Evidence for a detrimental relationship between hypertension history, prospective memory, and prefrontal cortex white matter in cognitively normal older adults

Hypertension affects many older adults and is associated with impaired neural and cognitive functioning. We investigated whether a history of hypertension was associated with impairments to prospective memory, which refers to the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions, such as remembering to take medication. Thirty-two cognitively normal older adult participants with or without a history of hypertension (self-reported) performed two laboratory prospective memory tasks, one that relied more strongly on executive control (nonfocal prospective memory) and one that relied more strongly on spontaneous memory retrieval processes (focal prospective memory). We observed hypertension-related impairments for nonfocal, but not focal, prospective memory. To complement our behavioral approach, we conducted a retrospective analysis of available structural magnetic resonance imaging data. Lower white matter volume estimates in the anterior prefrontal cortex were associated with lower nonfocal prospective memory and with a history of hypertension. A history of hypertension may be associated with worsened executive control and lower prefrontal white matter volume. The translational implication is that individuals who must remember to take antihypertensive medications and to monitor their blood pressure at home may be impaired in the executive control process that helps to support these prospective memory behaviors.     

自我不确定感对程序公正效应的调节作用:回顾与展望

自我不确定感是指个体怀疑“自我”,并且对其看法不稳定而产生的内隐与外显的主观感受及反应.其研究方法主要有自我报告法与情境实验法.自DeCremer和Sedikides首先通过实证研究验证了自我不确定感对程序公正效应的调节作用后,研究者们通过将自我不确定感分解为情绪自我不确定、地位不确定和归属不确定以及探讨程序公正认知机制,不断扩展了此领域的研究成果.未来可以通过自我不确定感调节效应的本土化研究,自我不确定感特质与情境成分交互作用的探讨,自我不确定感与自我肯定、信息不确定感等相关变量的关系研究,进一步深化此领域的研究.     

Attention to context: U.S. and Japanese children's emotional judgments

A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while Easterners often integrate their judgment of the focal object with surrounding contextual cues. There are few studies of whether such cultural differences are evident in children. This study examined 48 monolingual Japanese-speaking children residing in Japan and 48 monolingual English-speaking children residing in the U.S.A. (40 to 60 month-olds) in a task asking children to complete a picture by adding the proper emotional expression to a face. The key variable was the context and shift in context from the preceding trial for the same pictured individual. Japanese children were much more likely to shift their judgments with changes in context whereas children from the United States treated facial expression in a more trait-like manner, maintaining the same expression for the individual across contexts.     

Connecting instances to promote children's relational reasoning

The practice of learning from multiple instances seems to allow children to learn about relational structure. The experiments reported here focused on two issues regarding relational learning from multiple instances: (a) what kind of perceptual situations foster such learning and (b) how particular object properties, such as complexity and similarity, interact with relational learning. Two kinds of perceptual situations were of interest here: simultaneous view, where instances are viewed at once, and sequential view, where instances are viewed one at a time (one right after the other). We examined the influence of particular perceptual situations and object properties using two tests of relational reasoning: a common match-to-sample task, where new instances are compared with a common sample, and a variable match-to-sample task, where new instances are compared with a sample that varies on each trial. Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that simultaneous presentation of even highly dissimilar instances, one simple and one complex, effectively connects them together and improves relational generalization in both match-to-sample tasks. Experiment 3 shows that simple samples are more effective than complex ones in the common match-to-sample task. However, when one instance is not used a common sample and various pairs of instances are simply compared, as in Experiment 4, simple and rich instances are equally effective at promoting relational learning. These results bear on our understanding of how children connect instances and how those initial connections affect learning and generalization.     

儒家政治及其矫正：从激进主义到渐进主义

儒家思想在中国当前的复兴恰逢其时,因为没有哪个国家能够在缺乏核心价值观的情况下单凭举国对于财富的不懈追求而得到治理。然而,这一复兴并未伴随着对儒家思想当做一种政治理论可能存在的缺陷的审慎意识,如果我们所说的政治指的是一门关于治理的科学与艺术或一种公共及社会伦理。     

Higher Extraversion and Lower Conscientiousness in Humans Infected with Toxoplasma

Toxoplasmosis is associated with specific differences in the personality of infected subjects relative to non‐infected subjects. These differences are usually considered to be a side effect of the manipulative activity of the parasite aimed to increase the probability of its transmission from the intermediate host to the definitive host by predation. The personality of infected subjects was studied mostly using the Cattell's questionnaire. However, this questionnaire is now considered outdated and has been mostly substituted with the Neuroticism–Extraversion–Openness Personality Inventory—Revised (NEO‐PI‐R) questionnaire in clinical practice. Here, we searched for the association between toxoplasmosis and the personality by screening a population of students with the NEO‐PI‐R questionnaire. We found that Toxoplasma‐infected male and female students had significantly higher extraversion and lower conscientiousness. The conscientiousness negatively correlated with the length of infection in men, which suggested that the toxoplasmosis associated differences were more probably the result of slow cumulative changes induced by latent toxoplasmosis, rather than transient side effect of acute Toxoplasma infection. The existence of this correlation also supported (but of course not proved) the hypothesis that Toxoplasma infection influenced the personality, rather than the hypothesis that the personality influenced the probability of the infection. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Religion replenishes self-control

Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans' evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people's ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality- or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.     

儿童混合表情识别的发展及与基本表情识别的关系

以193名儿童为被试,采用表情识别范式,考察5岁、6岁及8岁儿童的基本表情识别能力和混合表情识别能力,探讨了儿童在这一年龄段中混合表情识别能力的发展特点,及其与基本表情识别能力之间的关系。研究发现：基本表情识别能力在5岁时已发展良好,混合表情识别能力在8岁时仍需完善,后者是前者的深化,同时还包含对多种表情进行辨认的能力;两种表情识别能力构成了更加完整的表情识别图景。     

青少年早期攻击和违纪行为的关系：受欢迎度的调节作用

以1755名初中一年级青少年为被试考察青少年早期个体攻击和违纪行为之间的关系,并对受欢迎度的调节作用进行了检验。结果表明,（1）在青少年早期,身体攻击能正向预测违纪行为,而关系攻击不能。（2）个体的受欢迎度能够调节身体攻击与违纪行为间的关系,具体表现为身体攻击对不受欢迎个体违纪行为的影响比对受欢迎个体的影响更大。