What is in a word? No versus Yes differentially engage the lateral orbitofrontal cortex

The words "No" and "Yes" are involved in conditioning to prohibit or encourage behavior, respectively. The authors, therefore, hypothesized that these words would be attributed to endogenous valence, activating neuronal circuits involved with valence and emotional control. Functional MRI (fMRI) at 4 Tesla was used to record regional brain activity while participants were exposed to emphatic vocalizations of the words. Results showed that No and Yes were associated with opposite brain-behavior responses; while No was negatively valenced, produced slower response times, and evoked a negative signal in the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), Yes was positively valenced, produced faster response times, and evoked a positive signal in a contiguous region of the OFC. Attribution of negative valence to No and trait anger control were associated with increased responsivity of the OFC to No. Inasmuch as sensitivity to the prohibitive command No develops during childhood through interaction with primary caregivers as the first social objects, our findings may implicate the lateral OFC in the neurobiology of emotion regulation and subsequent social development.     

The impact of egg incubation temperature on the personality of oviparous reptiles

Personality traits, defined as differences in the behavior of individual animals of the same species that are consistent over time and context, such as ‘boldness,’ have been shown to be both heritable and be influenced by external factors, such as predation pressure. Currently, we know very little about the role that early environmental factors have upon personality. Thus, we investigated the impact of incubation temperature upon the boldness on an oviparous reptile, the bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps). Eggs, from one clutch, were incubated at two different average temperatures within the normal range. After hatching the lizards were raised under the same environmental conditions. Novel object and novel environment tests were used to assess personality. Each test was repeated in both the short term and the long term. The results revealed that incubation temperature did impact upon ‘boldness’ but only in the short term and suggests that, rather than influencing personality, incubation temperature may have an effect on the development of behavioral of oviparous reptiles at different stages across ontogeny.     

Influence of religiosity on self-reported response to psychological therapies

There is a lack of research exploring the influence of religious or spiritual beliefs on response to psychological therapies. Our aims were to confirm the positive relationship between religiosity and psychological wellbeing, and investigate the potential synergistic impact of religiosity on self-reported response to psychological therapies. Participants were 118 adults (33 male, 85 female) aged 18 to 78 (M?=?40.01, SD?=?15.41); data was collected via online survey. Religious and psychological variables were assessed using a range of standard measures including the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, and the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale. Atheists reported less psychological distress and increased personal wellbeing; participants with higher levels of religiosity experienced greater ongoing benefits from therapy in domains of coping and social functioning. Results suggest that mental health practitioners should consider the religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviours of their clients in their interventions.     

Discourse in aphasia: Integration deficits in processing reference

The present study investigated moderately impaired aphasic subjects' ability to integrate information across sentences by having them identify antecedents for ambiguous pronouns in brief narratives. In order to disambiguate the pronouns, the subjects had to consult either textual cues and/or extratextual cues. In addition, the subjects' ability to retrieve factual information was measured by having them identify explicitly stated noun referents. The results show that the aphasic subjects had significant difficulty using textual cues to resolve referents when the referents were not readily accessible through world knowledge. The patients had little difficulty interpreting referents which were recoverable from world knowledge or were stated explicitly. The explanatory power of world knowledge effects, grammatical class effects, memory effects, and linguistic integration effects in accounting for the deficit pattern observed is considered.     

Skull size and intelligence, and King Robert Bruce's IQ

An estimate of someone's IQ is a potentially informative personal datum. This study examines the association between external skull measurements and IQ scores, and uses the resulting regression equation to provide an estimate of the IQ of King Robert I of Scotland (Robert Bruce, 1274–1329). Participants were 48 relatively healthy Caucasian men (age 71–76 years) resident in Scotland. Using magnetic resonance imaging data, intracranial volume estimated from external skull length and width correlated greater than .5 (p < .001) with measured intracranial area, which correlates very highly with brain volume. IQ scores estimated from the National Adult Reading Test (NART) correlated .56 (p < .001) with measured intracranial area, and .49 (p < .01) with estimated intracranial volume based on external skull width and length. The partial correlation coefficient of this latter association was .25 (p = .09) after adjustment for measured intracranial area. Thus, actual intracranial area accounts for about 74% of the variance shared by NART and estimated intracranial volume. A cast of the skull of Robert Bruce was measured and its intracranial volume estimated. A regression equation between IQ and estimated intracranial volume, based on data from the 48 subjects, estimated the IQ of Robert Bruce at about 128 (95% confidence interval 106 to  130), i.e. almost two standard deviations above the mean. NART scores show a ceiling effect, so this estimated IQ might be an underestimate. Robert Bruce's estimated high IQ is congruent with his military, political and other intellectual achievements.     

A longitudinal study of an adult with aphasia: Considerations for research and therapy

This paper described investigation and therapy carried out over a one year period with an adult aphasic patient characterized by severe impairment of auditory comprehension. A deblocking technique was used to reintegrate the mechanisms for correlating sound and meaning. The visual mode of presentation of linguistic material was used both to provide a stable representation of speech units and to allow reinforcement of auditory representations. The patient was given tasks of repetition, reading aloud, and sequencing, using progressively more complex material. The behavior of the patient gives support to the viability of the theoretical constructs of linguistics: this can be seen in the differential processing of function words vs. content words, and in the orderly progression of improvement through stages explicable as the recovery of well-defined and hierarchically dependent subcomponents of linguistic organization.     

Not too ‘shy’ to help catch a thief: Recall memory of shy versus non-shy witnesses

Witness shyness was examined to determine its impact on recall accuracy in two experiments. It was hypothesized that shyness would facilitate witness accuracy, under some conditions. In Experiment 1, witnesses were asked to respond to directed recall questions probing crime event and culprit details. Non-shy and shy witnesses produced comparable accuracy rates when describing the culprit. In contrast, non-shy witnesses were more accurate when describing crime environment details than shy witnesses. In Experiment 2, arousal was manipulated and a free recall approach was used to assess recall accuracy. Under low arousal, shy witnesses were more accurate at describing the culprit than non-shy witnesses, whereas, non-shy witnesses were more accurate at describing crime details than shy witnesses. Under high arousal, differences in accuracy were not observed across shy and non-shy witnesses.     

Emergency Research without Consent under Polish Law

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only (therapeutic experiment consists of the introduction by the physician of new or only partially proven diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive methods in order to achieve direct benefit to the health of the patients, and it can be carried out when hitherto applied methods were ineffective or their effectiveness was insufficient). (2). Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject's life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject's participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject's consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject's autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: (1) the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and (2) informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible (requirement of obtaining deferred consent). A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible.     

Primate errors in transitive ‘inference’: a two-tier learning model

Transitive performance (TP) is a learning-based behaviour exhibited by a wide range of species, where if a subject has been taught to prefer A when presented with the pair AB but to prefer B when presented with the pair BC, then the subject will also prefer A when presented with the novel pair AC. Most explanations of TP assume that subjects recognize and learn an underlying sequence from observing the training pairs. However, data from squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) and young children contradict this, showing that when three different items (a triad) are drawn from the sequence, subjects' performance degrades systematically (McGonigle and Chalmers, Nature 267:694-696, 1977; Chalmers and McGonigle, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 37:355-377, 1984; Harris and McGonigle, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 47B:319-348, 1994). We present here the two-tier model, the first learning model of TP which accounts for this systematic performance degradation. Our model assumes primate TP is based on a general-purpose task learning system rather than a special-purpose sequence-learning system. It supports the hypothesis of Heckers et al. (Hippocampus 14:153-162, 2004) that TP is an expression of two separate general learning elements: one for associating actions and contexts, another for prioritising associations when more than one context is present. The two-tier model also provides explanations for why phased training is important for helping subjects learn the initial training pairs and why some subjects fail to do so. It also supports the Harris and McGonigle (The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 47B:319-348, 1994) explanation of why, once the training pairs have been acquired, subjects perform transitive choice automatically on two-item diads, but not when exposed to triads from the same sequence.     

“Putting One Foot in Front of the Other”: A Qualitative Study of Emotional Experiences and Help-Seeking in Women with Multiple Sclerosis

Treatments for depression and anxiety in multiple sclerosis (MS) are effective but evidence suggests that individuals do not always seek help for emotional difficulties. This study explored how ten women with MS (aged 30–64), recruited via a hospital based MS clinic, coped with and understood their emotions. The semi-structured interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Eight participants discussed the analytic process and themes. Four overarching themes emerged: Disclosure stress, Uncomfortable dependence, Facing deterioration and One step at a time. The women struggled emotionally with many aspects of living with MS yet coping alone provided a way of defying MS and maintaining independence and control. The women needed emotional support but reported thinking others either did not notice or understand; their emotions often felt invisible. More holistic care from services was desired. Non help-seeking for distress was partially influenced by a desire to keep things “normal” and a lack of knowledge regarding service provision.