Intercessory Prayer on Spiritual Distress,Spiritual Coping,Anxiety, Depression and Salivary Amylase in Breast Cancer Patients During Radiotherapy: Randomized Clinical Trial

The goal of this study was to assess the effect of intercessory prayer in the psychological, spiritual and biological scores of breast cancer patients who are undergoing radiotherapy. Double-blind RCT comprising a sample of 31 participants (15 in the Control Group and 16 in the Intervention Group). Data collection was performed in three time points (T₀, T₁ and T₂). Significant changes have been identified in the intra-group analysis, concerning the decrease in spiritual distress score; negative religious/spiritual coping prevailed, while the total religious/spiritual coping increased between the posttest T₂ to T₀. Intercessory prayer was effective in religious and spiritual scores.

     

Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

Perception of pictorial eye gaze by baboons (Papio papio)

Pictorial faces looking left or right were presented to baboons (Papio papio) before the display of a target letter in the left or right hemifield of a monitor screen. Baboons had to provide go or no-go responses taking into account the identity of the target letter. The 1st 6 experiments showed no reliable effect of eye gaze on discrimination speed, using either schematic gazes or pictures of real gazes. Experiment 7 showed that eye gazes facilitated target processing when eye cues were perfect predictors of target location. Findings suggest that baboons do not spontaneously process eye-gaze direction but can learn to do so if the gaze has a predictive value. Implications of these findings on baboons' perspective-taking abilities are discussed.     

Using the PAI with an eating disordered population: scale characteristics,factor structure,and differences among diagnostic groups

Psychometric properties of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey 1991) within an eating disordered sample seeking treatment (N = 238) and differences among eating disorder diagnostic groups on the PAI were examined. The PAI showed acceptable alpha coefficients, item-total correlations, and interitem correlations. The factor structure was similar to that reported by Morey (1991), with the addition of another factor related to interpersonal coolness and distance. Those with binge eating disorder (BED) reported fewer problems and less distress in general compared to other eating disordered groups. The BED and bulimia nervosa groups were different from the anorexia nervosa groups in frequency of matching on two PAI clusters. Use of the PAI with an eating disordered population and its utility in understanding eating disorder diagnostic groups is supported.     

Cascaded versus noncascaded models of lexical and semantic processing: the turple effect

The density of the orthographic neighborhood surrounding an item has been shown to have an inhibitory effect for nonwords in a lexical decision experiment. Four experiments are reported investigating whether a similar pattern holds for a semantic categorization task (animal vs. non-animal). In the first experiment, no effects of neighborhood density were found for nonexemplars, whether they were words or nonwords. The absence of any inhibitory effect for nonwords implies that close orthographic neighbors are ignored. However, the second experiment showed that if the nonword has a neighbor that is an animal name (eg., turple), an interference effect is observed, implying that neighbors do exert an effect if they have the right semantic properties. The same items showed no additional interference in lexical decision. These results suggest the involvement of semantic properties very early in the processing cycle. A cascaded processing system monitoring activation in semantic features can explain these results, but cannot explain the frequency effect observed for nonexemplar words or the fact that variation in density is irrelevant when one of the neighbors is an exemplar. It is argued that existing models of semantic categorization must be extended to accommodate these results.