Repeated acute stress alters heart morphometry in male and female rats differently

Stress exerts deleterious effects on the cardiovascular system. Left ventricular hypertrophy has been identified as a risk factor for heart disease. The effects of stress on other heart parameters, including heart size and heart shape, are not well-characterized. In addition, the extent to which males and females differ in stress effects on these measures has not been examined, but may help to further explain gender differences in heart disease morbidity and mortality. The present experiment examined effects of mild daily stress on heart morphology and blood volume (obtained by ex-sanguination at decapitation) in 39 male and 40 female rats of two strains. Following 14 days of stress exposure, rats were killed and blood volume was measured. Heart length, heart weight, left ventricle cavity width, right ventricle width, lateral wall thickness, anterior wall thickness, posterior wall thickness, and septal wall thickness were measured. In males, after controlling for body weight, stress decreased heart length and left ventricle cavity width and increased septal wall thickness. In females, after controlling for body weight, stress reduced total blood volume, but did not significantly affect other heart parameters. These findings suggest that stress exposure can alter heart morphology and blood volume and that there are sex differences in these effects.     

Psychoanalysts in the Public Eye: Internal Resistances

An attitude against public presentations has been part of the inward looking stance of organized psychoanalysis and has contributed to the often-heard comment that psychoanalysis is a dying profession. Because of the very private nature of clinical psychoanalytic work, this ambivalence to public appearances continues to exist in all psychoanalysts. We have to realize that it is crucial for psychoanalysts to educate the public about psychoanalytic ideas while being aware of possible unintended negative consequences, such as interference in transference issues with patients, ethical and privacy violations, distortion in the press coverage, unfairly biased antipsychoanalytic coverage, and concern about disapproval from prominent and influential members of psychoanalytic organizations about the nature of the press coverage (or even of press coverage at all) leading to criticism of an individual psychoanalyst and interference with his or her progression. Our public information efforts have to include using misfired efforts as teaching tools and insure that presentation of clinical material is limited and sufficiently disguised.     

The other side of false belief: Constructing the objectivity of reality

Young children appear not to grasp the independence between objective reality and subjective beliefs, as evidenced by their errors on false belief tasks. Whereas decades of research have examined children's developing understanding of the subjectivity of beliefs, however, almost no research has examined the other side of the issue: How do humans come to understand the objectivity of reality, and why is this understanding important? To help address this gap, this article proposes an evolutionary-developmental account of how the understanding that reality is objective may have emerged in human thinking. Three key steps are highlighted: (i) phylogenetic foundations in great ape competitive mindreading, (ii) ontogenetic foundations in preverbal infant joint attention, and (iii) key experiences of perspectival conflict in linguistic humans. Functionally, the concept of an objective reality facilitated collaborative reasoning and joint decision-making. To arrive at good joint decisions, individuals needed to recognize that both their own beliefs and others' beliefs could be wrong—with respect to the objective reality.     

Scylla and Charybdis: the purist’s dilemma

This paper explores the view that, on Mumford’s account of the purist, to the degree that the purist adopts an aesthetic perspective, he or she doesn’t watch the sport in question, and to the degree that he or she does watch the sport, there is a loss of aesthetic appreciation. The idea that spectators oscillate between partisanship and purism means that the purist is unable to avoid either the Scylla of not actually watching the sport, or the Charybdis of loss of aesthetic appreciation at any given point. Ultimately there seems to be both a sport-shaped hole and an aesthetic-shaped hole in Mumford’s account of the purist. It is argued that oscillation is incapable of dealing with the problem precisely because it is disjunctive in nature and entails the spectator either watching sport from an aesthetic perspective or from a partisan perspective at any given time. An alternative conception of the aesthetic is considered that offers one way of dissolving the purist’s dilemma.     

Mizrahi haredism and Holocaust commemoration in Israel – a dynamic of critical national partnership

This article deals with the haredi position regarding the national memory of the Holocaust in Israel. The attitude of Mizrahi haredism to the Holocaust reflects a position of critical partnership in relation to Israel’s national symbols and, in fact, in relation to Zionist Israeli nationalism. On the one hand, it adopts the haredi world view with regard to national symbols in order to negotiate its place within Israeli nationalism. On the other, it employs the consensual messages embedded in national symbols to express a critical view in its negotiation for the place of Mizrahi haredism within Israeli society in general, and haredi society in particular.     

Strengths use and deficit correction in organizations: development and validation of a questionnaire

Although the positive psychology tradition emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach regarding individual strengths and weaknesses, there is no valid instrument to measure these phenomena in organizations. The purpose of the present studies is to develop and validate an instrument that measures four dimensions, namely perceived organizational support (POS) for strengths use, POS for deficit correction, strengths use behaviour, and deficit correction behaviour. In study 1 and 2, the Strengths Use and Deficit COrrection (SUDCO) questionnaire was developed and tested for its factor structure, reliability, and convergent and criterion validity in two samples of South African employees (N = 338 and N = 361, respectively). In study 3, the convergent and criterion validity of the SUDCO were examined in a sample of Dutch engineers (N = 133). Results indicated that the intended dimensions of strengths use and deficit correction can be measured reliably with 24 items and showed convergent validity. Moreover, POS for strengths use and strengths use behaviour correlated positively with self- and manager-ratings of job performance, supporting the criterion validity of these scales. As expected, POS for deficit correction and deficit correction behaviour were unrelated to the performance ratings.     

Provability in Principle and Controversial Constructivistic Principles

New epistemic principles are formulated in the language of Shapiros system of Epistemic Arithmetic. It is argued that some plausibility can be attributed to these principles. The relations between these principles and variants of controversial constructivistic principles are investigated. Special attention is given to variants of the intuitionistic version of Churchs thesis and to variants of Markovs principle.     

Rehearsal in Spatial Working Memory: Evidence From Neuroimaging

A variety of biological evidence has identified a frontal-parietal circuit underlying spatial working memory for visual stimuli. But the question remains, how do these neural regions accomplish the goal of maintaining location information on-line? We tested the hypothesis that the active rehearsal of spatial information in working memory is accomplished by means of focal shifts of spatial selective attention to memorized locations. Spatial selective attention has been shown to cause changes in the early visual processing of stimuli that appear in attended locations. Thus, the hypothesis of attention-based rehearsal predicts similar modulations of visual processing at memorized locations. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe posterior visual activations during the performance of a spatial working memory task. In line with the hypothesis, spatial rehearsal led to enhanced activation in the early visual areas contralateral to the memorized locations.