Life Satisfaction and Character Strengths in Spanish Early Adolescents

This study of Spanish early adolescents aimed to extend knowledge about the relationship between character strengths and life satisfaction (LS) and to explore gender differences in the prediction of LS. A sample of 457 adolescents aged 11–14 years completed questionnaires to assess LS and 24 character strengths. Results from simple correlation analysis showed that 18 strengths were positively and significantly correlated with LS, the highest coefficients being those for love, hope, authenticity and persistence. However, since strengths are inter-correlated, regression modelling was performed in order to determine which of these strengths are the best predictors of LS, and to identify any gender differences in this association. The results showed that love and hope were the most relevant strengths for predicting LS, with a positive relationship being observed for both girls and boys. This finding highlights the importance of positive thinking and of maintaining positive relationships during early adolescence. Gender differences were observed, however, for authenticity as a predictor of LS. Specifically, this variable made a significant contribution to the model in girls, for whom higher scores on authenticity were associated with greater LS. This result is interpreted in terms of gender differences in the timing of maturation. The findings help to further our understanding of the association between subjective well-being and character strengths in early adolescence, a critical stage of human development. In addition, the results suggest that intervention programmes based on character strengths in this developmental stage should mainly target the so-called ‘strengths of the heart’.     

Effects of chronic ethanol consumption on gestation and lactation in rats

Chronic consumption of ethanol during pregnancy and lactation may lead to abnormalities in the fetus or infant. A group of female Wistar rats was submitted to ethanol treatment over a period of a month. A pair-fed control group received sucrose solution isocaloric to ethanol and the control group received water “ad libitum.” Afterward, the females were mated with males over a period of 20 days. At birth, each litter was maximized to eight pups and the remaining ones were decapitated to remove the fetal blood and brains. No significant difference was observed in fetal body and brain weight at birth. During lactation the ethanol and pair-fed groups gained less weight than the control group. After weaning, their weight became similar. Fetal blood glucose levels were decreased in the ethanol-treated group. One hundred percent of the pair-fed and control females delivered live fetuses at term and all survived; only 40% of the females in the ethanol group delivered, and one pup did not survive. Chronic ethanol treatment pointed to a possible reduction in the fertility. It seems likely that the change in body weight of ethanol-fed dams was caused by undernutrition.     

Patterns of argumentation in Galileo's Discorsi

In this contribution I intend to reconstruct and evaluate one of Galileo's famous arguments given in the Discorsi against a well‐entrenched thesis of Aristotelian physics. It will be shown that Galileo's reduction‐to‐the‐absurd type of counterargument is, although seemingly cogent, after all fallacious. I ascribe Galileo's committing of this fallacy to his looking at the Aristotelian physics through the (Kuhnian type) paradigmatic “spectacles” of his own new physics.     

Interactions between sentence context and word frequencyinevent-related brainpotentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects silently read a set of unrelated sentences. The ERP responses elicited by open-class words were sorted according to word frequency and the ordinal position of the eliciting word within its sentence. We observed a strong inverse correlation between sentence position and the amplitude of the N400 component of the ERP. In addition, we found that less frequent words were associated with larger N400s than were more frequent words, but only if the eliciting words occurred early in their respective sentences. We take this interaction between sentence position and word frequency as evidence that frequency does not play a mandatory role in word recognition, but can be superseded by the contextual constraint provided by a sentence.     

Sounds, words, sentences: age-related changes across levels of language processing

Age-related changes in sensory, lexical, and sentence processing were examined and compared using event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded as young and elderly participants listened to natural speech for comprehension. Lexically associated and unassociated word pairs were embedded in meaningful or syntactically legal but meaningless sentences. Early, general sensory, and attention-related responses (N1, P2) were delayed by about 25 ms for older participants, but later components indexing semantic processing (N400) were not delayed. There were no differences in the size, timing, or distribution of lexical associative effects for the two groups. In contrast, message-level context effects were delayed by more than 200 ms in the elderly group. The results support models that posit age-related changes primarily in higher order language processes.     

Reading between the lines: Event-related brain potentials during natural sentence processing

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects as they silently read 160 different seven-word sentences, presented one word at a time. Each sentence was in itself a natural, meaningful phrase. Substantial intersubject variability was observed in the ERP waveshapes following the words. More than half of the subjects generated P3 components to word stimuli, but those who did showed similar responses to repeated control presentations of a single word. In addition, it was found that all but the first word in the sentence elicited an ERP with a significant left-greater-than-right asymmetry in the late positivity over temporo-parietal regions. The ERPs to the last words were associated with more late positivity than those to the preceding words. One quarter of the sentences, at random, ended with a word printed in a typeface that was different from that of the preceding words. This infrequent change in typeface elicited a complex ERP having three consistent late positive components.     

Differentiation of retinal and nonretinal contributions to averaged evoked responses obtained with electrodes placed near the eyes

Recent visual evoked potential (VEP) studies suggest that during sustained voluntary attention, irrelevant or unattended visual stimuli may be filtered precortically. Testing of this hypothesis in humans requires knowledge of the origin of specific components of the VEP that are affected by selective attention. This study describes techniques and procedures for distinguishing between retinal and nonretinal components of VEPs recorded from electrodes placed strategically around the eyes and on the forehead. By visually stimulating one eye at a time while recording simultaneously from both, and by stimulating a given retinal area with the eyes fixated on the target at different angular deviations from the normal line of regard, components of the VEPs around the eyes can be distinguished as of retinal or nonretinal origin. The results are discussed in terms of volume conduction theory.     

The suppression of reflexive visual and auditory orienting when attention is otherwise engaged

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether abrupt onsets are capable of reflexively capturing attention when they occur outside the current focus of spatial attention, as would be expected if exogenous orienting operates in a truly automatic fashion. The authors established a highly focused attentional state by means of the central presentation of a stream of visual or auditory characters, which participants sometimes had to monitor. No intramodal reflexive cuing effects were observed in either audition or vision when participants performed either an exogenous visual or auditory orthogonal cuing task together with the central focused attention task. These results suggest that reflexive unimodal orienting is not truly automatic. The fact that cuing effects were eliminated under both unimodal and cross-modal conditions is consistent with the view that auditory and visual reflexive spatial orienting are controlled by a common underlying neural substrate.     

MONITORING CONSCIOUS RECOLLECTION VIA THE ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY OF THE BRAIN

Abstract— Although another person's experience of recollection cannot be observed directly, we have found that the underlying operations can be monitored using noninvasive electrophysiological techniques. Results from two experiments showed that brain potentials elicited 500 to 900 ms after the onset of visually presented words vary systematically in amplitude with manipulations that influence the extent to which subjects engage in recollective processing. These brain potentials can thus be construed as correlates of the subjective experience of recollection