A Pilot Study of a Mental Silence Form of Meditation for Women in Perimenopause

Menopausal symptoms often feature or are worsened by psychological and psychosomatic factors. As there is limited research into the potential role of psychological interventions, especially meditation, for the treatment of these symptoms the current study adopted an AB case series design with a follow-up phase. Fourteen women who were experiencing hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms and receiving no treatment for them attended meditation classes twice weekly for 8 weeks and practiced daily at home. A mental silence orientated technique of meditation called Sahaja Yoga (SYM) was taught. The Hot Flash Diary, Kupperman Index, MENQOL, Greene’s Climacteric Scale and STAI, were administered at baseline, mid treatment (4 weeks), post-treatment (8 weeks) and at 8 weeks follow-up. Substantial improvements in all measures occurred at post treatment. Changes in vasomotor symptoms, especially hot flashes, were most prominent as a significant decrease of 67% at post-treatment and 57% at follow-up (χ² = 11.7, p < .003) were noted and Kupperman’s Index score decreased by 58% at post-treatment and 40% at follow-up (χ² = 11.7, p < .005). All other symptom measures improved substantially from baseline to post-treatment, non-parametric analysis indicating that most of these changes were significant. These findings tentatively suggest that menopausal symptoms, especially vasomotor symptoms, and particularly hot flashes, might be substantially improved by using meditation.     

The development of expert face processing: are infants sensitive to normal differences in second-order relational information?

Sensitivity to second-order relational information (i.e., spatial relations among features such as the distance between eyes) is a vital part of achieving expertise with face processing. Prior research is unclear on whether infants are sensitive to second-order differences seen in typical human populations. In the current experiments, we examined whether infants are sensitive to changes in the space between the eyes and between the nose and the mouth that are within the normal range of variability in Caucasian female faces. In Experiment 1, 7-month-olds detected these changes in second-order relational information. Experiment 2 extended this finding to 5-month-olds and also found that infants detect second-order relations in upright faces but not in inverted faces, thereby exhibiting an inversion effect that has been considered to be a hallmark of second-order relational processing during adulthood. These results suggest that infants as young as 5 months are sensitive to second-order relational changes that are within the normal range of human variability. They also indicate that at least rudimentary aspects of face processing expertise are available early in life.     

Prof. Ramesh K. Sharma on Late Prof. K.C. Pandey’s review of book entitled J.M.E. McTaggart: Substance,Self, and Immortality

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research -     

Mental state attributions and the side-effect effect

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not specifically intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes.     

Language proficiency does not modulate executive control in older bilinguals

ABSTRACT

We examined if language proficiency modulates performance in tasks that measure executive control in older Telugu-English bilinguals (n = 50, mean age = 57.15 years). We administered numerical Stroop task, Attention Network Task, Dimensional Change Card Sorting task, and stop-signal task that are known to tap into different aspects of executive functioning on healthy aging Telugu-English bilinguals. Second language (English) proficiency was calculated as a cumulative score that considered both subjective and objective measures of L2 fluency and use. Bilinguals were divided into two groups based on the cumulative score and compared on each task. We did not find any effect of language proficiency on any of the executive control measures. The additional Bayesian analysis also supported these findings. Therefore, the results do not support the claim that bilingual language proficiency modulates executive control, at least in the elderly population. We discuss the results with regard to the issue of bilingual advantage in executive control and the role of age and language use.     

Attention in Sentence Processing: A Review

This review looks at the relationship between attention and language. There have been many studies that have shown a certain role of attention on sentence and spoken word processing. At the same time some other studies have observed that language processing is autonomous. In this review an attempt has been made to review the empirical evidence from sentence processing in reading, auditory processing and speaking domains to see if attentional manipulations cause interference with processing. The review suggests currently available evidence is rather mixed and it is still a long way to fully explore the attentional basis of sentence processing.     

Disentangling stability, variability and adaptability in human performance: focus on the interplay between local variance and serial correlation

We address the complex relationship between the stability, variability, and adaptability of psychological systems by decomposing the global variance of serial performance into two independent parts: the local variance (LV) and the serial correlation structure. For two time series with equal LV, the presence of persistent long-range correlations (or 1/? β noise) increases the global variance. We hypothesized that a coadjustment between these two determinants of variability constitutes a resource for adaptive systems whose appropriate functioning under critical conditions requires the outcome variance to be limited. To test this hypothesis, we looked at the bimanual coordination dynamics at comfortable (stable) and critical (close to phase transition) frequencies. Results showed that a negative correlation appeared gradually as the theoretical stability of coordination modes decreased and reached significance only in the critical condition. We propose that the emergence of a mutual adjustment between LV and serial correlations might be an indicator of effective adaptation to stabilize behavior.     

The Deep Self Model and asymmetries in folk judgments about intentional action

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models.     

Latent inhibition in the honey bee, Apis mellifera: Is it a unitary phenomenon?

Latent inhibition refers to learning that some stimuli are not signals of important events. It has been widely studied in vertebrates, but it has been substantially less well studied in invertebrates. We present an investigation into latent inhibition in the honey bee (Apis mellifera) using a proboscis extension response conditioning procedure that involved ‘preexposure’ of an odor without reinforcement prior to appetitive conditioning. A significant latent inhibition effect, measured in terms of a reduction in acquisition performance to the preexposed odor, was observed after 8 unreinforced presentations, and the effect continued to increase in strength up to 30 presentations. We also observed that memories formed for the preexposed odor lasted at least 24 h. Further manipulation of interstimulus interval and the visual conditioning context partially attenuated the effect. The latter results indicate that latent inhibition in honey bees may not be a unitary phenomenon. Two different mechanisms may be required, in which one mechanism is dependent on the visual context and the second is not.