Experimental evidence of relaxation arising from the motion of geometrical kinks on screw dislocations in iron

Abstract

Internal friction measurements with a superimposed bias stress have provided evidence for geometrical kink migration on screw dislocations in iron. This intrinsic process causes a relaxation phenomenon in internal friction which has been identified with the occurrence of a subpeak (below 20 K) of the α-peak. The effect of different bias stress has allowed us to evaluate the kink migration energy, E ^m _k ? 0·001eV.     

Overt head movements moderate the effect of depressive symptoms on mood regulation

A dysfunction in the regulation of negative mood states is one of the core symptoms of depression. Research has found that levels of depression are associated with the intensity of the mood-regulation deficit. The present study aimed to explore the role the body plays in mood-regulation processes. More specifically, we studied whether head movements can influence mood persistence in dysphoric states. Subsequent to a sad-mood induction, participants were presented with a set of positive pictures immediately after performing either vertical (i.e., nodding) or lateral (i.e., shaking) head movements. We considered changes in mood from before to after the experimental task as an index of the effectiveness of mood regulation. As expected, the results showed that higher initial levels of depressive symptoms were associated with greater persistence of sad mood. More importantly, this association was present in participants who shook their heads, but not in those who nodded. These results show that body movements can contribute to mood-regulation processes, thus expanding our knowledge of the psychopathology of mood disorders.     

Functional and connectivity changes during working memory in Huntington’s disease: 18 month longitudinal data from the IMAGE-HD study

Background

This study aimed to characterize, for the first time, 18 month longitudinal changes in both functional activation and functional connectivity during working memory in premanifest Huntington’s disease (pre-HD) and symptomatic HD (symp-HD).

Methods

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate longitudinal changes in neuronal activity during working memory performance via an N-BACK task (0-BACK and 1-BACK) in 27 pre-HD, 17 symp-HD, and 23 control participants. Whole-brain analysis of activation and region-of-interest analysis of functional connectivity was applied to longitudinal fMRI data collected at baseline and 18 months follow-up.

Results

Compared with controls, the pre-HD group showed significantly increased activation longitudinally during 1-BACK versus 0-BACK in the lateral and medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate, primary motor, and temporal areas cortically, and caudate and putamen subcortically. Pre-HD far from onset, compared with controls, showed further longitudinal increases in the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Longitudinal increased activation in anterior cingulate and medial primary motor areas were associated with disease burden in the pre-HD group. Moreover, in pre-HD increased activation over time in primary motor and putamen regions were associated with average response time during 1-BACK performance. During 1-BACK, functional connectivity between the right DLPFC and posterior parietal, anterior cingulate, and caudate was significantly reduced over 18 months only in the pre-HD group.

Conclusions

Longitudinal reductions in connectivity over 18 months may represent an early signature of cortico-cortical and cortico-striatal functional disconnectivity in pre-HD, whereas the concomitant increased cortical and subcortical activation may reflect a compensatory response to the demands for cognitive resources required during task performance. Our findings demonstrate that functional imaging modalities have the potential to serve as sensitive methods for the assessment of cortical and subcortical responses to future treatment measures.     

Ethics and Culture in Mental Health Care

This article examines the complex relationship between culture, values, and ethics in mental health care. Cultural competence is a practical, concrete demonstration of the ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence (doing good), nonmaleficence (not doing harm), and justice (treating people fairly)—the cornerstones of modern ethical codes for the health professions. Five clinical cases are presented to illustrate the range of ethical issues faced by mental health clinicians working in a multicultural environment, including issues of therapeutic boundaries, diagnosis, treatment choice, confidentiality and informed consent, and the just distribution of limited health care resources.     

Implementing flexibility in automaticity: Evidence from context-specific implicit sequence learning

Attention is often dichotomized into controlled vs. automatic processing, where controlled processing is slow, flexible, and intentional, and automatic processing is fast, inflexible, and unintentional. In contrast to this strict dichotomy, there is mounting evidence for context-specific processes that are engaged rapidly yet are also flexible. In the present study we extend this idea to the domain of implicit learning to examine whether flexibility in automatic processes can be implemented through the reliance on contextual features. Across three experiments we show that participants can learn implicitly two complementary sequences that are associated with distinct contexts, and that transfer of learning when the two contexts are randomly intermixed depends on the distinctiveness of the two contexts. Our results point to the role of context-specific processes in the acquisition and expression of implicit sequence knowledge, and also suggest that episodic details can be represented in sequence knowledge.     

A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets

Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.     

自我不确定感对程序公正效应的调节作用:回顾与展望

自我不确定感是指个体怀疑“自我”,并且对其看法不稳定而产生的内隐与外显的主观感受及反应.其研究方法主要有自我报告法与情境实验法.自DeCremer和Sedikides首先通过实证研究验证了自我不确定感对程序公正效应的调节作用后,研究者们通过将自我不确定感分解为情绪自我不确定、地位不确定和归属不确定以及探讨程序公正认知机制,不断扩展了此领域的研究成果.未来可以通过自我不确定感调节效应的本土化研究,自我不确定感特质与情境成分交互作用的探讨,自我不确定感与自我肯定、信息不确定感等相关变量的关系研究,进一步深化此领域的研究.     

Ontology: minimalism and truth-conditions

In this paper, I develop a criticism to a method for metaontology, namely, the idea that a discourse’s or theory’s ontological commitments can be read off its sentences’ truth-conditions. Firstly, I will put forward this idea’s basis and, secondly, I will present the way Quine subscribed to it (not actually for hermeneutical or historic interest, but as a way of exposing the idea). However, I distinguish between two readings of Quine’s famous ontological criterion, and I center the focus on (assuming without further discussion the other one to be mistaken) the one currently dubbed “ontological minimalism”, a kind of modern Ockhamism applied to the mentioned metaontological view. I show that this view has a certain application via Quinean thesis of reference inscrutability but that it is not possible to press that application any further and, in particular, not for the ambitious metaontological task some authors try to employ. The conclusion may sound promising: having shown the impossibility of a semantic ontological criterion, intentionalist or subjectivist ones should be explored.     

Language use depending on news frame and immigrant origin

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of the media on individuals’ specific language use in relation to a news story on immigration: the influence of the news frame and group cue. Abstraction, complexity of language use, and negative affective language were evaluated. The 523 participants were randomly distributed to each of the four experimental conditions: news frame (crime versus economic contribution) by group cue (geographical origin of the immigrants involved: Moroccans versus Latin Americans). Through content analysis of the ideas and reflections that arose after the participants read the different news stories, using the Linguistic Category Model (LCM; Semin & Fiedler, 1991) to measure abstract language and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) to analyze complex language and negative affective language, it emerged that abstract language and negative affective language were more frequent in the participants assigned to the news frame on crime. Complex language was more commonly used when the news frame referred to the economic contribution of immigrants. Regression analyses showed the mediating role of attitude to immigration in the effects of news frame on negative affective language. The bootstrap method was used to assess the magnitude of the indirect effect. A significant mediator effect was also found through structural equation modeling. Analyses of covariance showed one interaction between news frame and group cue: Among those who read the news story in a frame linking immigration to crime and Moroccan origin, abstract language was more characteristic. The results are discussed from the theoretical perspective of framing.     

Theories of reasoning and the representational level: A reply to Oaksford

Oaksford (2001) considers that the findings of Espino, Santamaría, and García Madruga (2000a) could be explained by the Probability Heuristics Model (PHM) proposed by Chater and Oaksford (1999). He specifically voices three objections, the two main ones being based on the fact that PHM is not a theory about syllogism representation. If this is the case, we consider that PHM cannot explain our data, because most of them were registered before the participants evaluated the conclusion. We argue that only a theory at the representational level can property explain these data.