Alexithymia in Young people’s academic career: The mediating role of anxiety and resilience

Alexithymia prevents people from understanding and adopting verbal language to describe and regulate one’s emotions. Recent studies have found that alexithymia symptoms also impact on young people’s academic achievement. Nevertheless, it is worth investigating risk and protective roles played by students’ academic anxiety and resilience, respectively. The authors expected that students’ anxiety and resilience mediated the effect of alexithymia symptoms on students’ academic burnout and performance. A sample of 257 university students answered self-report questionnaires about alexithymia, academic anxiety and resilience, and academic burnout and performance. Mediation analyses were performed by the structural equation model. Anxiety acted as a mediator between alexithymia and academic burnout and performance. Furthermore, resilience mediated the effect of alexithymia on burnout, but not on academic performance. The study provides support for preventing alexithymia consequences on young people’s academic career by reducing their anxiety and promoting academic resilience. Implications of intervention programs were discussed.     

Learning RFT: An Introduction to Rrelational Frame Theory and its Clinical application by Niklas Törmeke

The Psychological Record -     

Introducing the concept of neurobiological foundation of Rorschach responses using the example of Oral Dependent Language

We introduce the concept of “neurobiological foundation” of Rorschach interpretations as an extension of the concept of behavioral representation as a foundation for interpretation of R‐PAS variables. Here, we propose that if there is a parallelism between the mental, verbal and perceptual behaviors occurring within the microcosm of the Rorschach task and those occurring in the external environment [behavioral foundation], then the same brain regions engaged by the test‐taker when producing of a given code, should be engaged also when reproducing, in the external environment, the same psychological processes underlying that specific Rorschach code [neurobiological foundation]. To investigate this concept, we used archival, fMRI data and tested whether producing Oral Dependency Language (ODL) responses would associate with increased activation in brain regions associated with dependency‐related, psychological processes. Results from a sample of 21 non‐clinical volunteers partially confirmed our hypothesis, providing some support to the neurobiological foundation of the ODL code.     

Happiness is a personal(ity) thing: the genetics of personality and well-being in a representative sample.

Subjective well-being is known to be related to personality traits. However, to date, nobody has examined whether personality and subjective well-being share a common genetic structure. We used a representative sample of 973 twin pairs to test the hypothesis that heritable differences in subjective well-being are entirely accounted for by the genetic architecture of the Five-Factor Model's personality domains. Results supported this model. Subjective well-being was accounted for by unique genetic influences from Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness, and by a common genetic factor that influenced all five personality domains in the directions of low Neuroticism and high Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. These findings indicate that subjective well-being is linked to personality by common genes and that personality may form an "affective reserve" relevant to set-point maintenance and changes in set point over time.     

A case of partial biotinidase deficiency associated with autism.

We report the case of a child with partial biotinidase deficiency and autistic developmental disorder. We arrived at the diagnosis of biotinidase deficiency when the child was almost 4 years of age. Consequently, he began cofactor biotin treatment (10 mg daily) which did not resolve his autistic behavior. His younger brother was affected by partial biotinidase deficiency diagnosed at birth through our neonatal screening program. He was precociously treated with cofactor biotin therapy (10 mg daily) and did not show any behavioral abnormality or developmental delay. Since the brain is quite vulnerable to biotin deficiency, delayed biotin therapy could result in neurological damage. Our patient is the first case of partial biotinidase deficiency associated with autism. We hypothesize that the low biotinidase activity could have caused biotin deficiency in his brain and cerebrospinal fluids and consequently serious neurological problems, such as stereotyped and autistic behaviors, which were irreversible in spite of biotin supplementation.     

Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information

Abstract: The philosophy of information (PI) is a new area of research with its own field of investigation and methodology. This article, based on the Herbert A. Simon Lecture of Computing and Philosophy I gave at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, analyses the eighteen principal open problems in PI. Section 1 introduces the analysis by outlining Herbert Simon's approach to PI. Section 2 discusses some methodological considerations about what counts as a good philosophical problem. The discussion centers on Hilbert's famous analysis of the central problems in mathematics. The rest of the article is devoted to the eighteen problems. These are organized into five sections: problems in the analysis of the concept of information, in semantics, in the study of intelligence, in the relation between information and nature, and in the investigation of values.     

信息哲学的若干问题

编者按:信息哲学的研究纲领在国际哲学界已经得以确立.英国牛津大学哲学系弗洛里迪的两篇文章《什么是信息哲学?》(本刊2002年第4期)与《信息哲学的若干问题》(Open Problems in the Philosophv of Information)可被视为信息哲学诞生的标志性与奠基性的工作.     

Aggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning

Aggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning were investigated. Participants were 235 kindergarten children (M=6.2 years) and 136 elementary-school children (M=7.6 years) who were selected as aggressive or prosocial based on (kindergarten) teacher ratings. The children were asked to evaluate hypothetical rule violations, attribute emotions they would feel in the role of the victimizer, and justify their responses. Compared with younger prosocial children, younger aggressive children attributed fewer negative emotions and were more likely to provide sanction-oriented justifications when evaluating rule violations negatively. Furthermore, age-, gender- and context-effects in moral development occurred. The context-effects included both effects of transgression type (i.e., prosocial morality vs. fairness) on emotion attributions and moral reasoning and the effects of the context of moral evaluation and emotion attribution on moral reasoning. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of emotion attributions and moral reasoning as antecedents of children's aggressive and prosocial behavior.