remains poorly understood. In an effort to better understand this issue, we conducted a verbal fluency experiment on 200 participants with the aim of inferring and representing the conceptual storage structure of the natural category of animals as a network. This was done by formulating a statistical framework for co-occurring concepts that aims to infer significant concept-concept associations and represent them as a graph. The resulting network was analyzed and enriched by means of a missing links recovery criterion based on modularity. Both network models were compared to a thresholded co-occurrence approach. They were evaluated using a random subset of verbal fluency tests and comparing the network outcomes (linked pairs are clustering transitions and disconnected pairs are switching transitions) to the outcomes of two expert human raters. Results show that the network models proposed in this study overcome a thresholded co-occurrence approach, and their outcomes are in high agreement with human evaluations. Finally, the interplay between conceptual structure and retrieval mechanisms is discussed.     

Size perception by vision and kinesthesia

When two sizes, one perceived by vision and the other by kinesthesia, are apparently equal, the physical relationship between them varies: The sizes may be equal, or the visual size may be larger than the kinesthetic size, or vice versa. In this study, the method of cross-modal matching and the method of magnitude production were used to explore the relationship between apparently equal sizes (5–40 cm) perceived by vision and by kinesthesia. The sizes were linear or circular, and the mode of standard presentation was visual, kinesthetic, or verbal. The size and the direction of the intermodal mismatch varied with the size of the standard. It was also found that an apparent length of movement varied with the direction of movement. In all conditions, the relationship between apparently equal visual and kinesthetic sizes was well approximated by a power function.     

Traumatization of group leaders in their work with displaced persons

Displaced persons are a special, threatened group of people, participants in this war, who were suddenly forced to abandon their homes. The majority of them were, overnight, left without anything they had, some even without their closest family. They all have one thing in common: they have all lost so much. Work with such people is directed toward overcoming their feelings of loss and abandonment and preventing psychical decompensation. Groups of displaced persons temporarily sheltered in the Rijeka region have been observed to be markedly regressed, with increased sensitivity, a low degree of tolerance, great demands on society and strongly expressed projective tendencies. Therapists suffer personal traumatization in working with displaced persons. This paper describes the reactions and feelings of group leaders caused by manifestations of group dynamics in different phases of exile.     

On Categorical Equivalences of Commutative BCK-algebras

A commutative BCK-algebra with the relative cancellation property is a commutative BCK-algebra (X;*,0) which satisfies the condition: if a ≤ x, a ≤ y and x * a = y * a, then x = y. Such BCK-algebras form a variety, and the category of these BCK-algebras is categorically equivalent to the category of Abelian ℓ-groups whose objects are pairs (G, G ₀), where G is an Abelian ℓ-group, G ₀ is a subset of the positive cone generating G ⁺ such that if u, v ∈ G ₀, then 0 ∨ (u - v) ∈ G ₀, and morphisms are ℓ-group homomorphisms h: (G, G ₀) → (G′,G′₀) with f(G ₀) ⫅ G′₀. Our methods in particular cases give known categorical equivalences of Cornish for conical BCK-algebras and of Mundici for bounded commutative BCK-algebras (= MV-algebras). This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.