The Imaginary Lovers Delusion: A Diagnostic Case Study

A patient who believed that two imposters were posing as her and her ex-fiance was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with the aid of the Rorschach, DAP and Hand Test. Projective tests not only accurately reflected various elements of the girl's psychopathology but also revealed certain voyeuristic tendencies which appeared to be related to the projection of a double. The delusion was tentatively classified as a variation of Capgras' syndrome.     

Influence of delayed muscle reflexes on spinal stability: Model-based predictions allow alternative interpretations of experimental data

Model-based calculations indicate that reflex delay and reflex gain are both important for spinal stability. Experimental results demonstrate that chronic low back pain is associated with delayed muscle reflex responses of trunk muscles. The aim of the present study was to analyze the influence of such time-delayed reflexes on the stability using a simple biomechanical model. Additionally, we compared the model-based predictions with experimental data from chronic low back pain patients and healthy controls using surface-electromyography. Linear stability methods were applied to the musculoskeletal model, which was extended with a time-delayed reflex model. Lateral external perturbations were simulated around equilibrium to investigate the effects of reflex delay and gain on the stability of the human lumbar spine. The model simulations predicted that increased reflex delays require a reduction of the reflex gain to avoid spinal instability. The experimental data support this dependence for the investigated abdominal muscles in chronic low back pain patients and healthy control subjects. Reflex time-delay and gain dependence showed that a delayed reflex latency could have relevant influence on spinal stability, if subjects do not adapt their reflex amplitudes. Based on the model and the experimental results, the relationship between muscle reflex response latency and the maximum of the reflex amplitude should be considered for evaluation of (patho) physiological data. We recommend that training procedures should focus on speeding up the delayed reflex response as well as on increasing the amplitude of these reflexes.     

Anchoring,Familiarity, and Confidence in the Detection of Deception

Anchoring in judgments is the tendency for the final judgment to be biased toward the initial estimate through insufficient adjustment. In the context of the detection of deception, it has been used to explain phenomena such as negative absolute leakage and the truthfulness bias. We examined the influence of order of judgment type on attitude ratings, accuracy, and the truthfulness bias. Receivers of communications should tend to anchor their judgments on the sender's attitudinal position if asked to make attitude judgments first and on the sender's behavior if asked to make truthfulness judgments first. The results partly support these predictions. Negative absolute leakage, accuracy, and the truthfulness bias were not significantly different for those who made attitude judgments before truthfulness judgments. However, results show that accuracy decreased as the session continued and there was no difference in the confidence with which truth and deception judgments were made, but there was a positive relation between confidence and truthfulness bias.     

The Reading Fluency and Comprehension of Fifth- and Sixth-Grade Struggling Readers Across Brief Tests of Various Intervention Approaches

Although several different reading fluency intervention approaches appear promising for adolescents who are struggling readers, few studies have directly compared various approaches. The purpose of this study was twofold: 1) to determine the relative effects of word-oriented, fluency-oriented, comprehension-oriented, and multi-component interventions on the reading fluency performance of fifth and sixth grade struggling readers; and 2) to examine the concomitant effects of each intervention approach on comprehension. A within participant design, where all 29 participants received all interventions, was used. Outcomes were measured using instructional and transfer materials. The results provide support for a fluency-oriented and multi-component approach.     

The relationship between self-reported oral symptoms and life-events

Abstract

This paper investigates whether eight specific life-events were related to self-reported chronic (persistent trouble over the last 12 months) and acute (trouble in the last 14 days) oral symptoms in a sample of 3861 civil servants aged 35-44 years. The results of a logistic regression analysis taking age, social class and gender into account showed that a range of life-events—marital or family problems other than divorce, death of a relative, personal serious illness, serious illness of a close relative, major financial difficulty and mugging and robbery—were significantly associated with either acute or chronic oral symptoms. Further analysis showed that marital or family problems other than divorce was found to be the most important life event studied. The results support the argument that marital dissatisfaction leads to poorer physical and psychological health.     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Observing the transformation of experience into memory

The ability to remember one's past depends on neural processing set in motion at the moment each event is experienced. Memory formation can be observed by segregating neural responses according to whether or not each event is recalled or recognized on a subsequent memory test. Subsequent memory analyses have been performed with various neural measures, including brain potentials extracted from intracranial and extracranial electroencephalographic recordings, and hemodynamic responses from functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural responses can predict which events, and which aspects of those events, will be subsequently remembered or forgotten, thereby elucidating the neurocognitive processes that establish durable episodic memories.     

The semantics of syntactic structures

Over the past 15 years, both linguists and psycholinguists have shown a growing interest in the idea that syntactic structures can carry meanings that are independent of the meanings of specific words. This article considers how this idea relates to traditional notions of compositionality in generative grammar, and examines two modern theories that, although based on different starting assumptions, both readily allow syntactic structures to bear independent meaning. We review work from psycholinguistics suggesting that observation alone is often insufficient to support the efficient learning of word meanings, and that some of the 'slack' left by observation can be picked up by the semantics of the syntactic structures in which words appear. We argue that this convergence between linguistic theory and psycholinguistic experimentation should be no surprise, because language must be learnable.