Health locus of control and health behaviour: results from a nationally representative survey

The present study aims to examine the association between sociodemographic variables and health locus of control (HLC) as well as HLC and health behaviour. Data from a representative sample of the German adult population, the Telephone Health Survey 2006 (GSTel06; N=5542), were used. A German version of the MHLC (multidimensional HLC) scales was used. Associations between sociodemographic variables and three dimensions of HLC (internal, powerful others and chance) and between HLC and health behaviour were calculated. In particular, higher age, low socioeconomic status and migration background were associated with higher HLC scores on the powerful others and chance dimension. Subjects scoring high on the chance dimension did less sports activity (OR: 0.8; CI: 0.7-0.9), had less medical teeth protection (0.7; 0.6-0.9), fewer health courses (0.8; 0.7-0.9) and conducted less systematic information-seeking (0.8; 0.6-0.9), while results regarding internal and powerful others HLC remained mainly insignificant. High chance HLC can be regarded as risk factor of adequate health behaviour. The associations between high chance HLC, low socioeconomic status and migration background emphasise the need for treatments and prevention programmes tailored to modify the high chance HLC of socially disadvantaged populations.     

Rise time and formant transition duration in the discrimination of speech sounds: the Ba-Wa distinction in developmental dyslexia

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure (phonological structure) of speech. One likely cause of their difficulties with phonology is a perceptual difficulty in auditory temporal processing (Tallal, 1980). Tallal (1980) proposed that basic auditory processing of brief, rapidly successive acoustic changes is compromised in dyslexia, thereby affecting phonetic discrimination (e.g. discriminating /b/ from /d/) via impaired discrimination of formant transitions (rapid acoustic changes in frequency and intensity). However, an alternative auditory temporal hypothesis is that the basic auditory processing of the slower amplitude modulation cues in speech is compromised (Goswami et al., 2002). Here, we contrast children's perception of a synthetic speech contrast (ba/wa) when it is based on the speed of the rate of change of frequency information (formant transition duration) versus the speed of the rate of change of amplitude modulation (rise time). We show that children with dyslexia have excellent phonetic discrimination based on formant transition duration, but poor phonetic discrimination based on envelope cues. The results explain why phonetic discrimination may be allophonic in developmental dyslexia (Serniclaes et al., 2004), and suggest new avenues for the remediation of developmental dyslexia.     

Using mu rhythm desynchronization to measure mirror neuron activity in infants

The Mirror Neuron System hypothesis stating that observed actions are projected onto the observer’s own action system assigns an important role to development, because only actions mastered by the observer can be mirrored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether there is evidence of a functioning mirror neuron system (MNS) in 8-month-old infants. High-density EEG was used to assess the mu rhythm desynchronization in an action observation task where the infants observed a live model. To reduce noise, ICA decompositions were used. The results show a higher desynchronization of the mu rhythm when infants observed a goal-directed action than when they observed a spatially similar non-goal-directed movement. The localizations of the sources are in agreement with those proposed by the MNS hypothesis. This indicates that the MNS is functioning at this age.     

Saved by the blush: being trusted despite defecting

This study examined whether blushing after a sociomoral transgression remediates trustworthiness in an interdependent context. Participants (N = 196) played a computerized prisoner's dilemma game with a virtual opponent who defected in the second round of the game. After the defection, a photograph of the opponent was shown, displaying a blushing or a nonblushing face. In a subsequent Trust Task, the blushing opponent was entrusted with more money than the nonblushing opponent. In further support of the alleged remedial properties of the blush, participants also indicated that they trusted the blushing opponent more, expected a lower probability that she would defect again, and judged the blushing opponent more positively.     

On the molecular genetics of flexibility: The case of task-switching,inhibitory control and genetic variants

The adjustment of behavior to changing goals and environmental constraints requires the flexible switching between different task sets. Cognitive flexibility is an endophenotype of executive functioning and is highly heritable, as indicated by twin studies. Individual differences in global flexibility as assessed by reaction-time measurement in a task-switching paradigm were recently related to a single nucleotide polymorphism in the vicinity of the dopamine d2 receptor gene DRD2. In the present study, we assessed whether the DRD2 gene is related to backward inhibition, a control mechanism that contributes to cognitive flexibility by reducing proactive interference by no longer relevant task sets. We found that carriers of the DRD2 A1+ variant who have a lower striatal dopamine d2 receptor density than A1– carriers show a larger backward inhibition effect. This is in line with previous results demonstrating increased behavioral flexibility in carriers of this genetic variant. The discussion relates the present finding to those of previous studies assessing the neurogenetic foundations of inhibitory control.     

Neurofunctional correlates of expressed vocal affect in social phobia

We investigated the neural correlates of expressed vocal affect in patients with social phobia. A group of 36 patients performed an anxiogenic public-speaking task while regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was assessed using oxygen-15 positron emission tomography. The patients’ speech was recorded and content masked using low-pass filtering (which obscures linguistic content but preserves nonverbal affective cues). The content-masked speech samples were then evaluated with regard to their level of vocally expressed nervousness. We hypothesized that activity in prefrontal and subcortical brain areas previously implicated in emotion regulation would be associated with the degree of expressed vocal affect. Regression analyses accordingly revealed significant negative correlations between expressed vocal affect and rCBF in inferior frontal gyrus, putamen, and hippocampus. Further, functional connectivity was revealed between inferior frontal gyrus and (a) anterior cingulate cortex and (b) amygdala and basal ganglia. We suggest that brain areas important for emotion regulation may also form part of a network associated with the modulation of affective prosody in social phobia.     

Contrafreeloading and the value of control over visual stimuli in Japanese macaques (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca fuscata</Emphasis>)

Contrafreeloading, which means that animals work for food even though identical food is freely available, has been reported in animals’ feeding behavior. This phenomenon has been assumed to be explained by the information primacy model, in which the information about a food resource as well as the food itself is valuable for animals. This study confirmed a contrafreeloading-like phenomenon using movies as rewards rather than food in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) and investigated the motivational system that exists behind contrafreeloading. In the experiment, movies that were presented dependently on subjects’ responses (earned movies) and movies that were presented automatically (free movies) were supplied simultaneously. The subjects continued to make responses to obtain the presentation of the earned movies although identical movies were available as free movies. These results provide the first evidence of contrafreeloading that occurs with movie rewards. The motivation maintaining the contrafreeloading behavior for movies may be control over the environment according to the competence theory.     

Contextual self-organizing map: software for constructing semantic representations

In this article, we introduce a software package that applies a corpus-based algorithm to derive semantic representations of words. The algorithm relies on analyses of contextual information extracted from a text corpus—specifically, analyses of word co-occurrences in a large-scale electronic database of text. Here, a target word is represented as the combination of the average of all words preceding the target and all words following it in a text corpus. The semantic representation of the target words can be further processed by a self-organizing map (SOM; Kohonen, Self-organizing maps, 2001), an unsupervised neural network model that provides efficient data extraction and representation. Due to its topography-preserving features, the SOM projects the statistical structure of the context onto a 2-D space, such that words with similar meanings cluster together, forming groups that correspond to lexically meaningful categories. Such a representation system has its applications in a variety of contexts, including computational modeling of language acquisition and processing. In this report, we present specific examples from two languages (English and Chinese) to demonstrate how the method is applied to extract the semantic representations of words.