An investigation of children's fears and their mothers' fears

Children (75 female, 52 male) in grades 2 through 8 completed the Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSS-FC). Their mothers completed the same questionnaire twice: once for themselves and a second time to estimate their children's fears. Spearman's rhos indicated that there was a high degree of correspondence between the mothers' rank-ordered estimates of their children's fears and the children's rank-ordered self-reports (=.86 for males, =.96 for females.However, mothers' overall estimates of their children's general fearfulness were significantly correlated only with their daughters' fearfulness, not with their sons'. Further analyses showed that mothers could generally identify their children's highest-rated fears. All test-retest measures were significant. In summary, these results suggest that mothers may provide useful clinical information about their children's specific fears and that the FSS-FC is a reliable instrument with which to assess children's fears.     

Contemplative Meditation and Neuroscience: Prospects for Mental Health

Numerous studies show that personal spirituality developed through prayer positively influences mental health. Phenomenological and neuroscientific studies of mindfulness, an Eastern meditative prayer form, reveal significant health benefits now yielding important insights useful for guiding treatment of psychological disorders. By contrast, and despite its practice for millennia, Christian meditation is largely unrepresented in studies of clinical efficacy. Resemblances between mindfulness and disciplinary acts in Christian meditation taken from the ancient Greek practice of askesis suggest that Christian meditation will prove similarly beneficial; furthermore, psychological and neuroscientific studies suggest that its retention of a dialogical and transcendent praxis will additionally benefit social and existential psychotherapy. This paper thus argues that study of contemplative meditation for its therapeutic potential is warranted.     

Equivalences Among Polarity Algorithms

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly (Giannakidou, in: Maienborn, von Heusinger, Portner (eds.), Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot appear in affirmative sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic (van Benthem in Essays in logical semantics, vol. 29 of Studies in linguistics and philosophy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986; Language in action: categories, lambdas, and dynamic logic, vol. 130 of Studies in logic, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1991). This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem (1986, 1991), Sánchez-Valencia (Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991), Dowty (Proceedings of the 4th conference on semantics and theoretical linguistics, Cornel University, CLC Publications, Rochester, 1994), and van Eijck (in: ten Cate, Zeevat (eds.), 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms.     

Conspirationism,Synarchism and the long shadow of Perón in Argentina

This article analyses the dissemination of conspiracy theories in late 20th-century Argentina, particularly those connected with the idea of Synarchy, a supposed underground global network working against the country’s interests. It reconstructs the projection and impact of those theories among Peronist right-wing and left-wing followers as well as among anti-Peronist intellectuals. While not necessarily anti-Semitic, the suspicion of such a network plotting in the shadows affected the public imaginary of society, spilling at certain points into explicit anti-Semitism. The text also addresses the long-term effect of a connected myth, the Plan Andinia, a plot supposedly articulated by Jews and/or young Israelis who, while touring Patagonia, were thought to be undercover agents preparing a territorial takeover of the southern region to create a second Jewish state. Analysis reveals that even in the early twenty-first century such conspirationist logic continued to pervade some of Argentina’s high echelons of power.     

Conditioned taste aversion modifies persistently the subsequent induction of neocortical long-term potentiation in vivo

The ability of neurons to modify their synaptic strength in an activity-dependent manner has a crucial role in learning and memory processes. It has been proposed that homeostatic forms of plasticity might provide the global regulation necessary to maintain synaptic strength and plasticity within a functional dynamic range. Similarly, it is considered that the capacity of synapses to express plastic changes is itself subject to variation dependent on previous experience. In particular, training in several behavioral tasks modifies the possibility to induce long-term potentiation (LTP). Our previous studies in the insular cortex (IC) have shown that induction of LTP in the basolateral amygdaloid nucleus (Bla)-IC projection previous to conditioned taste aversion (CTA) training enhances the retention of this task. The aim of the present study was to analyze whether CTA training modifies the ability to induce subsequent LTP in the Bla-IC projection in vivo. Thus, CTA trained rats received high frequency stimulation in the Bla-IC projection in order to induce LTP 48, 72, 96 and 120 h after the aversion test. Our results show that CTA training prevents the subsequent induction of LTP in the Bla-IC projection, for at least 120 h after CTA training. We also showed that pharmacological inhibition of CTA consolidation with anisomycin (1 μl/side; 100 μg/μl) prevents the CTA effect on IC-LTP. These findings reveal that CTA training produces a persistent change in the ability to induce subsequent LTP in the Bla-IC projection in a protein-synthesis dependent manner, suggesting that changes in the ability to induce subsequent synaptic plasticity contribute to the formation and persistence of aversive memories.     

Anticipated emotions and personal experience for predicting behavioral intentions and behavioral expectations

We tested how anticipated emotions interact with personal experience in risk behavior to improve predictions from TPB on behavioral intention (BI) and behavioral expectation (BE) for sex without condom (Study 1) and excessive drinking (Study 2). In the moderate-high experience group, anticipated emotional profiles (AEPs) improve TPB prediction from 28% to 45% in the case of BI and from 19% to 40% in that of BE in relation to sexual risk behavior (Study 1), and from 23% to 36% in the case of BI and from 17% to 31% in that of BE in relation to binge drinking (Study 2). However, in the low-experience group (Study 2) AEPs improve TPB predictions for BI (12% to 34%) but not for BE, showing that in less experienced people BI and BE are not equivalent: anticipated emotions have different relevance in their prediction. These results were replicated using a general negative anticipated emotion index (averaging emotional categories).     

Assessing the impact of dispositional resistance to change on organizational attraction

In recent years there has been an increasing interest among researchers and practitioners to analyze what makes a firm attractive in the eyes of university students, and if individual differences such as personality traits have an impact on this general affect towards a particular organization. The main goal of the present research is to demonstrate that a recently conceptualized narrow trait of personality named dispositional resistance to change (RTC), that is, the inherent tendency of individuals to avoid and oppose changes (Oreg, 2003), can predict organizational attraction of university students to firms that are perceived as innovative or conservative. Three complementary studies were carried out using a total sample of 443 college students from Mexico. In addition to validating the hypotheses, our findings suggest that as the formation of the images of organizations in students' minds is done through social cognitions, simple stimuli such as physical artifacts, when used in an isolated manner, do not have a significant impact on organizational attraction.     

Qualitative differences between implicit and explicit sequence learning

Four experiments investigate the differences between implicit and explicit sequence learning concerning their resilience to structural and superficial task changes. A superficial change that embedded the SRT task in the context of a selection task, while maintaining the sequence, did selectively hinder the expression of implicit learning. In contrast, a manipulation that maintained the task surface, but decreased the sequence validity, affected the expression of learning specifically when it was explicit. These results are discussed in the context of a dynamic framework (Cleeremans & Jiménez, 2002), which assumes that implicit knowledge is specially affected by contextual factors and that, as knowledge becomes explicit, it allows for the development of relevant metaknowledge that modulates the expression of explicit knowledge.     

Multivariate repeated measures designs

In the social, behavioral, and health researches it is a common strategy to collect data along time on more than one group of participants on multiple dependent variables. To analyse this kind of data is very complicated due to the correlations between the measures taken in different points of the time, and between the answers. Usually to analyse these data the multivariate mixed model, or the doubly multivariate model, are the most frequent approaches. Both of them require combined multivariate normality, equal covariance matrices, independence between the observations of different participants, complete measurements on all subjects, and time-independent covariates. When one ore more of these assumptions are not accomplished these approaches do not control in the correct way the Type I error, and this affects the validity and the accuracy of the inferences. In this paper some solutions that solve the problems with the error Type I will be shown. Several programs for a correct realization of the analyses through the SAS Proc Mixed procedure are presented.