Religious Activity and Risk Behavior Among African American Adolescents: Concurrent and Developmental Effects

This study examines how religious activity is associated with risk behaviors, concurrently and developmentally among urban African American adolescents. Seven hundred and five African American youths were interviewed annually during high school. Retention rates for the study exceeded 90%. Frequency of religious activity, sexual intercourse, and alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use were assessed at each wave. Growth curve analyses found negative concurrent associations between religious activity and each of the four risk behaviors. The developmental effects of religious activity varied by gender. Higher levels of religious activity in 9th grade predicted smaller increases in marijuana use among males and cigarette use among females. In addition, larger decreases in religious activity during high school were associated with greater increases in alcohol use among males and sexual intercourse among females. During high school, religious activity limits the development of certain types of risk behavior among African American youth, even after controlling for reciprocal effects.     

Emotional intelligence and social interaction

Two studies found positive relationships between the ability to manage emotions and the quality of social interactions, supporting the predictive and incremental validity of an ability measure of emotional intelligence, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). In a sample of 118 American college students (Study 1), higher scores on the managing emotions subscale of the MSCEIT were positively related to the quality of interactions with friends, evaluated separately by participants and two friends. In a diary study of social interaction with 103 German college students (Study 2), managing emotions scores were positively related to the perceived quality of interactions with opposite sex individuals. Scores on this subscale were also positively related to perceived success in impression management in social interactions with individuals of the opposite sex. In both studies, the main findings remained statistically significant after controlling for Big Five personality traits.     

Effects of binding in the identification of objects

The binding problem requires a solution at the level of individual neurons, but no definite mechanism has yet be given. Therefore, the neuronal level is as yet inadequate for modeling cognitive processes in which binding plays a crucial role. Moreover, the neuronal level involves too many details that are unlikely to be essential for understanding cognition. A general model of cognitive brain functioning is described in which cognitive tasks are represented in a network of cell assemblies. In the network, binding is functionally defined in a way that is compatible with the neuronal level. A computer simulation of the model clarifies how the binding of location and identity of a set of simultaneously presented letters takes place and how questions about the location and identity of the letters are answered. From the simulation of the task three predictions on the logistics of neural processes are derived: 1. When the cell assembly representing a letter participates in more than one temporary excitation loop, it will reach its critical threshold faster. At the behavioral level this means that as the number of identical letters in the display increases, responses will be faster. 2. In order to answer questions about the location and identity of presented letters cell assemblies representing the target location and the target identity have to become bound to their appropriate values. As a consequence the facilitatory effect of identical letters will be stronger if they involve the target location or the target identity than when identical non-targets are involved. 3. Negative identifications are more dependent on the presentation time of the letters than positive identifications because the excitation loops involved take more time to reach the critical threshold. Therefore, the facilitatory effect of identical letters is stronger when the external activation is relatively strong, i.e., when presentation time of the letters is sufficiently long. The reaction times obtained in three behavioral experiments support these hypotheses. Effects of binding can therefore be predicted on the basis of the general logistics of neural processes, without assumptions about a specific binding mechanism at the neuronal level.     

Actions blind to conceptually overlapping stimuli

Participants are worse at identifying spatial symbols (arrowheads) while performing spatially compatible manual key presses. The present experiments investigated the generality of this blindness effect to response-compatible stimuli. In Experiment 1 a left key press deteriorated the identification of left-pointing arrows, and a right key press deteriorated the perception of right-pointing arrows, independent of the hands used to press the key. Thus the blindness effect is based on codes of the distal response location rather than on the body-intrinsic anatomical connection of the hands. Experiment 2 extended the blindness effect to verbal responses and written position words (left, right, up, down). Vocalizing a position word blinded to directly compatible position words (e.g., left-left), but not to orthogonally compatible position words (e.g., left-down). This result suggests that the use of identical stimulus-response codes, and not the use of saliency-matching but distinct codes, suffices to produce blindness effects. Finally, Experiment 3 extended the blindness phenomenon beyond the spatial domain by demonstrating blindness between saying color words and perceiving color patches. Altogether, the experiments revealed action-induced blindness to be a phenomenon of broad empirical validity occurring whenever action and perception afford simultaneous access to the same conceptual codes.     

Perceiving while acting: action affects perception

In two experiments we studied how motor responses affect stimulus encoding when stimuli and responses are functionally unrelated and merely overlap in time. Such R-S effects across S-R assignments have been reported by Schubö, Aschersleben, and Prinz (2001), who found that stimulus encoding was affected by concurrent response execution in the sense of a contrast (i.e., emphasizing differences). The present study aimed at elucidating the mechanisms underlying this effect. Experiment 1 studied the time course of the R-S effect. Contrast was only obtained for short intertrial intervals (ITIs). With long ITIs contrast turned into assimilation (i.e., emphasizing similarities). Experiment 2 excluded an interpretation of the assimilation effect in terms of motor repetition. Our findings support the notion of a shared representational domain for perception and action control, and suggest that contrast between stimulus and response codes emerges when two S-R assignments compete with each other in perception. When perceptual competition is over, assimilation emerges in memory.     

Spatial learning in rats is impaired by microinfusions of protein kinase C-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide within the nucleus accumbens

The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) has been shown to play a role in motor and spatial learning. Protein kinase C (PKC) has been implicated in the mechanisms of initiation and maintenance of long-term potentiation that is thought to be involved in the storage of long-term memory. In the present study, the importance of de novo synthesis of PKC-gamma within the NAcc in the acquisition and retention of spatial discrimination learning was assessed using an antisense knockdown approach. Separate groups of Long-Evans rats were exposed to acute microinfusions (6microg/microl) of PKC-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide (AS-ODN), control oligodeoxynucleotide (C-ODN) or vehicle into the NAcc at 24 and 3h before each training session. Behavioral findings showed that the blockade of NAcc-PKC-gamma translation caused impairments in the early phase of learning and retention of spatial information. Biochemical experiments showed that PKC-gamma expression was reduced and Ca(2+)/phospholipid-dependent protein kinase C (PKC) activity was blocked significantly in the AS-ODN-treated rats in comparison with control rats. The present findings suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma plays a role during the early acquisition of spatial learning. Also, retention test results suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma may be working as an intermediate factor involved in the onset of molecular mechanisms necessary for spatial memory consolidation within the NAcc.     

Is the unilateral lesion of the left substantia nigra pars compacta sufficient to induce working memory impairment in rats?

Adult male Wistar rats with a substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) lesion induced by intranigral administration of 1 micromol 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) were used as a model of early phase Parkinson's disease (PD). This lesion caused a partial depletion of striatal dopamine (DA). The animals were submitted to a spatial working memory version of the water maze task in which they had to find a hidden (submersed) platform using online-maintained information that the platform remains in the same place during four consecutive trials, but that it is moved to another place every training day. Left, but not right SNc-lesioned rats were impaired in finding the platform in the second trial. This result suggests that the left SNc plays a key role in spatial working memory. Control experiments ruled out the possibility that motor impairment, sensory neglect, and/or impairment in the mental representation of the contralateral spatial environment had affected performance of the SNc-lesioned rats.     

Identifying environmental contributions to autism: provocative clues and false leads

The potential role of environmental factors in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is an area of emerging interest within the public and scientific communities. The high degree of heritability of ASD suggests that environmental influences are likely to operate through their interaction with genetic susceptibility during vulnerable periods of development. Evaluation of the plausibility of specific neurotoxicants as etiological agents in ASD should be guided by toxicological principles, including dose-effect dependency and pharmacokinetic parameters. Clinical and epidemiological investigations require the use of sufficiently powered study designs with appropriate control groups and unbiased case ascertainment and exposure assessment. Although much of the existing data that have been used to implicate environmental agents in ASD are limited by methodological shortcomings, a number of efforts are underway that will allow more rigorous evaluation of the role of environmental exposures in the etiology and/or phenotypic expression of the disorder. Surveillance systems are now in place that will provide reliable prevalence estimates going forward in time. Anticipated discoveries in genetics, brain pathology, and the molecular/cellular basis of functional impairment in ASD are likely to provide new opportunities to explore environmental aspects of this disorder.     

Placebo and criminal law

This article considers issues concerning cases where the use of placebo is lawful or is not lawful under aspects of German criminal law. It will differentiate between cases of individual therapy and cases of supervised experiments within the scope of medical tests. Thereby, it reveals that a medication of placebo with regard to an individual patient seems to be lawful if there is no alternative possibility of a better treatment using a chemically effective medicine and if the limits of presumed consent are complied with. On the other hand, in the context of the supervised experiment, the assignment of a patient to a group treated with placebo is only lawful if the patient has been fully informed about the possibilities of a treatment and if the patient has given consent to it. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003. The author’s interests include International Criminal Law, Comparative Criminal Law and Philosophy of Law.     

Unimodal and crossmodal effects of endogenous attention to visual and auditory motion

Three experiments were conducted examining unimodal and crossmodal effects of attention to motion. Horizontally moving sounds and dot patterns were presented and participants’ task was to discriminate their motion speed or whether they were presented with a brief gap. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimuli of one modality and of one direction were presented with a higher probability ( p = .7) than other stimuli. Sounds and dot patterns moving in the expected direction were discriminated faster than stimuli moving in the unexpected direction. In Experiment 3, participants had to respond only to stimuli moving in one direction within the primary modality, but to all stimuli regardless of their direction within the rarer secondary modality. Stimuli of the secondary modality moving in the attended direction were discriminated faster than were oppositely moving stimuli. Results suggest that attending to the direction of motion affects perception within vision and audition, but also across modalities.