Blood pressure responses of defensive hostile women when facing a real stress task

Objective: This study investigated the importance of the combination of the hostility and defensiveness variables as psychosocial factors that predict the risk of cardiovascular dysfunction. We examined the impact of a stressful situation on blood pressure responses, using a continuous psychophysiological assessment approach.

Design: We measured the evolution of these responses over three experimental phases (adaptation, task and recovery), also considering a minute-by-minute analysis within each phase.

Main Outcome Measures: We used the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and the Social Desirability Questionnaire to form four groups (high hostility and high defensiveness, high hostility and low defensiveness, low hostility and high defensiveness, and low hostility and low defensiveness).

Results: We expected the group of hostile defensive women to record higher activation (task phase: an academic exam) and slower habituation (recovery phase) compared to the other groups. The results confirmed our hypothesis, as the profile of the hostile defensive individuals was one of constant or sensitization during the task phase, while during the recovery phase those individuals underwent a slow recovery.

Conclusion: Therefore, it can be indicated that the low hostility and low defensive group is the most adaptive, as recorded very little activation in response, and rapid recovery.     

Revealing the Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education

The so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ (HC) is often presented as a counterproductive element in education, and many scholars argue that it should be eliminated, by being made explicit, in education in general and specifically in higher education (HE). The problem of the HC has not been solved by the transition from a teacher-centered education to a student-centered educational model that takes the student’s experience as the starting point of learning. In this article we turn to several philosophers of education (Dewey, Kohlberg, Whitehead, Peters and Knowles) to propose that HC can be made explicit in HE when the teacher recognizes and lives his/her teaching as a personal issue, not merely a technical one; and that the students’ experience of the learning process is not merely individual but emerges through their interpersonal relationship with the teacher. We suggest ways in which this interpersonal relationship can be strengthened despite current challenges in HE.     

Positive and negative intergroup contact: Interaction not asymmetry

This research reports a novel investigation into the comparative effects of positive and negative direct and extended intergroup contact on intergroup orientations. It tested the generality of the positive–negative asymmetry effect among majority (N = 357) and minority (N = 101) group members in Iceland. Little evidence of asymmetry was observed: the beneficial effects of positive contact were mostly as strong as the detrimental effects of negative contact, for both direct and extended contact. However, evidence was found for alternative interaction models in which positive contact buffers the negative effects of negative contact, and negative contact enhances the benefits of positive contact. These interaction effects were found only for direct contact and principally in the majority group, but were also found for the minority group, though more weakly. No interaction was observed for extended contact. It appeared that differential group salience elicited by positive and negative contact could partly contribute to the explanation of the observed effects, at least in the majority sample.     

Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Children with ADHD: a Systematic Review

In developmental research, the relationship between Executive Function (EF) and Theory of Mind (ToM) has been extensively assessed, and EF has been considered a condition for ToM. However, few researchers have studied the relationship between EF and ToM in clinical populations, especially that of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by symptoms of inattention and motor hyperactivity/impulsivity, in which EF is largely impaired. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) model, 201 English and Spanish articles evaluating EF and ToM in ADHD were chosen. Fifteen papers met the inclusion criteria and were selected for further analysis. The first study dates from 2001. Most of the studies’ designs are cross-sectional, include mostly male children, have a small sample size, and were conducted in European countries. Unlike tasks assessing EF, tasks assessing ToM were heterogeneous across studies. The EFs most correlated with ToM were inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and attention. Interest in studying the relationship between EF and ToM in ADHD is recent,but increasing based on new findings and tuning of ToM instruments. However, while an association between EF and ToM is indicated in ADHD, the degree of prediction and predictability of one over the other cannot yet be established because of the studies’ heterogeneity.     

Reencounter With History and Memory Through a Therapeutic Process

In this co-authored paper, two clinical cases of extreme trauma from political persecution are presented, both of which were treated at ILAS, a center dedicated to treating survivors of such traumatization in Chile. In the first instance we refer to a woman who has been imprisoned and tortured in the first years of the dictatorship and who seeks psychotherapy 30 years after her experience. In the second case we refer to the daughter of whose parents were both detained and disappeared who seeks psychotherapy after she testifies in a film about the political repression in Chile. Both come to therapy many years after their original experience, triggered by testimony they gave for a documentary film about the Coup d’Etat in Chile. Using our understanding of intersubjective theory, most important the aspects of recognition and witnessing, we underscore the crucial role of the social context of the therapeutic dyad that allows the silence to lift. This gives way to the reparative function that words have when spoken to a live available person who represents society at large.     

Hypermnesia in older people and its relationship with successful ageing / La hipermnesia en personas mayores y su relación con el envejecimiento exitoso

Abstract

This study analyses the phenomenon of hypermnesia and its relationship with variables associated with successful ageing such as age, sex, cognitive status and cognitive plasticity in older people. The sample consists of 124 institutionalized and non-institutionalized participants, whose ages ranged from 65 to 91. A specific task was used to evaluate hypermnesia; a cognitive screening test and a verbal fluency test were used to assess cognitive status, and the AVLT-LP test was used to measure cognitive plasticity. The results show significant improvements between the hypermnesia recall tests for the total sample and for all the groups, according to the variables studied. Participants with successful ageing characterized by a younger age, a high level of cognitive functioning and a greater cognitive plasticity showed better results than the other participants in the hypermnesia task with the exception of sex, which did not present differences between groups. This study confirms that hypermnesia occurs more significantly in older people with successful ageing regardless of whether they are male or female.     

Adherence predictors in an Internet-based Intervention program for depression

Internet-delivered psychotherapy has been demonstrated to be effective in the treatment of depression. Nevertheless, the study of the adherence in this type of the treatment reported divergent results. The main objective of this study is to analyze predictors of adherence in a primary care Internet-based intervention for depression in Spain. A multi-center, three arm, parallel, randomized controlled trial was conducted with 194 depressive patients, who were allocated in self-guided or supported-guided intervention. Sociodemographic and clinical characteristics were gathered using a case report form. The Mini international neuropsychiatric interview diagnoses major depression. Beck Depression Inventory was used to assess depression severity. The visual analogic scale assesses the respondent’s self-rated health and Short Form Health Survey was used to measure the health-related quality of life. Age results a predictor variable for both intervention groups (with and without therapist support). Perceived health is a negative predictor of adherence for the self-guided intervention when change in depression severity was included in the model. Change in depression severity results a predictor of adherence in the support-guided intervention. Our findings demonstrate that in our sample, there are differences in sociodemographic and clinical variables between active and dropout participants and we provide adherence predictors in each intervention condition of this Internet-based program for depression (self-guided and support-guided). It is important to point that further research in this area is essential to improve tailored interventions and to know specific patients groups can benefit from these interventions.     

The effects of attention and task-relevance on the processing of syntactic violations during listening to two concurrent speech streams

The notion of automatic syntactic analysis received support from some event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, none of these studies tested syntax processing in the presence of a concurrent speech stream. Here we present two concurrent continuous speech streams, manipulating two variables potentially affecting speech processing in a fully crossed design: attention (focused vs. divided) and task (lexical – detecting numerals vs. syntactical – detecting syntactic violations). ERPs elicited by syntactic violations and numerals as targets were compared with those for distractors (task-relevant events in the unattended speech stream) and attended and unattended task-irrelevant events. As was expected, only target numerals elicited the N2b and P3 components. The amplitudes of these components did not significantly differ between focused and divided attention. Both task-relevant and task-irrelevant syntactic violations elicited the N400 ERP component within the attended but not in the unattended speech stream. P600 was only elicited by target syntactic violations. These results provide no support for the notion of automatic syntactic analysis. Rather, it appears that task-relevance is a prerequisite of P600 elicitation, implying that in-depth syntactic analysis occurs only for attended speech under everyday listening situations.     

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.     

Kalmár's Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis

In his famous paper, An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory, Alonzo Church (1936) identified the intuitive notion of effective calculability with the mathematically precise notion of recursiveness. This proposal, known as Church's Thesis, has been widely accepted. Only a few papers have been written against it. One of these is László Kalmár's An Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis from 1959. The aim of this paper is to present Kalmár's argument and to fill in missing details based on his general philosophical thoughts on mathematics.