Impact of school sense of community within a faith-based university: administrative and academic staff perceptions on institutional mission and values

Academic staff (n = 305) and administrative staff (n = 595) at a large urban, Catholic, and religious order teaching university completed on-line school sense of community, social desirability, and mission-identity plus mission-driven activity measures. Partial correlates (controlling for social desirability) indicated that for both faculty and staff a sense of community with co-workers and with administrators were significantly related to mission-identity characteristics of the university. Moreover, regression analyses found that for faculty and staff significant predictors of school sense of community variables were perceptions that the university was innovative and inclusive of pragmatic and risk-taking ideas. For staff but not for faculty, a feeling of Catholic pluralism on campus was a significant predictor of a sense of community with co-workers. These outcomes suggest that employees at faith-based universities may strengthen their school sense of community by institutional practices and programs that foster creating a setting for innovative, inclusive, pragmatic, and risk-taking policies, but not necessarily religious practices on campus.     

Personality traits and endocrine response as possible asymmetry factors of agonistic outcome in karate athletes

Individual variations of plasma levels of hormones testosterone (T) and cortisol (C), before (pre) and after (post) Kumite (real fight) and Kata (ritualized fight) were measured in male karate athletes and analyzed in relation with the agonistic outcome (i.e. winning or losing the fight) and personality trait measures. T and C increased only during Kumite contest and pre‐ and post‐competition C levels were higher in losers than winners. Losers showed higher levels of harm avoidance and anxiety as well as lower level of novelty seeking than winners. Importantly, novelty seeking negatively correlates with pre C and the higher the level of risk assessment, emotionality and insecurity indexes the higher the pre C level. In conclusion, personality traits might be an important factor asymmetry between athletes influencing both the probability of winning or losing an agonistic interaction and the different anticipatory endocrine response to the incipient fight. Aggr. Behav. 35:324–333, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Nondiscriminated avoidance of shock by pigeons pecking a key

Four pigeons were trained to avoid shock by pecking a key on a free-operant avoidance schedule in which no exteroceptive stimulus signalled impending shock. Response rate was an inverse function of response-shock interval when shock-shock interval was held constant at 2 sec and response-shock intervals varied from 5 to 40 sec. Amphetamine increased response rates in two subjects and reserpine markedly reduced responding in one.     

rTMS stimulation on left DLPFC increases the correct recognition of memories for emotional target and distractor words

According to a recent hypothesis, the prefrontal cortex has been proposed as the site of emotional memory integration, because it is sensitive to the recognition of emotional contents. In the present research, we explored the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in memory recognition processes for positive versus negative emotional stimuli when old (target) and new (distractor, either semantically related or unrelated to the target) stimuli were presented. The role of the DLPFC was analysed using an rTMS (repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation) paradigm that induced increased cortical activation of the left DLPFC. The subjects were required to perform a task that consisted of two experimental phases (i.e., an encoding and a recognition phase) in which the targets and the distractors were presented and recognition performance was measured. rTMS stimulation was provided over the left DLPFC during the recognition phase. We found that the rTMS stimulation affected the memory recognition of positive emotional material. Moreover, related and unrelated distractors were discarded better when they were positively valenced, and a more significant effect (i.e., increased performance) was produced in response to related distractors. This result suggests that the activation of the left DLPFC favours the memory recognition of positive emotional information, and that such activation is able to induce a more appropriate selective process to distinguish target from distractor stimuli in the presence of more complex processes (related distractors). The valence model of emotional cue processing may explain this increased performance by demonstrating the distinct role of the left hemisphere in the retrieval of positive emotional information.     

Animal Disenhancement for Animal Welfare: The Apparent Philosophical Conundrums and the Real Exploitation of Animals. A Response to Thompson and Palmer

In his paper “The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem” (Nanoethics 2: 305-36, 2008) Thompson argued that technological attempts to reduce or eliminate selected non-human animals’ capabilities (animal disenhancements) in order to solve or mitigate animal welfare problems in animals’ use pose a philosophical conundrum, because there is a contradiction between rational arguments in favor of these technological interventions and intuitions against them. In her response “Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to Thompson” (Nanoethics 5:43–48, 2011), Palmer maintained that the philosophical conundrum is even deeper if we introduce the non-identity problem into the discussion. In my brief response, I claim that in order to avoid the pitfalls of speculative ethics, empirical facts related to the technologies involved as well as costs for the non-human animals have to be taken into account. Depending on which changes we are referring to, ethical problems can be seen very differently. Widening the consideration to the socio-economic context in which non-human animals are currently used by humans, I challenge the idea of genuine philosophical conundrums from an antispeciesist and abolitionist perspective. Only in a context of exploitation, in which non-human animals are deprived of basic rights and their existence is totally dependent on human exploitation, the contradictions between improvement of welfare and disenhancement of capabilities make sense.     

Neues in der Akuttherapie des ischämischen Schlaganfalls

Stroke is one of the major causes of mortality and the most important cause of disability in the industrialized world. About 85?% of all strokes are caused by acute occlusion of a cerebral vessel and are, therefore, classified as ischemic stroke. Acute stroke care has seen substantial improvements in the last 20 years with the introduction of specialized acute care units (stroke units) and the implementation of intravenous thrombolysis with rtPA, which can be administered up to 4.5 h after symptom onset. According to recent evidence, even patients with age over 80 years, history of diabetes and stroke, wake up stroke, pretreatment with vitamin K antagonists, or one of the new oral anticoagulants could benefit from rtPA under specific conditions. A new therapeutic option for patients with a severe ischemic stroke could be the combined use of intravenous and intraarterial thrombolysis together with mechanical thrombectomy.