Negative support of significant others affects psychological adjustment in breast cancer patients

Significant others play an important role in providing support in patients' lives, but some types of support negatively affect the patients. This study was conducted in early-stage breast cancer patients to examine the structure of support, which was provided by their significant others and assessed negatively by the patients, and to identify negative support relating to the psychological adjustment of these patients. Thus, we first conducted interviews among 28 breast cancer patients to identify these support items assessed as negative; next, we conducted a questionnaire survey using the resulting items in 109 postoperative patients who had early-stage breast cancer. We performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and obtained a valid second-order factor structure, including superordinate factors (excessive engagement, avoidance of problems and underestimation) and subordinate factors (overprotection, encouragement and management). Among these factors, the avoidance of problems was the only factor to be negatively associated with psychological adjustment of the patients, suggesting that these patients receive problem-avoiding support. The results of our study suggest that such problem-avoiding support from significant others can be counter-productive and potentially worsen the psychological adjustment of breast cancer patients.     

A Common Force-Sharing Pattern in Joint Action That Consists of Four People

The authors examined the force-sharing patterns in a joint action performed by a group of two, three, or four people compared with a solo action. In the joint actions, 28 participants produced periodic isometric forces such that the sum of forces they produced cycled between 5% and 10% maximum voluntary contraction with the right hand at 1 Hz. In both the three- and four-person tasks, the correlation between forces produced by two of the three or four participants was negative, and the remaining one or two participants produced intermediate forces. The errors of force and interval and force variabilities were smaller in four- and three-people groups than individuals. Four- and three-people groups thus performed better than individuals.     

A pattern of common acoustic modification by human mothers to gain attention of a child and by macaques of others in their group

Criticisms of how Niwano and Sugai (2002) conducted their analysis of pitch change in human mothers' repeated utterances to their children suggest mothers resort to utterance with elevated pitch when infants are initially unresponsive. When this phenomenon is compared with an evaluation of similar data for free-ranging macaques, a certain common pattern of human mothers and the macaques may be observed in seeking to gain the attention of another.     

Neural network processing of natural language: II. Towards a unified model of corticostriatal function in learning sentence comprehension and non-linguistic sequencing

A central issue in cognitive neuroscience today concerns how distributed neural networks in the brain that are used in language learning and processing can be involved in non-linguistic cognitive sequence learning. This issue is informed by a wealth of functional neurophysiology studies of sentence comprehension, along with a number of recent studies that examined the brain processes involved in learning non-linguistic sequences, or artificial grammar learning (AGL). The current research attempts to reconcile these data with several current neurophysiologically based models of sentence processing, through the specification of a neural network model whose architecture is constrained by the known cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) neuroanatomy of the human language system. The challenge is to develop simulation models that take into account constraints both from neuranatomical connectivity, and from functional imaging data, and that can actually learn and perform the same kind of language and artificial syntax tasks. In our proposed model, structural cues encoded in a recurrent cortical network in BA47 activate a CSTC circuit to modulate the flow of lexical semantic information from BA45 to an integrated representation of meaning at the sentence level in BA44/6. During language acquisition, corticostriatal plasticity is employed to allow closed class structure to drive thematic role assignment. From the AGL perspective, repetitive internal structure in the AGL strings is encoded in BA47, and activates the CSTC circuit to predict the next element in the sequence. Simulation results from Caplan's [Caplan, D., Baker, C., & Dehaut, F. (1985). Syntactic determinants of sentence comprehension in aphasia. Cognition, 21, 117-175] test of syntactic comprehension, and from Gomez and Schvaneveldts' [Gomez, R. L., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1994). What is learned from artificial grammars?. Transfer tests of simple association. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20, 396-410] artificial grammar learning experiments are presented. These results are discussed in the context of a brain architecture for learning grammatical structure for multiple natural languages, and non-linguistic sequences.     

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of human cognitive processes

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is now widely accepted as a tool for analyzing human brain function. Since the realization of fMRI in the early 1990s, numerous reports have been published. In this paper, we present three studies. The first examined syntactic processing of Japanese sentences and the results prove that Broca's area is involved in the use of grammar. The second study compared binocular with monocular stereopsis. There were significant activations in the right inferior parietal lobe. The third study concerned the encoding and retrieval processes underlying face recognition. It revealed activations mainly in the right prefrontal areas, which is contrary to the hemispheric encoding and retrieval asymmetry (HERA) theory. fMRI will continue to play an important role in the analysis of human brain function.     

Threading dislocation with b=c+2a in 4H-SiC as determined by LACBED

The Burgers vectors of the so-called threading screw dislocations (a total of 28 dislocations) in 4H-SiC were determined by large-angle convergent-beam electron diffraction. A new type of TSD, that is, b = c + 2a dislocation, was identified. Thus, all of the four types of TSD predicted by Onda et al. [Phil. Mag. Lett. 93 (2013) p.591] were identified.     

A neural network model for development of reaching and pointing based on the interaction of forward and inverse transformations

Pointing is one of the communicative actions that infants acquire during their first year of life. Based on a hypothesis that early pointing is triggered by emergent reaching behavior toward objects placed at out‐of‐reach distances, we proposed a neural network model that acquires reaching without explicit representation of ‘targets’. The proposed model controls a two‐joint arm in a horizontal plane, and it learns a loop of internal forward and inverse transformations; the former predicts the visual feedback of hand position and the latter generates motor commands from the visual input through random generation of the motor commands. In the proposed model, the motor output and visual input were represented by broadly tuned neural units. Even though explicit ‘targets’ were not presented during learning, the simulation successfully generated reaching toward visually presented objects at within‐reach and out‐of‐reach distances.     

Fading-figure tracing in Williams syndrome

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe impairment of visuospatial abilities. Figure-drawing abilities, which are thought to reflect visuospatial abilities, have yet to be fully investigated in WS. The purpose of the present study was to clarify whether drawing abilities differ between WS individuals and typically developing children (TD). We compared the performance of two groups of subjects (WS, mean age 16 years; TD, 5-6 years of age) using a fading-figure tracing task that requires subjects to trace a target figure that is gradually disappearing from a PC screen. Although the TD group exhibited clearly improved performance with long fading time, the WS group did not. Moreover, the TD group exhibited poor performance for figures with more than six angles, regardless of the figure type (e.g. closed or open), whereas the WS group exhibited generally poor performance for figures with more than five angles but relatively preserved performance for open figures. These findings indicate that a combination of decreased visuospatial span associated with incomplete development of visual scanning and disproportionate development of global processing may cause drawing disabilities in WS.     

Type-based associations in grapheme-color synaesthesia revealed by response time distribution analyses

Determining the nature of binding in grapheme-color synaesthesia has consequences for understanding the neural basis of synaesthesia and visual awareness in general. We evaluated type- and token-based letter-color binding using a synaesthetic version of the object-reviewing paradigm. Although mean response times failed to reveal any significant differences between synaesthetes and control participants, RT analyses with ex-Gaussian distributions revealed that the response facilitation in the synaesthesia group reflected type representations exclusively, while response facilitation in the control group, who learned letter-color associations, was dominated by token representations. Thus, letter-color associations in associator synaesthetes are type-based, and do not involve binding to object tokens, consistent with their subjective reports. Contrary to recent studies that failed to find differences between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes with behavioral measures, response time distribution analyses indicate that color sensations in synaesthetes are not simply the extreme form of normal letter-color associations, and cannot be attributed to demand characteristics.     

Negative support of significant others affects psychological adjustment in breast cancer patients

Significant others play an important role in providing support in patients’ lives, but some types of support negatively affect the patients. This study was conducted in early-stage breast cancer patients to examine the structure of support, which was provided by their significant others and assessed negatively by the patients, and to identify negative support relating to the psychological adjustment of these patients. Thus, we first conducted interviews among 28 breast cancer patients to identify these support items assessed as negative; next, we conducted a questionnaire survey using the resulting items in 109 postoperative patients who had early-stage breast cancer. We performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and obtained a valid second-order factor structure, including superordinate factors (excessive engagement, avoidance of problems and underestimation) and subordinate factors (overprotection, encouragement and management). Among these factors, the avoidance of problems was the only factor to be negatively associated with psychological adjustment of the patients, suggesting that these patients receive problem-avoiding support. The results of our study suggest that such problem-avoiding support from significant others can be counter-productive and potentially worsen the psychological adjustment of breast cancer patients.