Hodgkin's disease in adolescence: A psychoanalytical approach

As a general rule, adolescents suffering from severe organic diseases experience more difficulty than adults and children in recognizing the illness and undergoing treatment, because there is a conflict between accepting the sick body and the sexual body. Dependence on medical treatment, moreover, clashes with the normal drive to autonomy. Long experience as a consultant psychiatrist in the haematology department of a hospital enables the author to propose a hypothesis as to the emotional significance of Hodgkin's disease and chemotherapy, concentrating particular attention on the refusal reaction to the chemotherapy itself. The psychoanalytical psychotherapy of a female adolescent suffering from Hodgkin's disease is presented and discussed to illustrate the theoretical and technical implications.     

What works in secondary schools? A systematic review of classroom-based body image programs

Governments, schools, and curriculum authorities are increasingly recognizing that body image during adolescence is a public health issue that warrants attention in the school setting. After 30 years of eating disorder prevention research, and given the current interest in this area, it seems timely to review the research on interventions to improve body image in schools. We reviewed universal-selective, classroom-based programs that have been conducted since the year 2000, among adolescents, and found 16 eligible intervention programs. Seven of these programs were effective in improving body image on at least one measure, from pre to post test, though effect sizes were small (d = 0.22–0.48). These effective programs were conducted among younger adolescents 12.33–13.62 years, and included activities focusing on media literacy, self esteem, and the influence of peers. Implications for school personnel and curriculum authorities are discussed, and we provide recommendations for a strategic approach to future research in this area.     

Attentional involvement in subitizing: Questioning the preattentive hypothesis

Subitizing, the rapid, effortless, and accurate enumeration of small numbers of items has been said to be carried out preattentively. If so, the preattentive processing could occur entirely in primary visual cortex, in which case it would be completed within about 50 ms, or during the feedforward sweep, in which case it would be completed within about 100 ms after the onset of an enumeration display which was followed by a mask. The stimulus–mask SOAs were 50 or 83 ms in Experiment 1, and 100 or 150 ms in Experiment 2. In both experiments subjects were more accurate and more sensitive to one-target than to two-target displays. These outcomes, in conjunction with the finding that accuracy and sensitivity were higher at the longer SOA, are inconsistent with the preattentive viewpoint and point to the necessity for attentional involvement in subitizing.     

Facial expressions and the ability to recognize emotions from the eyes or mouth: A comparison among old adults,young adults,and children

The aim of the present study was to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and neutral emotions from facial information (whole face, eye region, mouth region). More specifically, the aim was to investigate older adults' performance in emotions recognition using the same tool used in the previous studies on children and adults’ performance and verify if the pattern of emotions recognition show differences compared with the other two groups. Results showed that happiness is among the easiest emotions to recognize while the disgust is always among the most difficult emotions to recognize for older adults. The findings seem to indicate that is more easily recognizing emotions when pictures represent the whole face; compared with the specific region (eye and mouth regions), older participants seems to recognize more easily emotions when the mouth region is presented. In general, the results of the study did not detect a decay in the ability to recognize emotions from the face, eyes, or mouth. The performance of the old adults is statistically worse than the other two groups in only a few cases: in anger and disgust recognition from the whole face; in anger recognition from the eye region; and in disgust, fear, and neutral emotion recognition from mouth region.     

When working memory updating requires updating: Analysis of serial position in a running memory task

This study aimed to investigate updating in working memory (WM), analyzing the effects of task demand and memory resources on serial position curve (SPC), in a running memory task with slow pace presentation and a probed recognition procedure. These task conditions were supposed to produce an easier WM updating task, which may allow evidencing whether the task is performed through an active or a passive updating.     

University Teachers During the First Lockdown Due to SARS-CoV-2 in Italy: Stress,Issues and Perceptions of Misconduct

Science and Engineering Ethics - In this paper, we apply the capabilities approach—with the addition of capability ceilings—to energy justice. We argue that, to ensure energy justice,...     

The “right” side of sleeping: laterality in resting behaviour of Aldabra giant tortoises (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

Animal Cognition - Although some studies investigated lateralization in reptiles, little research has been done on chelonians, focusing only on few behaviours such as righting response and escape...     

Free-ranging dogs assess the quantity of opponents in intergroup conflicts

In conflicts between social groups, the decision of competitors whether to attack/retreat should be based on the assessment of the quantity of individuals in their own and the opposing group. Experimental studies on numerical cognition in animals suggest that they may represent both large and small numbers as noisy mental magnitudes subject to scalar variability, and small numbers (≤4) also as discrete object-files. Consequently, discriminating between large quantities, but not between smaller ones, should become easier as the asymmetry between quantities increases. Here, we tested these hypotheses by recording naturally occurring conflicts in a population of free-ranging dogs, Canis lupus familiaris, living in a suburban environment. The overall probability of at least one pack member approaching opponents aggressively increased with a decreasing ratio of the number of rivals to that of companions. Moreover, the probability that more than half of the pack members withdrew from a conflict increased when this ratio increased. The skill of dogs in correctly assessing relative group size appeared to improve with increasing the asymmetry in size when at least one pack comprised more than four individuals, and appeared affected to a lesser extent by group size asymmetries when dogs had to compare only small numbers. These results provide the first indications that a representation of quantity based on noisy mental magnitudes may be involved in the assessment of opponents in intergroup conflicts and leave open the possibility that an additional, more precise mechanism may operate with small numbers.     

Temperamental profiles and language development: a replication and an extension

Individual differences in child temperament are associated with individual differences in language development. The present study examined the relationship between temperament and language ability in 109 twenty-four- to 30-month-old children. Parents and day-care teachers completed two questionnaires: the Primo Vocabolario del Bambino (Caselli & Casadio, 1995) and the Questionari Italiani del Temperamento (Axia, 2002). Researchers administered the First Language Test (Axia, 1993) to assess productive and receptive language in each child. Replicating previous research (Usai, Garello, & Viterbori, 2009), day-care teachers identified three temperamental profiles: most of the children fit into the first profile, typical of the Italian population; another profile was made up of easily distractible and not very persistent children, with a poor capacity to modulate motor activity; and the third profile of children were inhibited in new situations. A relationship was found between temperament assessed by day-care teachers and different levels of linguistic competence. In particular, the groups of "inattentive" and "inhibited" children showed poorer lexical and morphological abilities and a more immature vocabulary, characterised by the presence of more primitive components of the lexical repertory compared to the group of "typical" children. Unlike the results from day-care teachers, temperament questionnaires completed by parents revealed a 4-cluster-solution. Also, for parents, the "typical" profile is characterised by the largest vocabulary (productive and receptive) and the most mature semantic production.