Quality of Life in Patients with Recurrent Vasovagal or Unexplained Syncope: Influence of Sex, Syncope Type and Illness Representations

Health-related quality of life (QoL) is reduced in patients with recurrent vasovagal (VVS) or unexplained (US) syncope. Little is known regarding these patients’ QoL as pertains to their capacity to attain their life goals. Factors influencing QoL, such as sex, syncope type and illness representations have not been studied. Our objective is to examine the relationship between illness representations and QoL, as well as possible sex and syncope type differences. One hundred and four patients undergoing tilt-table testing (TTT) for recurrent syncope were interviewed one month before TTT, using questionnaires. Data were analysed using ANCOVAs, a-priori Helmert contrasts for illness representations, and regressions. Patients with US had a poor QoL compared to those with VVS [F(1, 91) = 10.46; p < 0.01], particularly in men (p < 0.01). Patients with higher perceived syncope severity showed an impoverished QoL relative to those with less severe perceptions [F(1, 91) = 5.47; p < 0.05]. A hierarchical regression revealed that illness representations mediate the impact of lifetime number of syncope on QoL. In conclusion, QoL is reduced in these patients, and is influenced by illness representations. Helping patients change their perceptions about their syncope may be an efficient way to promote QoL.     

Voice as Materialistic Principle

In this reply, three core notions from Schürmann’s comment The materiality of the abstraction “voice” are picked out and discussed: the ethos, the so called trialogical self and vocality as principle. The notion of ethos is explored through the word’s history, coming to say that ethos develops in relation to a certain geographical place and is determined by the social practices of a historically situated community. Thus, the concept allows to see how current scientific activities are rooted in reality, taken in the socio-cultural sense. The “trialogical self” is discussed in its implications, leading to firmly retain “dialogical self” as sign of a movement leading through the other to self. Schürmann’s distinction of voice as phenomenon and vocality as principle is seen as fruitful supplement to own ideas, especially as it highlights the fact that it is the act of uttering in different modes which matters for a language notion based in addressivity.     

“When Strangers Meet”: John Bowlby and Harry Harlow on Attachment Behavior

From 1957 through the mid-1970s, John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, was in close personal and scientific contact with Harry Harlow. In constructing his new theory on the nature of the bond between children and their caregivers, Bowlby profited highly from Harlow’s experimental work with rhesus monkeys. Harlow in his turn was influenced and inspired by Bowlby’s new thinking. On the basis of the correspondence between Harlow and Bowlby, their mutual participation in scientific meetings, archival materials, and an analysis of their scholarly writings, both the personal relationship between John Bowlby and Harry Harlow and the cross-fertilization of their work are described.

Rigorous Experiments on Monkey Love: An Account of Harry F. Harlow’s Role in the History of Attachment Theory

On the basis of personal reminiscences an account is given of Harlow’s role in the development of attachment theory and key notions of attachment theory are being discussed. Among other things, it is related how Harlow arrived at his famous research with rhesus monkeys and how this made Harlow a highly relevant figure for attachment theorist Bowlby.

Living Being and Speaking Being: Toward a Dialogical Approach to Intentionality

One of the main goals of cognitive science is to shed light on human knowledge. This paper states that, if daily conversations, literature, and private thought, are proper expressions of human behavior, then cognitive sciences ought to elaborate a concept of knowledge suited to this kind of activities. I draw upon the notion of discourse in Bakhtin to specify the attributes of knowing needed to account for human behavior, whose manifestations in everyday life are not reduced to representing objects but essentially oriented toward responding to others. As a central aspect of knowledge, I focus on intentionality and offer a discussion about different aspects of it. Specifically, I examine the difference between intentionality as the faculty of representation (aboutness) and intentionality as the subjective positioning toward contextually relevant ideological perspectives (meaning).

Social representations used by the parents of Mexican adolescent drug users under treatment to explain their children's drug use: gender differences in parental narratives

The aim of this study was to explore the social representations used by the parents of adolescent drug users to explain the onset of drug use. Differences in explanations between the parents of male and female adolescents were also explored. Sixty parents who accompanied their children to four rehabilitation centers in 2004 completed two semi-structured questionnaires. In addition, indepth interviews were applied to a subsample. The explanation of the drug use was carried out through two social representations: the neglectful family and the son or daughter as an inexperienced teen. The parents-son model was well structured; however, the parents-daughter was unstructured, which suggests a higher resonance in the familial group.     

Newborns' face recognition is based on spatial frequencies below 0.5 cycles per degree

A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is the nature of the visual information that newborn infants rely on to perform face recognition. Newborns were able to extract from a face the visual information lying from 0 to 1 cpd (Experiment 1), but only a narrower 0-0.5 cpd spatial frequency range was successful to accomplish face recognition (Experiment 2). These results provide the first empirical support of a low spatial frequency advantage in individual face recognition at birth and suggest that early in life low-level, non-specific perceptual constraints affect the development of the face processing system.     

Can an agent's false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants

Do 18-month-olds understand that an agent's false belief can be corrected by an appropriate, though not an inappropriate, communication? In Experiment 1, infants watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers: a box and a cup. To start, agent1 played with the ball and then hid it in the box, while agent2 looked on. Next, in agent1's absence, agent2 moved the ball from the box to the cup. When agent1 returned, agent2 told her "The ball is in the cup!" (informative-intervention condition) or "I like the cup!" (uninformative-intervention condition). During test, agent1 reached for either the box (box event) or the cup (cup event). In the informative-intervention condition, infants who saw the box event looked reliably longer than those who saw the cup event; in the uninformative-intervention condition, the reverse pattern was found. These results suggest that infants expected agent1's false belief about the ball's location to be corrected when she was told "The ball is in the cup!", but not "I like the cup!". In Experiment 2, agent2 simply pointed to the ball's new location, and infants again expected agent1's false belief to be corrected. These and control results provide additional evidence that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to agents. In addition, the results suggest that by 18 months of age infants expect agents' false beliefs to be corrected by relevant communications involving words or gestures.     

Infants' reasoning about others' false perceptions

Prior research suggests that children younger than age 3 or 4 do not understand that an agent may be deceived by an object's misleading appearance. The authors asked whether 14.5-month-olds would give evidence in a violation-of-expectation task that they understand that agents may form false perceptions. Infants first watched events in which an agent faced a stuffed skunk and a doll with blue pigtails; the agent consistently reached for the doll, suggesting that she preferred it over the skunk. Next, while the agent was absent, the doll was hidden in a plain box, and the skunk was hidden in a box with a tuft of blue hair protruding from under its lid. Infants expected the agent to be misled by the tuft's resemblance to the doll's hair and to falsely perceive it as belonging to the doll. These and other results indicate that 14.5-month-old infants can already reason about agents' false perceptions.     

Remembering the past and imagining the future in schizophrenia

It has been suggested that patients with schizophrenia experience a distorted sense of continuity of self across time. However, temporal aspects of self-processing have received little empirical attention in schizophrenia. In this study, the authors investigated schizophrenic patients' ability to generate specific mental images of their personal past and future. Results showed that patients recalled fewer specific past events than did healthy controls and were even more impaired in generating specific future events. These deficits were associated with positive symptoms but were not associated with negative symptoms or with performances on verbal fluency tasks. It is suggested that schizophrenic patients' failures to project themselves into specific past and future episodes might be related to difficulties in retrieving contextual details from memory, as well as disturbance of the sense of subjective time.