A place for nouns and a place for verbs? A critical review of neurocognitive data on grammatical-class effects

It is generally held that noun processing is specifically sub-served by temporal areas, while the neural underpinnings of verb processing are located in the frontal lobe. However, this view is now challenged by a significant body of evidence accumulated over the years. Moreover, the results obtained so far on the neural implementation of noun and verb processing appear to be quite inconsistent. The present review briefly describes and critically re-considers the anatomo-correlative, neuroimaging, MEG, TMS and cortical stimulation studies on nouns and verbs with the aim of assessing the consistency of their results, particularly within techniques. The paper also addresses the question as to whether the inconsistency of the data could be due to the variety of the tasks used. However, it emerged that neither the different investigation techniques used nor the different cognitive tasks employed fully explain the variability of the data. In the final section we thus suggest that the main reason for the emergence of inconsistent data in this field is that the cerebral circuits underlying noun and verb processing are not spatially segregated, at least for the spatial resolution currently used in most neuroimaging studies.     

Hallucinations and REM sleep behaviour disorder in Parkinson's disease: dream imagery intrusions and other hypotheses

REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) is a REM sleep-related parasomnia which may be considered a “dissociated state of wakefulness and sleep”, given that conflicting elements of REM sleep (dreaming) and of wakefulness (sustained muscle tone and movements) coexist during the episodes, leading to motor and behavioural manifestations reminiscent of an enacted dream. RBD has been reported in association with α-synucleinopathies: around a third of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have full-blown RBD.Recent data indicate that PD patients with RBD are more prone to hallucinations than PD patients without this parasomnia. However it is still not clear why RBD in PD is associated with an increased prevalence of VHs.Data exist which suggest that visual hallucinations in PD may be the result of untimely intrusions of REM visual imagery into wakefulness. RBD, which is characterised by a REM sleep dissociation pattern, might be a condition that particularly favours such intrusions. However, other hypotheses may be advanced. In fact, deficits in attentional, executive, visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities have been documented in RBD and found to occur far more frequently in PD with RBD than in PD without RBD. Neuropsychological deficits involving visual perception and attentional processes are thought to play an important role in the pathophysiology of VHs. On this basis, RBD in PD could be viewed as a contributory risk factor for VHs.     

Sense of reality,reality testing and reality processing in borderline patients1

Although borderline patients are suitable for it, they often undergo repeated testing of phantasies against objective reality without success. A reason for these partial failures is that subjects have not been able to build a solid sense of reality and have found many diffi culties for processing reality demands and possibilities. The author puts forward some thoughts on this question, such as the importance of working through the depressive position and the Oedipus complex in the process of building up a solid sense of reality. A sense of reality also favours continuous reality processing. When reality processing becomes as continuous as life itself, the repetition of individual reality tests becomes less frequent and necessary, and more satisfying. The author also presents some recommendations for the psychoanalytic treatment of such patients, stressing the importance and the diffi culties of the introduction of the borderline patient into the triangular situation because primitive defences‐such as disavowal and denial‐are mobilized.     

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992 ) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.     

When Parsimony Subdues Distinctiveness: Simplified Public Perceptions of Politicians' Personality

Voters develop uniquely simplified perceptions of political candidates' personalities during election campaigns. In an earlier study, voters described their own personalities, and also those of celebrities, using the same five factors typical of the Big Five model of personality. In contrast, the appraisal of political candidates' personalities by voters in both Italy and the United States was reduced to only a few factors. The present research extends that exploration of the relationship between personality and politics to the public's perception of politicians' personalities across a wider variety of politicians and across a long time span after an election campaign. Two studies conducted in Italy, with more than 3,000 voters, replicated the earlier results: The factors of Energy and Agreeableness are primary anchors for evaluating politicians' personalities both during campaigns and for several years thereafter. Also uncovered were congruences between the ways that voters tend to present themselves (self-schemata) and the schemata they use to evaluate candidates representing their political preference.     

Aristotle's Thesis between paraconsistency and modalization

If the arrow → stands for classical relevant implication, Aristotle's Thesis ¬(A→¬A) is inconsistent with the Law of Simplification (AB)→B accepted by relevantists, but yields an inconsistent non-trivial extension of the system of entailment E. Such paraconsistent extensions of relevant logics have been studied by R. Routley, C. Mortensen and R. Brady. After examining the semantics associated to such systems, it is stressed that there are nonclassical treatments of relevance which do not support Simplification. The paper aims at showing that Aristotle's Thesis may receive a sense if the arrow is defined as strict implication endowed with the proviso that the clauses of the conditional have the same modal status, i.e. the same position in the Aristotelian square. It is so grasped, in different form, the basic idea of relevant logic that the clauses of a true conditional should have something in common. It is proved that thanks to such definition of the arrow Aristotle's Thesis subjoined to the minimal normal system K yields a system equivalent to the deontic system KD.     

In the face of emotions: event-related potentials in supraliminal and subliminal facial expression recognition

Is facial expression recognition marked by specific event-related potentials (ERPs) effects? Are conscious and unconscious elaborations of emotional facial stimuli qualitatively different processes? In Experiment 1, ERPs elicited by supraliminal stimuli were recorded when 21 participants viewed emotional facial expressions of four emotions and a neutral stimulus. Two ERP components (N2 and P3) were analyzed for their peak amplitude and latency measures. First, emotional face-specificity was observed for the negative deflection N2, whereas P3 was not affected by the content of the stimulus (emotional or neutral). A more posterior distribution of ERPs was found for N2. Moreover, a lateralization effect was revealed for negative (right lateralization) and positive (left lateralization) facial expressions. In Experiment 2 (20 participants), 1-ms subliminal stimulation was carried out. Unaware information processing was revealed to be quite similar to aware information processing for peak amplitude but not for latency. In fact, unconscious stimulation produced a more delayed peak variation than conscious stimulation.     

Trait congruence in the study of the cognitive consequences of emotional arousal

This study investigated the possible influence of mood and emotional vulnerability on recall. Mood was induced by projecting highly emotionally laden slides. In the first experiment, 64 female subjects, rated low or high on emotional vulnerability, were tested on recall of mood-congruent, mood-incongruent and neutral words, under mood induction and non-mood induction conditions. Emotionally low-vulnerable subjects recalled more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent words in the mood induction condition, whereas the opposite was the case in the non-mood induction condition. Highly vulnerable subjects recalled more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent words in the non-mood induction condition and fewer mood-congruent words in the mood induction compared with non-mood induction condition. The results are discussed in terms of ‘mood congruence’ (to explain low-vulnerable (LV) subjects' performance) and in terms of ‘trait congruence’ (to explain highly-vulnerable (HV) subjects' performance). In a second experiment, which investigated LV and HV subjects' galvanic skin responses to highly- and low-emotionally laden slides, the highest values were those for HV subjects when exposed to emotional slides. The different activation of LV and HV subjects led us to reconsider previous reasoning regarding mood congruence and trait congruence in the light of the inverted U theory.