Adolescent health behavior and conventionality-unconventionality: an extension of problem-behavior theory

Examined the relation of psychosocial and behavioral conventionality-unconventionality to health-related behavior in cross-sectional data from 1,588 male and female 7th to 12th graders. Conventionality-unconventionality was represented by personality, perceived social environment, and behavior variables selected from the social-psychological framework of problem-behavior theory (R. Jessor & S. L. Jessor, 1977). Greater psychosocial conventionality correlates with more regular involvement in health-related behavior (regular physical activity, adequate sleep, safety belt use, attention to healthy diet). Greater behavioral conventionality (less involvement in problem behaviors such as marijuana use, problem drinking, delinquent-type behavior, and greater involvement in conventional behaviors such as church attendance) was also associated with greater involvement in health-maintaining behavior. The overall findings provide support for the extension of problem-behavior theory to the domain of adolescent health behavior and for the relevance of the dimension of conventionality-unconventionality.     

Cause as an implication

An appropriately unprejudiced logical investigation of causation as a type of implication relation is undertaken. The implication delineated is bounded syntactically. The developing argument then leads to a very natural process analysis, which demonstrably captures the established syntactical features. Next relevantly-based semantics for the resulting logical theory are adduced, and requisite adequacy results delivered. At the end of the tour, further improvements are pointed out, and the attractive terrain beyond present developments is glimpsed.This paper was presented at the 1986 Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Logic in Auckland, 9–12 July, 1986.     

Illiteracy and brain damage. 2. Manifestations of unilateral neglect in testing "auditory comprehension" with iconographic materials

This report concerns the sentence-picture matching behavior of 100 neurologically healthy and 169 brain-damaged subjects, all of whom were unilingual adult right-handers. Within this population, 144 subjects were totally unschooled illiterates and the remaining 125 had received school education and thereafter had retained writing skills and reading habits. Brain-damaged subjects were tested less than 2 months after a first left- or right-hemisphere stroke. All subjects were administered an aphasia screening battery including, among other subtests, a set of six sentence-picture matching stimuli. For each of these six stimuli, subjects heard a sentence uttered by the examiner and were then requested to match this sentence with one of four drawings presented within a single display divided into four quadrants of equal surface. Three sentences were syntactically "simple" (noun subject + verb) and three were relatively more "complex" (noun subject + verb + one or two noun complements). Evidence of unilateral neglect was found in both left- and right-brain-damaged illiterates and literates. Moreover, the right neglect of left-brain-damaged subjects was manifest mostly when target sentences were relatively "complex" whereas the left neglect of right-brain-damaged subjects was manifest irrespective of the syntactic complexity of target sentences. Our data are interpreted as indicative of an interaction between two cognitive disorders resulting from dysfunctions of asymmetrically represented cognitive mechanisms. The implications of these findings with respect to clinical and research aphasia testing are discussed.     

How do highly proficient bilinguals control their lexicalization process? Inhibitory and language-specific selection mechanisms are both functional

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in language-switching contexts involving (a) the 2nd language (L2) and the L3 of the bilinguals, (b) the L3 and the L4, and (c) the L1 and a recently learned new language. Highly proficient bilinguals showed symmetrical switching costs regardless of the age at which the L2 was learned and of the similarities of the 2 languages and asymmetrical switching costs when 1 of the languages involved in the switching task was very weak (an L4 or a recently learned language). The theoretical implications of these results for the attentional mechanisms used by highly proficient bilinguals to control their lexicalization process are discussed.     

Aesthetic phenomena as supernormal stimuli: the case of eye, lip, and lower-face size and roundness in artistic portraits

In the first study, eye and lip size and roundness, and lower-face roundness were compared between a control sample of 289 photographic portraits and an experimental sample of 776 artistic portraits covering the whole period of the history of art. Results showed that eye roundness, lip roundness, eye height, eye width, and lip height were significantly enhanced in artistic portraits compared to photographic ones. Lip width and lower-face roundness, on the contrary, were less prominent in artistic than in photographic portraits. In a second study, forty-two art academy students were requested to draw two self-portraits, one with a mirror and one without (from memory). Eye, lip, and lower-face roundness in artistic self-portraits was compared to the same features derived from photographic portraits of the participants. The results obtained confirmed those found in the first study. Eye and lip size and roundness were greater in artistic self-portraits, while lower-face roundness was significantly reduced. The same degree of modification was found also when a mirror was available to the subjects. In a third study the effect of lower-face roundness on the perception of attractiveness was assessed: fifty-three participants had to adjust the face width of 24 photographic portraits in order to achieve the highest level of attractiveness. Participants contracted the face width by a mean value of 5.26%, showing a preference for a reduced lower-face roundness. All results are discussed in terms of the importance of the 'supernormalisation' process as a means of assigning aesthetic value to perceptual stimuli.     

The effects of metabolic stress and vagotomy on emotional learning in an animal model of anxiety

The aim of the present study is to evaluate the role of the blood glucose (BG) level in emotional learning in the elevated plus maze (EPM), an animal model of anxiety. In Experiment 1, male Wistar rats were submitted to different EPM trial lengths (1- or 5-min). Blood samples were withdrawn before and after the maze exploration, through a polyethylene cannula chronically implanted into the jugular vein. In Experiment 2, the animals received either saline or 2-deoxy-D-glucose, a glucoprivic drug (2-DG, 250 or 500 mg kg(-1)) by i.p. route, 30 min before a 5-min EPM exposure and were retested in the maze (Trial1/Trial2 EPM procedure) 24 h later. In an independent group of rats, blood samples were withdrawn 0, 5, 15, and 30 min after 2-DG administration, through the jugular vein, to determine BG. In Experiment 3, the animals underwent a vagotomy and were tested in a Trial1/Trial2 EPM procedure four weeks later. The results showed that rats exploring the EPM for 5 min displayed increased fear and higher hyperglycemia than those exploring the EPM for 1 min. In addition, rats submitted to 5-min EPM Trial1 length displayed higher level of fear on Trial2, as well as higher percentage of shortening of the %Open arm entries and %Open arm time from Trial1 to Trial2, which characterizes the occurrence of emotional learning. In contrast, rats previously vagotomized or treated with 2-DG (500 mg kg(-1)) showed the same level of fear on both EPM trials and a low percentage of shortening, from Trial1 to Trial2, of the %Open arm entries and %Open arm time, indicating poor emotional learning. The data is discussed regarding the role of glycaemia in emotional learning in the EPM.     

Planning at the Phonological Level during Sentence Production

In two picture–word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short determiner + noun + verb or long determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response times to begin producing both types of sentences were faster in the presence of a related versus unrelated distractor. The results suggest that the activation of phonological properties of words outside the first phrase and first and second phonological word affect onset of articulation during sentence production. The results are discussed in the light of previous evidence of phonological planning during multi-word production. Implications for the phonological facilitation effect in the picture–word interference paradigm are also discussed.The research reported in this article served as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree at Harvard University for Tatiana T. Schnur     

Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity is reduced in hippocampus of rats submitted to an experimental model of depression: effect of chronic lithium treatment and possible involvement in learning deficits

This study was undertaken to verify the effects of chronic stress and lithium treatments on the hippocampal Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity of rats, as well as to investigate the effects of stress interruption and post-stress lithium treatment on this enzyme activity and on spatial memory. Two experiments were carried out; in the first experiment, adult male Wistar rats were divided into two groups: control and submitted to a chronic variate stress paradigm, and subdivided into treated or not with LiCl. After 40 days of treatment, rats were killed, and Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity was determined. In the second experiment, rats were stressed during 40 days, and their performance was evaluated in the Water Maze task. The stressed group was then subdivided into four groups, with continued or interrupted stress treatment and treated or not with lithium for 30 additional days. After a second evaluation of performance in the Water Maze, rats were killed and Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity was also measured. Results showed an impairment in Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity and in Water Maze performance of chronically stressed rats, which were prevented by lithium treatment and reversed by lithium treatment and by stress interruption. These results suggest that the modulation of Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity may be one of the mechanisms of action of lithium in the treatment of mood disorders.     

Effects of phoneme repertoire

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.