Han Fei's Enlightened Ruler

In this essay I will revise, based on the notion of the ‘enlightened ruler’ or mingzhu and his critique of the literati of his time, the common belief that Han Fei was an amoralist and an advocate of tyranny. Instead, I will argue that his writings are dedicated to advising those who ought to rule in order to achieve the goal of a peaceful and stable society framed by laws in accordance with the dao.     

Feelings of control restore distorted time perception of emotionally charged events

Humans perceive time with millisecond precision. However, when experiencing negative or fearful events, time appears to slow down and aversive events are judged to last longer than neutral or positive events of equal duration. Feelings of control have been shown to attenuate increases in arousal triggered by anxiety-provoking events. Here, we tested whether feelings of control can go as far as influencing people’s perception of the world, by modulating the perceived duration of aversive events. Observers judged the duration of images depicting positive or negative content, and we manipulated the amount of control experienced by participants. Crucially, participants never had any real control over events. All control was illusory. Results showed that when participants experienced low levels of control, negative images were judged as lasting longer than positive images. However, when participants illusorily experienced high levels of control, they no longer experienced aversive negative images as lasting longer than positive images.     

Late-onset startle syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder

A case of late onset sporadic startle syndrome in a patient with a right posterior fossa brain tumour is reported. The exaggerated startle response did not respond to treatment with clonazepam. In addition to anxiety and depression, the patient developed obsessive- compulsive symptoms which responded to behavioural therapy. The possible mechanisms for this unique pattern of symptoms are discussed.     

Diminished heart rate complexity in adolescent girls: a sign of vulnerability to anxiety disorders?

Background and Objectives: Diminished heart rate variability has been found to be associated with high anxiety symptomatology. Since adolescence is the period of onset for many anxiety disorders, this study aimed to determine sex- and anxiety-related differences in heart rate variability and complexity in adolescents.

Methods: We created four groups according to sex and anxiety symptomatology: high-anxiety girls (n?=?24) and boys (n?=?25), and low-anxiety girls (n?=?22) and boys (n?=?24) and recorded their cardiac function while they performed regular school activities. A series of two-way (sex and anxiety) MANOVAs were performed on time domain variability, frequency domain variability, and non-linear complexity.

Results: We obtained no multivariate interaction effects between sex and anxiety, but highly anxious participants had lower heart rate variability than the low-anxiety group. Regarding sex, girls showed lower heart rate variability and complexity than boys.

Conclusions: The results suggest that adolescent girls have a less flexible cardiac system that could be a marker of the girls’ vulnerability to developing anxiety disorders.     

Reliability and validity of the Basic Depression Questionnaire

Background/ObjectiveDepressive disorders have a high prevalence around the world. They present a great comorbidity with other disorders like anxiety, thereby making a differential diagnosis very difficult. The Basic Depression Questionnaire was designed to palliate this issue by isolating specific depression symptoms. Our aim is to study the reliability, factorial structure, and differential item functioning of this questionnaire. Method: The sample consisted of 1,397 adults without psychological problems (M_age = 29.76, SD = 11.25, 64.78% women) who completed the CBD. Results: We observed that none of the items presented differential functioning. A monofactorial structure was established. In this model a good fit was obtained by confirmatory factor analysis and a strict invariance by sex. The ordinal alpha was used to check the reliability and it fetched an index of .95. Conclusions: The Basic Depression Questionnaire has adequate psychometric properties. The absence of differential item functioning and the invariance by sex are guarantees of an adequate use to diagnose depression for men and women. So, its clinical use can help to differentiate between the specific diagnoses for depressive disorders and anxiety disorders.     

Exploring the contributions of spatial and non-spatial working memory to priming of pop-out

Priming of pop-out (PoP) refers to the facilitation of performance that occurs when a target-defining feature is repeated across consecutive trials in a pop-out oddball search task. The underlying mechanism of PoP has been poorly understood and raises important questions about how our visual system is guided by past experiences, even during bottom-up processing. Lee, Mozer, and Vecera (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1059–1071, 2009) demonstrated that PoP remained unaffected by a concurrent non-spatial visual working memory (VWM) load, and they concluded that PoP occurs through feature gain modulation, essentially eliminating the contribution of memory representations in VWM to PoP. In the present study, we followed up on those results by (a) replicating the null effect of non-spatial VWM load on PoP and (b) examining the effect of spatial VWM load on PoP. The results showed that spatial VWM load does interfere with PoP, supporting the notion that spatial VWM is involved in PoP. In Experiment 2, we extended this finding by manipulating VWM load and observing its consequence on the magnitude of PoP. Increasing spatial VWM load decreased the amount of PoP observed, in a dose-dependent manner, whereas changes in non-spatial VWM load did not. Contrary to Lee et al.’s conclusions, these results suggest that VWM resources appear to contribute to the occurrence of PoP, supporting the theory that PoP is, in fact, a multilevel process in which the deployment of spatial attention, relying on VWM representations, plays an important role.     

Simple lines and shapes are associated with,and communicate,distinct emotions

We investigated whether lines and shapes that present face-like features would be associated with emotions. In Experiment 1, participants associated concave, convex, or straight lines with the words happy or sad. Participants found it easiest to associate the concave line with happy and the convex line with sad. In Experiment 2, participants rated (valence, pleasantness, liking, and tension) and categorised (valence and emotion words) two convex and concave lines that were paired with six distinct pairs of eyes. The presence of eyes affected participants’ valence ratings and response latencies; more congruent eye–mouth matches produced more consistent ratings and faster reaction times. In Experiment 3, we examined whether dots that resembled eyes would be associated with emotional words. Participants found it easier to match certain sets of dots with specific emotions. These results suggest that facial gestures that are associated with specific emotions can be captured using relatively simple shapes and lines.     

On the learnability of frequent and infrequent word orders: An artificial language learning study

Most languages have a basic or "canonical" word order, which determines the relative positions of the subject (S), the verb (V), and the object (O) in a typical declarative sentence. The frequency of occurrence of the six possible word orders among world languages is not distributed uniformly. While SVO and SOV represent around 85% of world languages, orders like VSO (9%) or OSV (0.5%) are much less frequent or extremely rare. One possible explanation for this asymmetry is that biological and cognitive constraints for structured sequence processing make some word orders easier to be processed than others. Therefore, the high frequency of these word orders would be related to their higher learnability. The aim of the present study was to compare the learnability of different word orders between groups of adult subjects. Four artificial languages with different word orders were trained: two frequent (SVO, SOV) and two infrequent (VSO, OSV). In a test stage, subjects were asked to discriminate between new correct sentences and syntax or semantic violations. Higher performance rates and faster responses were observed for more frequent word orders. The results support the hypothesis that more frequent word orders are more easily learned.