Platelet MAO-B, personality, and psychopathology

The article investigates the relationships between platelet monoamine oxidase-B (MAO-B) activity, personality, and psychopathology (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994] diagnoses. These relationships were assessed in 178 incarcerated male juvenile delinquents. Even after controlling for smoking, the authors found that both Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology were negatively related to MAO-B activity. In the final reduced model, novelty seeking fully mediated the relationships between MAO-B and Externalizing Psychopathology but not between MAO-B and Internalizing Psychopathology. It was hypothesized that low platelet MAO-B activity does not directly predispose individuals to psychopathology but is related to specific personality traits, which in turn represent a vulnerability factor for psychopathology. Future studies should help clarify the nature of the relationships between personality, biological markers, and psychopathology.     

Patents and ethics: Is it possible to be balanced?

In this presentation, principles of ethics are confronted with the desire of the inventor to make a profit. To this end the presentation is focused on patent protection. Patents should guarantee the return of an inventor’s investment and profit and, on the other side, ensure availability — by patent disclosure — of the invention for the society when the patent terminates. Recent patent applications made by inventors are infringing this principle and societies are paying an unexpected price for these practices. Patent claims are too broad and disclosures too poor. Extreme examples will be discussed. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004.     

In Search of a Neuronal Signature of Consciousness – Facts,Hypotheses and Proposals

Evolution leads to more and more complex structures, e.g., molecules, cells and organisms. By means of such structures elementary dynamic bio-electrical fields originate in single cells. They further develop into neurons with neuronal fields, and these combine and integrate in brains into global neuro-electrical fields (NEF) as a medium for the fast representation of outer stimuli. The present hypothesis proposes a specific state of the global NEF in brains as the signature of consciousness. This NEF changes periodically between two states, a de- and a hyperpolarized brain state, and these in turn are paralleled intimately by transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness. In the hyperpolarized state the elementary neuronal fields are enslaved and synchronized by strong oscillations, and under these conditions the NEF is of low information capacity. In the depolarized state, however, the elementary fields are freed to self-organize and superimpose into an integrated NEF rich in information. In this condition the NEF acquires a qualitatively new state variable: consciousness. This new variable is no longer physically measurable; it can only be perceived by introspection.     

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge in children

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge was investigated in 144 five-, seven- and eleven-year-old children. Two experiments were conducted in the Kiel locomotor maze. In the first experiment, one group of children explored the spatial layout by walking through the maze, while another learned the maze by surveying the layout. In the second experiment, children were exposed to one of two orientation tests in the maze, one of which could be solved using "landmark orientation", the other only using a "relational place orientation". Children sitting by the side of the experimental chamber surveying the maze needed fewer trials to learn the spatial layout than children exploring the environment in the locomotion condition, but in the orientation test demanding the "relational place orientation" children who had explored the maze in the locomotion condition outperformed the children in the non-locomotion condition. Results are discussed in the context of cognitive mapping models.     

Complex effects of NMDA receptor antagonist APV in the basolateral amygdala on acquisition of two-way avoidance reaction and long-term fear memory

Although much has been learned about the role of the amygdala in Pavlovian fear conditioning, relatively little is known about an involvement of this structure in more complex aversive learning, such as acquisition of an active avoidance reaction. In the present study, rats with a pretraining injection of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, 2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoic acid (APV), into the basolateral amygdala (BLA) were found to be impaired in two-way active avoidance learning. During multitrial training in a shuttle box, the APV-injected rats were not different from the controls in sensitivity to shock or in acquisition of freezing to contextual cues. However, APV injection led to impaired retention of contextual fear when tested 48 h later, along with an attenuation of c-Fos expression in the amygdala. These results are consistent with the role of NMDA receptors of the BLA in long-term memory of fear, previously documented in Pavlovian conditioning paradigms. The APV-induced impairment in the active avoidance learning coincided with deficits in directionality of the escape reaction and in attention to conditioned stimuli. These data indicate that normal functioning of NMDA receptors in the basolateral amygdala is required during acquisition of adaptive instrumental responses in a shuttle box but is not necessary for acquisition of short-term contextual fear in this situation.     

Defense mechanisms in alexithymia

The Polish version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 and Defense Mechanisms Questionnaire were completed by 387 university students. Scores on alexithymia correlate significantly with scores on the whole group of 12 immature defenses (Pearson r = .39, p < .001) and with scores on such individual immature defense mechanisms as Autistic Fantasy (r = .39), Somatization (r = .37), Projection (r = .32), and Displacement (r = .32). These results support other findings indicating that alexithymia is significantly associated with immature ego defenses.     

Information retrieval with semantic memory model

Psycholinguistic theories of semantic memory form the basis of understanding of natural language concepts. These theories are used here as an inspiration for implementing a computational model of semantic memory in the form of semantic network. Combining this network with a vector-based object-relation-feature value representation of concepts that includes also weights for confidence and support, allows for recognition of concepts by referring to their features, enabling a semantic search algorithm. This algorithm has been used for word games, in particular the 20-question game in which the program tries to guess a concept that a human player thinks about. The game facilitates lexical knowledge validation and acquisition through the interaction with humans via supervised dialog templates. The elementary linguistic competencies of the proposed model have been evaluated assessing how well it can represent the meaning of linguistic concepts. To study properties of information retrieval based on this type of semantic representation in contexts derived from on-going dialogs experiments in limited domains have been performed. Several similarity measures have been used to compare the completeness of knowledge retrieved automatically and corrected through active dialogs to a “golden standard”. Comparison of semantic search with human performance has been made in a series of 20-question games. On average results achieved by human players were better than those obtained by semantic search, but not by a wide margin.     

How Does Neurobiological Research Influence Psychoanalytic Treatments?—Clinical Observations and Reflections From a Study on the Interface of Clinical Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

One of the counterarguments against empirical research in psychoanalysis is that research negatively influences the treatment situation. In this paper, the impact of a neurobiological study on psychoanalytically oriented treatments is presented from three different perspectives: patients' views, a study group of participating psychoanalysts and a clinical case example. Twenty chronically depressed patients, 20 healthy controls and 16 psychoanalysts participated in the project on research. Results show a clear influence of the neurobiological study on the course of treatments. Patients consistently reported that study participation had a positive impact on their treatment experiences. However, study participation was conflictual for the psychoanalysts and forced them to carefully reflect on their unconscious and conscious involvement to establish a psychoanalytic stance independent from empirical research.     

Motor execution affects action prediction

Previous studies provided evidence of the claim that the prediction of occluded action involves real-time simulation. We report two experiments that aimed to study how real-time simulation is affected by simultaneous action execution under conditions of full, partial or no overlap between observed and executed actions. This overlap was analysed by comparing the body sides and the movement kinematics involved in the observed and the executed action. While performing actions, participants observed point-light (PL) actions that were interrupted by an occluder, followed by a test pose. The task was to judge whether the test pose depicted a continuation of the occluded action in the same depth angle. Using a paradigm proposed by Graf et al., we independently manipulated the duration of the occluder and the temporal advance of the test pose relative to occlusion onset (occluder time and pose time, respectively). This paradigm allows the assessment of real-time simulation, based on prediction performance across different occluder time/pose time combinations (i.e., improved task performance with decreasing time distance between occluder time and pose time is taken to reflect real-time simulation). The PL actor could be perceived as from the front or back, as indicated by task instructions. In Experiment 1 (front view instructions), evidence of action simulation was obtained for partial overlap (i.e., observed and performed action corresponded either in body side or movement kinematics), but not for full or no overlap conditions. The same pattern was obtained in Experiment 2 (back view instructions), ruling out a spatial compatibility explanation for the real-time pattern observed. Our results suggest that motor processes affect action prediction and real-time simulation. The strength of their impact varies as a function of the overlap between observed and executed actions.     

What chance-credence norms should be

Synthese - Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam (1967) supposed it to be...