Executive functions and linguistic performance in SCD older adults and healthy controls

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) might represent the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease. Given the interest to characterize it, the present study explores (1) if there are differences in lexical retrieval (LexR) and sentence comprehension (SComp) between SCD and matched controls, and (2) the predictive value of demographic variables and executive functions in relation to LexR and SComp in each group. A sample of 135 participants voluntarily took part in this study (66 with SCD). They all completed the Trail Making, the Stroop, the Boston Naming, and the ECCO-Senior tests, as well as verbal fluency tasks (VF). Results show that (1) groups differ in LexR and in inhibition efficiency, and (2) VF is explained by years of formal education, particularly in the control group; SComp in the most complex items seems to rely in different strategies, related to flexibility in controls and to inhibition efficiency in SCD patients.     

Do ‘literate’ pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>) show mirror-word generalization?

Many children pass through a mirror stage in reading, where they write individual letters or digits in mirror and find it difficult to correctly utilize letters that are mirror images of one another (e.g., b and d). This phenomenon is thought to reflect the fact that the brain does not naturally discriminate left from right. Indeed, it has been argued that reading acquisition involves the inhibition of this default process. In the current study, we tested the ability of literate pigeons, which had learned to discriminate between 30 and 62 words from 7832 nonwords, to discriminate between words and their mirror counterparts. Subjects were sensitive to the left–right orientation of the individual letters, but not the order of letters within a word. This finding may reflect the fact that, in the absence of human-unique top-down processes, the inhibition of mirror generalization may be limited.     

Social Comparisons on Subjective Well-Being: The Role of Social and Cultural Capital

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze the relevance of modeling social comparisons to determine their effect on subjective well-being. We find that it is important to model social comparisons in such a way that captures the sensitivity of individuals to proximity. The impact on subjective well-being differs depending on the manner in which proximity is modeled, revealing that the underlying processes in comparisons are not homogenous along the income distribution. Additionally, our results point out that social and cultural capital modify the effect of social comparisons and such modification depends on the sensitivity to proximity.     

Individual Social Capital and Subjective Wellbeing: The Relational Goods

In this paper we analyze the non-instrumental dimension of social capital and its effects on subjective well-being. In the first part, we define the characteristics of production and consumption of relational goods. The second section analyses the influence of the different expressions of relational goods and social capital on individual subjective well-being. In the third, we test the explanatory power of this variable on the Easterlin’s paradox using the results of a survey on individual social capital in Spain. The main findings from the empirical analysis for Spanish society allow us to strengthen the hypothesis. We found a weak explanatory capacity of income or educational level or instrumental dimensions of social capital (expert mobilization) while a strong link between expressions of relational goods (domestic mobilization, household stability, partnership, trust and security in the environment) was found.     

Identity Status,Gender, and Social Comparison Among Young Adults

The aim of this study was to investigate identity status globally and across identity domains among young Swedish adult women and men. Also, potential differences in social comparison among identity statuses were evaluated. The results showed that most of the 124 participants (50% women, M_age 33.29 years) were assigned to an achieved global identity and had made identity-defining commitments across domains. Gender differences in identity status were found in the occupational and parenthood domains. In addition, differences in social comparison orientation were found only in the parenthood domain, whereas those assigned to moratorium scored higher in social comparison than did those assigned to foreclosure and diffusion. These results bring important knowledge to our understanding of identity during young adulthood.     

Brain activity underlying negative self- and other-perception in adolescents: The role of attachment-derived self-representations

One of teenagers’ key developmental tasks is to engage in new and meaningful relationships with peers and adults outside the family context. Attachment-derived expectations about the self and others in terms of internal attachment working models have the potential to shape such social reorientation processes critically and thereby influence adolescents’ social-emotional development and social integration. Because the neural underpinnings of this developmental task remain largely unknown, we sought to investigate them by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked n = 44 adolescents (ages 12.01–18.84 years) to evaluate positive and negative adjectives regarding either themselves or a close other during an adapted version of the well-established self-other trait-evaluation task. As measures of attachment, we obtained scores reflecting participants’ positive versus negative attachment-derived self- and other-models by means of the Relationship Questionnaire. We controlled for possible confounding factors by also obtaining scores reflecting internalizing/externalizing problems, schizotypy, and borderline symptomatology. Our results revealed that participants with a more negative attachment-derived self-model showed increased brain activity during positive and negative adjective evaluation regarding the self, but decreased brain activity during negative adjective evaluation regarding a close other, in bilateral amygdala/parahippocampus, bilateral anterior temporal pole/anterior superior temporal gyrus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that a low positivity of the self-concept characteristic for the attachment anxiety dimension may influence neural information processing, but in opposite directions when it comes to self- versus (close) other-representations. We discuss our results in the framework of attachment theory and regarding their implications especially for adolescent social-emotional development and social integration.     

Holos: A collaborative environment for similarity-based holistic approaches

Through this article, we aim to introduce Holos—a new collaborative environment that allows researchers to carry out experiments based on similarity assessments between stimuli, such as in projective-mapping and sorting tasks. An important feature of Holos is its capacity to assess real-time individual processes during the task. Within the Holos environment, researchers can design experiments on its platform, which can handle four kinds of stimuli: concepts, images, sounds, and videos. In addition, researchers can share their study resources within the scientific community, including stimuli, experimental protocols, and/or the data collected. With a dedicated Android application combined with a tactile human–machine interface, subjects can perform experiments using a tablet to obtain similarity measures between stimuli. On the tablet, the stimuli are displayed as icons that can be dragged with one finger to position them, depending on the ways they are perceived. By recording the x,y coordinates of the stimuli while subjects move the icons, the obtained data can reveal the cognitive processes of the subjects during the experiment. Such data, named digit-tracking data, can be analyzed with the SensoMineR package. In this article, we describe how researchers can design an experiment, how subjects can perform the experiment, and how digit-tracking data can be statistically analyzed within the Holos environment. At the end of the article, a short exemplary experiment is presented.     

Using Automated Learning Devices for Monkeys (ALDM) to study social networks

Social network analysis has become a prominent tool to study animal social life, and there is an increasing need to develop new systems to collect social information automatically, systematically, and reliably. Here we explore the use of a freely accessible Automated Learning Device for Monkeys (ALDM) to collect such social information on a group of 22 captive baboons (Papio papio). We compared the social network obtained from the co-presence of the baboons in ten ALDM testing booths to the social network obtained through standard behavioral observation techniques. The results show that the co-presence network accurately reflects the social organization of the group, and also indicate under which conditions the co-presence network is most informative. In particular, the best correlation between the two networks was obtained with a minimum of 40 days of computer records and for individuals with at least 500 records per day. We also show through random permutation tests that the observed correlations go beyond what would be observed by simple synchronous activity, to reflect a preferential choice of closely located testing booths. The use of automatized cognitive testing therefore presents a new way of obtaining a large and regular amount of social information that is necessary to develop social network analysis. It also opens the possibility of studying dynamic changes in network structure with time and in relation to the cognitive performance of individuals.     

Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words

Most current models of research on emotion recognize valence (how pleasant a stimulus is) and arousal (the level of activation or intensity that a stimulus elicits) as important components in the classification of affective experiences (Barrett, 1998; Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Barrett, 2012). Here we present a set of norms for valence and arousal for a very large set of Spanish words, including items from a variety of frequencies, semantic categories, and parts of speech, including a subset of conjugated verbs. In this regard, we found that there were significant but very small differences between the ratings for conjugations of the same verb, validating the practice of applying the ratings for infinitives to all derived forms of the verb. Our norms show a high degree of reliability and are strongly correlated with those of Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, and Comesaña’s (2007) Spanish version of the influential Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999), as well as those from Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (2013), the largest available set of emotional norms for English words. Additionally, we included measures of word prevalence—that is, the percentage of participants that knew a particular word—for each variable (Keuleers, Stevens, Mandera, & Brysbaert, 2015). Our large set of norms in Spanish not only will facilitate the creation of stimuli and the analysis of texts in that language, but also will be useful for cross-language comparisons and research on emotional aspects of bilingualism. The norms can be downloaded and available as a supplementary materials to this article.     

Facial gender confirmation surgery—review of the literature and recommendations for Version 8 of the WPATH Standards of Care

Facial gender confirmation surgery (FGCS), also popularly known and referred to in the scientific literature as facial feminization surgery (FFS), was previously treated as a collection of aesthetic procedures complementing other aspects of gender-confirming surgery. Recent literature on quality-of-life outcomes following FGCS has supported the substantial impact these procedures have on overall well-being and reduction of psychosocial sequelae in patients. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care, Version 7 (WPATH SOC 7), did not deem FGCS a medical necessity. Based on these new studies, increasing evidence points to the need to include FGCS among medically necessary gender-confirming surgeries, though more-prospective studies are needed. Updates to the WPATH SOC 8 are proposed based on available quality of life studies.