GOOD or BAD responder? Behavioural and neuroanatomical markers of clinical response to donepezil in dementia

We explored the neuropsychological and neuromorphometrical differences between probable Alzheimer's disease patients showing a good or a bad response to nine months treatment with donepezil. Before treatment, the neuropsychological profile of the two patient groups was perfectly matched. By the ninth month after treatment, the BAD-responders showed a decline of the MMSE score together with a progressive impairment of executive functions. A voxel-based morphometry investigation (VBM), at the time of the second neuropsychological assessment, showed that the BAD-responders had larger grey and white matter atrophies involving the substantia innominata of Meynert bilaterally, the ventral part of caudate nuclei and the left uncinate fasciculus, brain areas belonging to the cholinergic pathways. A more widespread degeneration of the central cholinergic pathways may explain the lack of donepezil efficacy in those patients not responding to a treatment that operates on the grounds that some degree of endogeneous release of acetylcholine is still available.     

News Reports of Catastrophes and Viewers' Fear: Threat Appraisal of Positively Versus Negatively Framed Events

Although research has shown that media coverage of traumatic events can evoke intense fear in spectators, few studies have examined the mechanisms underlying this effect. Drawing from appraisal theories, this article investigates whether viewers' fear responses to traumatic reports are mediated by the appraisal of personal relevance, as well as whether positive framing of news stories is capable of dampening fear. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, participants watched one of two reports about mutilations caused by either an event with high signal potential (bacterial infection) or an event with low signal potential (explosion of land mines). Each of the reports could be either positively or negatively framed. Participants were asked to report their emotions in response to the news story and to answer questions concerning their cognitive appraisal. Results showed that the report with mutilations caused by bacterial infection elicited more fear than the report with mutilations caused by land mine explosions. This effect was mediated by the dimensions of suddenness, unpleasantness, personal relevance, and coping potential. Positively framed reports generated less fear than negatively framed reports, and this effect was mediated by the dimensions of coping potential and unpleasantness. The implications for media research are discussed.     

Strenge Beweise und das Verbot der metábasis eis állo génos

In his booklet ‘Contributions to a better founded presentation of mathematics’ of 1810 Bernard Bolzano made his first serious attempt to explain the notion of a rigorous proof. Although the system of logic he employed at that stage is in various respects far below the level of the achievements in his later Wissenschaftslehre, there is a striking continuity between his earlier and later work as regards the methodological constraints on rigorous proofs. This paper tries to give a perspicuous and critical account of the fragmentary logic of Beyträge, and it shows that there is a tension between that logic and Bolzano's methodological ban on ‘kind crossing’.     

Functions in Frege,Bolzano and Husserl

This explorative article is organized around a set of questions concerning the concept of a function. First, a summary of certain general facts about functions that are a common coin in contemporary logic is given. Then Frege's attempt at clarifying the nature of functions in his famous paper Function and Concept and in his Grundgesetze is discussed along with some questions which Freges' approach gave rise to in the literature. Finally, some characteristic uses of functional notions to be found in the work of Bernard Bolzano and in Edmund Husserl's early work are presented and elucidated.     

Infants' individuation of agents and inert objects

Using the violation-of-expectancy method, we investigated 10-month-old infants' ability to rely on dynamic features in object individuation processes. Infants were first familiarized to events in which two different objects repeatedly appeared and disappeared, one at a time from behind a screen; at test, the screen was removed, revealing either one or two objects. In Experiment 1, one self-moving non-rigid agent and one inert object were involved in each trial, while in Experiment 2 two different agents were presented. Infants preferred to look at one-object outcomes in Experiment 1, but they did not show any preference for one- or two-object outcomes in Experiment 2. The results suggest that infants can use dynamic information to detect agents in complex individuation tasks before they can rely on shape or surface features. We propose that the sortals agent and inert object appear in development before 12 months without a substantial contribution of linguistic experience. These findings may motivate a revision of current theories on the development of kind-based individuation and object files.     

Socially creative appraisals of rejection bolster ethnic migrants' subjective well‐being

We examined a proposition based on social identity theory that socially creative appraisals of rejection can boost the well‐being of strongly identifying ethnic migrants. We piloted this proposition amongst women (N = 80) and found that strong (but not weak) group identifiers who considered the positive views that society holds about their social identity reported higher subjective wellbeing (self‐esteem) relative to those who dwelt on rejection. In a subsequent field experiment (N = 179) conducted amongst ethnic migrants in London, we added a further social creativity treatment in which participants were encouraged to consider how they would view immigrants if they were native British (accommodation). Results revealed that the two social creativity mindsets (accommodation and positive) combined: (a) reduced perceptions of social rejection and increased optimism over the openness and fairness of society relative to a rejection mindset, (b) enhanced the self‐esteem of strongly (but not weakly) identified ethnic migrants, and (c) enhanced ethnic migrant's wellbeing by minimizing the recall of social rejection and by strengthening optimism over the host society's openness and fairness. Implications for social change are discussed.     

Facial Expressions and the Ability to Recognize Emotions from the Eyes or Mouth: A Comparison Between Children and Adults

The authors sought to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and neutral emotions from facial information. They aimed to investigate if—regardless of age—this pattern changes. More specifically, the present study aimed to compare the difference between the performance of adults and 6- to 7-year-old children in detecting emotions from the whole face and a specific face region, namely the eyes and mouth. The findings seem to indicate that, for both groups, recognizing disgust, happiness, and surprise is facilitated when pictures represent the whole face. However, with regard to a specific region, a prevalence for children was not found between the eyes and mouth. Meanwhile, for adults, would seem to detect a greater role of the eye region. Finally, regarding the differences in the performance of emotions recognition, adults are better only in a few cases, whereas children are better in recognizing anger from the mouth.     

Psychometric Properties of an Italian Version of the Differentiation of Self Inventory-Revised (It-DSI-R)

The Differentiation of Self (DoS) is a key concept of Bowen’s theory, indicating a process that begins in early infancy and progresses throughout childhood and adolescence, to reach a basic level in early adulthood. This study examined the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the Differentiation of Self Inventory-Revised (DSI-R) Skowron, Schmitt, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 29:209–222, 2003), a multidimensional measure assessing DoS as conceptualized by Bowen. The sample comprised 671 subjects (age 19–69 year). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that the Italian DSI-R possesses good psychometric properties. Internal consistencies were adequate. Correlations with the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, the Symptom Checklist 90-Revised, and the trait form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory were consistent with the theoretical relations among the constructs. The findings confirm the use of DSI-R as a psychometrically sound measure of the differentiation of self in the Italian context. Implications for future research and clinical practice are addressed.     

Use of evidence in a categorization task: analytic and holistic processing modes

Category learning performance can be influenced by many contextual factors, but the effects of these factors are not the same for all learners. The present study suggests that these differences can be due to the different ways evidence is used, according to two main basic modalities of processing information, analytically or holistically. In order to test the impact of the information provided, an inductive rule-based task was designed, in which feature salience and comparison informativeness between examples of two categories were manipulated during the learning phases, by introducing and progressively reducing some perceptual biases. To gather data on processing modalities, we devised the Active Feature Composition task, a production task that does not require classifying new items but reproducing them by combining features. At the end, an explicit rating task was performed, which entailed assessing the accuracy of a set of possible categorization rules. A combined analysis of the data collected with these two different tests enabled profiling participants in regard to the kind of processing modality, the structure of representations and the quality of categorial judgments. Results showed that despite the fact that the information provided was the same for all participants, those who adopted analytic processing better exploited evidence and performed more accurately, whereas with holistic processing categorization is perfectly possible but inaccurate. Finally, the cognitive implications of the proposed procedure, with regard to involved processes and representations, are discussed.     

Effects of stressful life events on human brain structure: a longitudinal voxel-based morphometry study

Although stressful life events (SLEs) have been associated with an increased risk of illness and mental disorder, their impact on brain anatomy remains poorly understood. Using a longitudinal design, we tested the hypothesis that SLEs are significantly associated with changes in gray matter volume (GMV) in brain regions previously implicated in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a group of clinically healthy adults. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to acquire an anatomical scan from 26 subjects (13 males and 13 females; mean age ± SD: 25.2 ± 4.3 years), with no psychiatric diagnosis, at two time points with a 3-month interval. Voxel-based morphometry was used to examine an association between SLEs and gray matter changes during this period. The number of SLEs was associated with a decrease in GMV in the anterior cingulate, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus (p < 0.001). In contrast, there were no areas where the number of SLEs was associated with an increase in GMV. These results provide evidence that, in adults with no formal psychiatric diagnosis, SLEs are associated with GMV decreases in a subset of regions implicated in PTSD, and that these alterations can be observed within a period as short as 3 months.