Regular and irregular morphology and its relationship with agrammatism: evidence from two Spanish-Catalan bilinguals

We report the performance of two aphasic patients in a morphological transformation task. Both patients are Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers who were diagnosed with agrammatic Broca's aphasia. In the morphological transformation task, the two patients were asked to produce regular and irregular verb forms. The patients showed poorer performance with irregular than regular morphological transformations in both of their languages. These results are at odds with the proposal that agrammatic speech is always or even preponderantly associated with poorer performance in processing regular versus irregular verb form. Instead, these results support the view that a major component of agrammatic production is a deficit in morphosyntactic processing, independently of whether this processing ultimately involves regular or irregular forms.     

The cognate facilitation effect: implications for models of lexical access

Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages. If nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access.     

Borderline personality disorder from the perspective of general personality functioning

The authors extended previous work on the hypothesis that borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be understood as a maladaptive variant of personality traits included within the 5-factor model (FFM) of personality. In each of 3 samples, an empirically derived prototypic FFM borderline profile was correlated with individuals' FFM profiles to yield a similarity score, an FFM borderline index. Results across all samples indicated that the FFM borderline index correlated as highly with existing borderline measures as they correlated with one another, and the FFM borderline index correlated as highly with measures of dysfunction, history of childhood abuse, and parental psychopathology as did traditional measures of BPD. Findings support the hypothesis that BPD is a maladaptive variant of FFM personality traits.     

Interference processes in monkey auditory list memory

A rhesus monkey’s memory was tested for single items and four-item lists of natural and environmental sounds. Memory items were presented from a center speaker, followed by a retention delay and then a choice response to a test sound presented simultaneously from two side speakers. Recognition of the last item of four-item lists was much poorer than that of single items at 0-, 1-, and 2-sec delays, despite there being the same temporal relations between study and test. This result showed that the first three items proactively interfered with memory of the last list item. Proactive interference dissipated after 2 sec, revealing a recency effect that eventually equaled single-item performance. Recognition of the first item of four-item lists was much poorer than single items at 20- and 30-sec delays, showing that the last three items retroactively interfered with memory of the first list item. The results point to the critical nature of interference processes in the understanding of serial position functions.     

Reports of attempted suicide among Brazilian addicts

Both substance dependence and depressive mood seem to be associated with increased suicide risk. Clinical information on suicide attempts and depressive symptoms were obtained from a sample of 211 psychoactive substance dependents attending a university clinic program for addicts in Brazil. 49 subjects (23.4%) had attempted suicide at least once, and the frequency of reporting attempts was 4.32 times greater among women than among men. Male addicts also tended to engage in potentially more dangerous attempt methods than women. Depressive male addicts were 2.17 times more likely to have attempted suicide than nondepressive addicted men. Among women, no association could be established between having attempted suicide and the presence of depression. Substance addicts have a relatively high risk of attempting suicide and the co-occurrence of depression seems to increase prevalence of suicidal behavior among men.     

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.     

Religiosity/Spirituality and Mental Health and Quality of Life of Early Pregnant Women

Journal of Religion and Health - The present study aims to investigate how religious/spiritual (R/S) beliefs are associated with depressive, anxious and stress symptoms and quality of life (QOL) of...     

The Effects of Anxiety on Attention Problems and Rule-Breaking Behavior: The Moderating Effect of Work Adjustment in the Workplace

We investigated the relationship between anxiety and attention problems and rule-breaking in a population of subclinical employees and identified the moderating role of work adjustment. After screening 9938 employees at a power company, we obtained a subclinical sample of 269. Our results demonstrate that anxiety is related to attention problems and rule-breaking behavior, and that work adjustment moderates these relationships. Study findings extend our knowledge of adjustment in the workplace, which may act to protect technicians from factors that affect occupational functioning.     

Mental Health of Parents of Children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome in Brazil

This study aims to analyze the potential impact of taking care of a child with congenital Zika virus syndrome (CZS) on the mental health of parents. Specifically, three objectives were formulated: (a) to assess the level of mental health of the parents; (b) to examine the influence of subjective well-being and fatigue as predictors of parents’ mental health; and (c) to identify the impact of sociodemographic variables on parents’ mental health. Sixty-nine mothers (M_age?=?26.38; SD?=?6.23) and 17 fathers (M_age?=?31.41; SD?=?7.57) of children diagnosed with CZS took part in this study. They answered a questionnaire containing measures of positive and negative affects, life satisfaction, fatigue, mental health, as well as sociodemographic questions. The results indicated that approximately 7% of the participants had low levels of mental health and probable emotional disorder. In addition, higher levels of fatigue and negative affects and lower levels of life satisfaction significantly predict a lower level of mental health. Finally, comparative analysis showed significant differences between fathers and mothers: mothers reported experiencing fewer positive and more negative affects, a lower level of satisfaction with life, a higher level of fatigue and worse mental health. In summary, this article presents an overview of the mental health of mothers and fathers of children with CZS and points the way to devising strategies for psychological intervention that promote the adaptation of parents to this kind of developmental disability in the family.     

Do Personal Dispositions Affect the Relationship Between Psychosocial Working Conditions and Workplace Bullying?

There is scarce research on the interaction between psychosocial working conditions and being a target of workplace bullying with individual characteristics as a moderator. We therefore examined 3,363 employees from 60 Danish workplaces to test whether sense of coherence moderates the relationship between the job demand-control model and bullying. This work is exploratory in nature, as no previous study to assess this moderation was found. Hierarchical linear regressions showed that demand-control model was significantly associated with bullying. Sense of coherence displayed a significant though practically negligible moderating effect. This suggests that negative psychosocial working conditions are associated with bullying independently of personal characteristics, at least in terms of sense of coherence.