The Effects of Hippocampal and Area Parahippocampalis Lesions in Pigeons: II. Concurrent Discrimination and Spatial Memory

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of bilateral hippocampus (Hp) and area parahippocampalis (APH) lesions in pigeons on the acquisition of a visual and spatial task. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained on three successive six-pair concurrent discrimination tasks, each using a novel set of stimuli. There was no difference between control unoperated pigeons and Hp-APH pigeons in terms of the number of sessions required to learn either the first, second, or third concurrent discrimination task. In Experiment 2, the same pigeons were trained on an open-field spatial task similar in many ways to the radial-arm maze task used with rats. In contrast to the absence of impairments on the visual concurrent discrimination task, pigeons with Hp-APH lesions were severely impaired on the acquisition of the spatial task. These findings support the view that the Hp-APH in pigeons is important for the processing of spatial, rather than visual information.     

Context dependent latent inhibition in adult humans

Learning the association between one stimulus (a condition stimulus, CS) and another (unconditioned stimulus, US) can be impaired by prior exposure to the CS alone—latent inhibition (LI). Current theories attempting to elucidate the cognitive deficit in schizophrenia have used the abolition of LI in schizophrenia as an indicator of attentional dysfunction. However, it has always been unclear if human and animal LI are measuring the same psychological processes. It is obviously important to clarify this relationship so that theoretical and experimental developments in the rat do not mislead the investigation of brain-behaviour relationships in schizophrenia. LI in the rat is strongly dependent upon context. Our aim was to examine the context specificity of LI in humans and specifically to: (1) investigate whether participants' belief that they are in a different context is sufficient to abolish LI, even though there is no physical change in the environment; (2) produce a context manipulation that is immune to alternative interpretation in terms of stimulus generalization decrement; and (3) investigate whether a "tonic" change of context reduces or abolishes human LI, thus complementing previous reports using a "phasic" change of context. In two experiments we manipulated context in either the real world or a virtual world, and showed that LI is abolished by a change of context in adult humans.     

Characteristic emotional intelligence and emotional well-being

Both theory and previous research suggest a link between emotional intelligence and emotional well-being. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to understand and regulate emotions; emotional well-being includes positive mood and high self-esteem. Two studies investigated the relationship between emotional intelligence and mood, and between emotional intelligence and self-esteem. The results of these studies indicated that higher emotional intelligence was associated with characteristically positive mood and higher self-esteem. The results of a third study indicated that higher emotional intelligence was associated with a higher positive mood state and greater state self-esteem. The third study also investigated the role of emotional intelligence in mood and self-esteem regulation and found that individuals with higher emotional intelligence showed less of a decrease in positive mood and self-esteem after a negative state induction using the Velten method, and showed more of an increase in positive mood, but not in self-esteem, after a positive state induction. The findings were discussed in the light of previous work on emotional intelligence, and recommendations were made for further study.     

Method of Suicide in the Mentally Ill: A National Clinical Survey

Comparisons of psychiatric patients who die by suicide using different methods are scarce. We aimed to establish the methods of suicide used by those who are currently or have recently been in contact with mental health services in England and Wales (N = 6,203), and describe the social and clinical characteristics of suicides by different methods. We found that hanging, self‐poisoning, and jumping (from a height or in front of a moving vehicle) were the most common methods of suicide, accounting for 79% of all deaths. The implications of these and other findings are discussed.     

Practices of freedom: playing with the position of the Other

An exercise for introducing tutors to a group of trainee systemic therapists is described. This is based on a principle of subverting hierarchy between tutors and students in a playful way and invites transparency and self‐disclosure on the part of the tutors. It is an example of ongoing experimentation with positioning theory in systemic training as a way of exploring power differentials and attempting to give voice to subjugated discourses. Tutors and trainees reflect on the excitement and learning arising from the exercise.     

Does colour preference have a role in colour term acquisition?

A developmental association exists between colour preference and emerging colour term acquisition in young children. Colour preference might influence colour term acquisition by directing attention towards or away from a particular colour, making it more or less memorable. To investigate the role that colour preference may have in the acquisition of colour terms, experimental tasks of colour preference, discrimination, attention, memory, and new colour term learning, were given to three groups of participants (preschool children; primary school children; and adults). Each task utilized the same colour stimuli, which were four computer‐simulated colours, matched perceptually to four different Munsell chips, drawn from the same colour category. Three colours varied systematically from an anchor colour (10PB 4/8) only in saturation (10PB 4/4), luminance (10PB 6/8), or hue (5P 4/8). Results showed that within‐category colour preferences emerged with age, and that when established within individuals, most preferred colours were named significantly more accurately than least preferred colours, although this association did not appear to be mediated directly by attention or memory. Rather, perceptual saliency was shown to have a mediating role, to some extent, in determining the relationship between colour preference and the cognitive processing of colour.     

Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4-7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning.