Anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: Reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging

Studies of semantic impairment arising from brain disease suggest that the anterior temporal lobes are critical for semantic abilities in humans; yet activation of these regions is rarely reported in functional imaging studies of healthy controls performing semantic tasks. Here, we combined neuropsychological and PE T functional imaging data to show that when healthy subjects identify concepts at a specific level, the regions activated correspond to the site of maximal atrophy in patients with relatively pure semantic impairment. The stimuli were color photographs of common animals or vehicles, and the task was category verification at specific (e.g., robin), intermediate (e.g., bird), or general (e.g., animal) levels. Specific, relative to general, categorization activated the antero-lateral temporal cortices bilaterally, despite matching of these experimental conditions for difficulty. Critically, in patients with atrophy in precisely these areas, the most pronounced deficit was in the retrieval of specific semantic information.     

An overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and its variants

We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropschychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) semantic dementia (SD), 3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants.     

What makes a word so attractive? Disclosing the urge to read while bisecting

Expert readers have been repeatedly reported to misperceive the centre of visual stimuli, shifting systematically to the left the bisection of any lines (pseudoneglect) while showing a cross-over effect while bisecting different types of orthographic strings (Arduino et al., 2010, Neuropsychologia, 48, 2140). This difference has been attributed to asymmetrical allocation of attention that visuo-verbal material receives when lexical access occurs (e.g., Fischer, 2004, Cognitive Brain Research, 4, 163). The aim of this study was to further examine which visual features guide recognition of potentially orthographic materials. To disentangle the role of orthography, heterogeneity, and visuo-perceptual discreteness, we presented Italian unimpaired adults with four experiments exploiting the bisection paradigm. The results showed that a cross-over effect emerges in most discrete strings, especially when their internal structure, that is being composed of heterogeneous elements, is suggestive of orthographically relevant material. Interestingly, the cross-over effect systematically characterized the processing of letter strings (Experiment 2) and words (Experiments 3 and 4), whether visually discrete or not. Overall, this pattern of results suggests that neither discreteness nor heterogeneity per se are responsible for activating visual scanning mechanisms implied in text exploration, although both contribute to increasing the chance of a visual stimulus undergoing a perceptual analysis dedicated to pre-lexical processing.     

Prospero Moisè Loria: A Case Study of Jewish Secularism in Liberal Italy

In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814–92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, “to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction.” Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy’s culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context.     

Self-monitoring and the prediction of one's own and others' personality test scores

This study had two aims. Firstly, it examined the similarity between subjects' ratings of themselves and others and their scores on various personality tests. A group of 264 undergraduates in psychology completed Snyder's (1974) Self-Monitoring Scale and the Neuroticism and Extraversion Scales from the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1975; 1986). Then, they estimated both their own score and that of a peer on those questionnaires. The results showed that subjects (i) were fairly good at estimating their own and others' extraversion and neuroticism scores, (ii) were less accurate at estimating self-monitoring scores, (iii) were better at predicting their own scores than those of others, and (iv) erroneously believed themselves to be significantly similar to the chosen peer. Secondly, individual differences in the accuracy of personality estimation were studied. According to Synder's (1974) self-monitoring construct, people high in self-monitoring would be especially adept at reading others' expressive behaviours; therefore, any differences in the accuracy of perceiving the personality of others might be associated with differences in self-monitoring. High self-monitors were more accurate than low self-monitors at estimating neuroticism scores for others. Another implication of the self-monitoring theory is that, taking high and low self-monitors as targets of others' estimations, there should be greater discrepancy between actual scores and peer estimations for high self-monitors. The results here supported this prediction, but only in self-monitoring estimation.     

Psychosocial risk assessment among families receiving assistance from the social services

This study analyses the psychosocial risk profiles that better discriminate between three levels of risk: low, middle and high. We also examine to what extent the assessments of the level of risk made by professionals of social services are consistent with their decision of initiate a "risk declaration" expedient. For this purpose, 468 cases of families (245 two-parents and 223 one-parent) were examined through the Psychosocial Risk Profile of the Family. Discriminant analysis showed that social exclusion and family violence profiles discriminate between high and middle-low levels of risk in two-parent families. Negligence and family violence plus maternal inadequacy and children maladjustment discriminate between high and middle-low levels of risk in one-parent families. There is a high consistence between the assessment of psychosocial risk and the decision to initate a procedure of a "risk declaration" in both families, with a tendency to overestimate the middle risk in one-parent families.     

SUPERVISION: A CONTAINERÆCONTAINED APPROACH

The authors illustrate an approach to the supervisory process as a learning experience for both supervisee and supervisor built on the containment of unconscious anxieties. It is argued that a core function of psychoanalytic supervision is to help contain the emotional turbulence and the unconscious anxieties arising and evolving in the two interacting domains of the analytic and the supervisory sessions. From this perspective, the analyst-patient interaction and that of the supervisee and supervisor can be understood as twin, tiered transformational arenas, the supervisory one being at the service of holding and grasping the roles the supervisee/analyst goes through as part of the analytic process. On the basis of detailed clinical material from a disturbed 7-year-old girl, the authors explore the interrelated issues and difficulties in containing anxieties and turbulence in both the analytic and the supervisory situation. When emotional containment is adequately handled, the supervision helps the understanding and development of the supervisee's use of his/her own personality as a treatment instrument, as advocated by Fleming and Benedek decades ago. The supervisory session thus furthers the resolution of clinical issues through symbol-formation, clinical sessions and supervision being twin domains for recording and understanding emotional evolution.     

Seven-month-olds detect ordinal numerical relationships within temporal sequences

Previous evidence has shown that 11-month-olds represent ordinal relations between purely numerical values, whereas younger infants require a confluence of numerical and non-numerical cues. In this study, we show that when multiple featural cues (i.e., color and shape) are provided, 7-month-olds detect reversals in the ordinal direction of numerical sequences relying solely on number when non-numerical quantitative cues are controlled. These results provide evidence for the influence of featural information and multiple cue integration on infants’ proneness to detect ordinal numerical information.     

Pecunia olet: the role of incidental disgust in the ultimatum game

We address the role of the incidental emotion of disgust in the Ultimatum Game. Participants had to choose whether or not to accept a ? offer from a ?0 pot made by another participant; 120 were in a room where a disgusting smell was released and 120 were in a room with no particular smell. Acceptance rates were higher in the room with the disgusting smell. The effect was mainly carried by the male participants who also reported more disgust with the disgusting smell and judged the offer as less unfair than females. We propose a spontaneous discounting explanation. Acceptance rates were higher in the room with the disgusting smell because participants misattributed the disgust induced by the offer to the ambient disgusting smell.