Differences in the Manifest Dream Content of Anglo-American,Mexican-American,and African-American College Women

This study compares the manifest dream content of African-American college women with that of their Anglo-American and Mexican-American peers. The dream elements examined are characters, emotions, environmental press, achievement outcomes, and social interactions that are aggressive, friendly, or sexual. The results show a statistically significant difference on only one measure: environmental press. That is, the dreams of African Americans reveal a significantly stronger perception of themselves as victims of their fate rather than directors of it.     

Islam and Mental Disorders of the Older Adults: Religious Text,Belief System and Caregiving Practices

Journal of Religion and Health - This paper illustrates the impact of Islamic religious texts on dementia care in the Middle East. It examines how old age and older adults mental disorders are...     

Why does working memory span predict complex cognition? Testing the strategy affordance hypothesis

We introduce and empirically evaluate the strategy affordance hypothesis, which holds that individual differences in strategy use will mediate the relationship between performances on a working memory (WM) span task and another cognitive task only when the same strategies are afforded by both tasks. One hundred forty-eight participants completed basic memory tasks and verbal span tasks that afford the same strategies, such as imagery and sentence generation, and completed reading comprehension tasks that afford different ones, such as self-questioning and summarization. Effective strategy use on WM span tasks accounted for variance in the span-memory relationship, but not for the span-comprehension relationship, supporting the strategy affordance hypothesis. Strategy use mediated the span-cognition relationship only when both tasks afforded the same strategies.     

Reperfusion of Specific Brain Regions by Raising Blood Pressure Restores Selective Language Functions in Subacute Stroke

We report a series of six single subject studies examining the effects of pharmacological blood pressure elevation on regional brain perfusion and language function. Previous reports indicate that hypoperfusion of specific brain regions, as delineated by magnetic resonance perfusion weighted imaging (PWI), is associated with disruption of selective lexical functions. On this basis, we hypothesized that reperfusion of the same regions, in the absence of infarct in that region, would restore the associated lexical function. We present five patients with impaired lexical-semantics associated with poor perfusion, but not infarction, of Brodmann's area 22 (BA 22), and one patient with impaired lexical-semantics and a superimposed deficit in retrieving the phonological representations of words, associated with poor perfusion Brodmann's area 37 (BA 37) as well as BA 22. Each patient was treated with induced blood pressure elevation to increase perfusion of the ischemic and dysfunctional tissue. Daily testing of naming and comprehension, with stimulus sets matched for frequency, familiarity, and length, showed improved lexical-semantics in the patients who showed reperfusion of BA 22 and improved oral naming (but not lexical-semantics) in the patient who showed reperfusion of BA 37. These cases illustrate that loss of function with hypoperfusion of a circumscribed area of the brain, and recovery of the same function with improved perfusion of that brain region, can reveal brain/language relationships prior to reorganization after brain injury.     

A controlled-attention view of working-memory capacity.

In 2 experiments the authors examined whether individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity are related to attentional control. Experiment 1 tested high- and low-WM-span (high-span and low-span) participants in a prosaccade task, in which a visual cue appeared in the same location as a subsequent to-be-identified target letter, and in an antisaccade task, in which a target appeared opposite the cued location. Span groups identified targets equally well in the prosaccade task, reflecting equivalence in automatic orienting. However, low-span participants were slower and less accurate than high-span participants in the antisaccade task, reflecting differences in attentional control. Experiment 2 measured eye movements across a long antisaccade session. Low-span participants made slower and more erroneous saccades than did high-span participants. In both experiments, low-span participants performed poorly when task switching from antisaccade to prosaccade blocks. The findings support a controlled-attention view of WM capacity.     

Romantic relationship distress,gender, socioeconomic status,and inflammation: A preregistered report

Poor quality romantic relationships increase risk for health problems; elevated systemic inflammation is one promising underlying mechanism. This registered report utilized data from three publicly available data sets with large sample sizes (Add Health, MIDUS, NSHAP) to test this possibility. An internal meta‐analysis across all three studies determined that romantic relationship distress was unrelated to inflammation (assessed via C‐reactive protein levels). In addition, this link was not moderated by gender, socioeconomic status (SES), or the combination of gender and SES.     

Steroid Regulation of Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP)

The present review is dedicated to the work of B.S. Mc Ewen on the regulatory effects of steroid hormones on peptidergic neurotransmission in the brain and pituitary. The focus is on the discoveries encompassing almost two decades of work on the central and neuroendocrine regulation of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) by both corticosteroids and estrogens.     

Moral Responsibility,Reactive Attitudes and Freedom of Will

In his influential paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson argued that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and related reactive attitudes (such as blame, resentment, indignation, and moral approval) were wholly “internal” to the practices themselves and could be insulated from traditional philosophical and metaphysical concerns, including concerns about free will and determinism. This “insulation thesis” is a controversial feature of Strawson’s influential paper; and it has had numerous critics. The first purpose of this paper is to explain my own reasons for thinking that our practices of holding responsible cannot be entirely insulated from incompatibilist concerns about freedom and determinism. The second purpose is to argue that these incompatibilist concerns are in fact legitimate concerns: There are sound reasons to believe that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible do require at least sometimes in our lives that we must be capable of acting freely in a manner that is not determined. I defend this thesis by spelling out why I believe various compatibilist strategies attempting to show that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism fail to show this. In the course of this critique, a general theme will emerge: In order to do full justice to our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible and the freedoms thus involved, one must distinguish between different types of freedom, and in particular, between freedom of action and freedom of will.     

Achievement and beliefs outcomes of students with high and low expectation teachers

Social Psychology of Education - Teacher expectation models have theorized that expectations are likely to affect student socio-psychological as well as academic outcomes. Effects on...