Real and Virtual Clinical Trials: A Formal Analysis

Topoi - If well-designed, the results of a Randomised Clinical Trial (RCT) can justify a causal claim between treatment and effect in the study population; however, additional information might be...     

Teaching Responsible Research and Innovation: A Phronetic Perspective

Science and Engineering Ethics - Across the European research area and beyond, efforts are being mobilized to align research and innovation processes and products with societal values and needs,...     

Examining Social Desirability in Measures of Religion and Spirituality Using the Bogus Pipeline

A primary concern in the psychology of religion is the distinct possibility that responses to empirical assessments of individuals’ degree and type of religiosity and spirituality are exaggerated owing to social desirability bias. In spite of increased secularization in American culture and a growing distrust of organized religion, religious involvement, personal religiosity, and spirituality are still viewed as highly desirable characteristics. This study estimates the extent of social desirability biases that affect self-reports of religion and spirituality by utilizing a bogus pipeline procedure. In this procedure, participants are convinced that experimenters can detect disingenuous responses to individual items on questionnaires through the use of physiological measures, although no physiological data are actually collected. If the self-reports of participants in the bogus pipeline condition indicate greater religiosity or spirituality than those in the control condition, self-report bias is indicated. The bogus pipeline procedure has been used in other areas of study to increase veracity of self-reports when social desirability effects are present (such as reporting sexual behaviors or prejudice). The results indicate that social desirability biases influence multiple constructs including religious orientations, religious coping, and daily spiritual experiences. Implications for future research relying on self-reports of religion and spirituality are discussed.     

The ERP signature of the contextual diversity effect in visual word recognition

Behavioral experiments have revealed that words appearing in many different contexts are responded to faster than words that appear in few contexts. Although this contextual diversity (CD) effect has been found to be stronger than the word-frequency (WF) effect, it is a matter of debate whether the facilitative effects of CD and WF reflect the same underlying mechanisms. The analysis of the electrophysiological correlates of CD may shed some light on this issue. This experiment is the first to examine the ERPs to high- and low-CD words when WF is controlled for. Results revealed that while high-CD words produced faster responses than low-CD words, their ERPs showed larger negativities (225–325 ms) than low-CD words. This result goes in the opposite direction of the ERP WF effect (high-frequency words elicit smaller N400 amplitudes than low-frequency words). The direction and scalp distribution of the CD effect resembled the ERP effects associated with “semantic richness.” Thus, while apparently related, CD and WF originate from different sources during the access of lexical-semantic representations.     

How grammar can cope with limited short-term memory: simultaneity and seriality in sign languages

It is known that in American Sign Language (ASL) span is shorter than in English, but this discrepancy has never been systematically investigated using other pairs of signed and spoken languages. This finding is at odds with results showing that short-term memory (STM) for signs has an internal organization similar to STM for words. Moreover, some methodological questions remain open. Thus, we measured span of deaf and matched hearing participants for Italian Sign Language (LIS) and Italian, respectively, controlling for all the possible variables that might be responsible for the discrepancy: yet, a difference in span between deaf signers and hearing speakers was found. However, the advantage of hearing subjects was removed in a visuo-spatial STM task. We attribute the source of the lower span to the internal structure of signs: indeed, unlike English (or Italian) words, signs contain both simultaneous and sequential components. Nonetheless, sign languages are fully-fledged grammatical systems, probably because the overall architecture of the grammar of signed languages reduces the STM load. Our hypothesis is that the faculty of language is dependent on STM, being however flexible enough to develop even in a relatively hostile environment.     

Decomposability of the Finitely Generated Free Hoop Residuation Algebra

In this paper we prove that, for n > 1, the n-generated free algebra in any locally finite subvariety of HoRA can be written in a unique nontrivial way as Ł₂ × A′, where A′ is a directly indecomposable algebra in . More precisely, we prove that the unique nontrivial pair of factor congruences of is given by the filters and , where the element is recursively defined from the term introduced by W. H. Cornish. As an additional result we obtain a characterization of minimal irreducible filters of in terms of its coatoms. Presented by Daniele Mundici     

Do all kids look alike? Evidence for an other-age effect in adults

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be modulated by experience. Moreover, in each of the 3 experiments, differences in the magnitude of the observed face inversion effect for each age class of faces were taken to reflect a difference in the processing strategies used to recognize the faces of each age. Evidence from Experiment 3 indicates that these strategies can be tuned by experience. The data are discussed with reference to an experience-based framework for face recognition.     

Longitudinal Relationships Between Positive Affect,Loneliness, and Suicide Ideation: Age‐Specific Factors in a General Population

The aims of this study were to analyze whether positive and negative affect, social support, and loneliness are factors longitudinally related to suicide ideation in the general population in different age groups. A total of 2,392 individuals from a nationally representative sample of the Spanish general population were evaluated in 2011–2012 and in 2014–2015. After including relevant control variables in the analyses, lower positive affect was prospectively related to ideation in 18‐ to 59‐year‐old individuals, whereas feelings of loneliness were related to ideation in 60‐year‐and‐older individuals. Social support was not associated with suicide ideation in any age group. These results are in line with the need for age‐tailored suicide prevention programs. The present findings might also suggest that health care professionals should consider feelings of loneliness rather than social support to assess the presence of suicide ideation in older people.