Does the right hemisphere take over after damage to Broca's area? the Barlow case of 1877 and its history

In 1877 Thomas Barlow, a London physician, published a remarkable case of functional recovery of speech following brain damage. It involved a 10-year-old boy who had lost his speech, regained it, and lost it again before he died from a disorder that affected his heart and produced embolisms that subsequently affected other organs, including his brain. Examination of the boy's brain revealed two focal regions of softening; one that affected Broca's area and the left facial-motor area, and another, which occurred weeks later, in the homologous regions of the right hemisphere. Although Barlow was most concerned with motor deficits, others at the turn of the century began to cite this case as strong evidence that the corresponding region of the right hemisphere can take over speech functions for Broca's area on the left. Whether this case really provides good support for functional takeover or vicariation theory is critically evaluated in the light of contemporary research, including PET scan studies involving damage to Broca's speech region.     

Distributed cortical networks for syntax processing: Broca's area as the common denominator

Different types of syntactic information (word category, grammatical gender) are processed at different times during word recognition. However, it is an open issue which brain systems support these processes. In the present event-related fMRI study, subjects performed either a syntactic gender decision task on German nouns (GEN), a word category decision task (WC, nouns vs. prepositions), or a physical baseline task (BASE). Reaction times in WC were faster than in GEN, supporting earlier electrophysiological results. Relative to BASE, both syntactic tasks activated the inferior tip of BA 44. In addition, BA 45 showed activation in GEN, whereas BA 47 was activated in WC. The imaging data indicate that the inferior portion of BA 44 together with type-specific prefrontal areas supports both initial word category related and later syntactic processes.     

Pragmatic communication skills in patients with Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND: Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function. HYPOTHESIS: We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these patients. In Study 2 we hypothesized that PD patients would be unaware of their pragmatic communication deficits. METHODS: In Study 1 we administered tests of pragmatic abilities and frontal lobe functioning to twenty-two persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 10 healthy controls. In Study 2 we obtained self-ratings of pragmatic abilities from 11 PD patients and then checked these self-ratings against ratings of these same abilities by the patient's spouses. RESULTS: We found in Study 1 that patients with PD were: (a) significantly impaired on measures of pragmatic communication abilities, especially in the areas of conversational appropriateness, turn-taking, prosodics and proxemics, and that this impairment was significantly related to measures of frontal lobe function. In study 2 we found that PD patients overestimated their own abilities relative to spousal ratings of those abilities and thus were unaware of the extent of their problems with pragmatic social communication skills. CONCLUSION: We conclude that pragmatic social communication skills are impaired in PD and that this impairment may be related to frontal lobe dysfunction.     

Effects of a Danish Student‐Centered Prosocial Intervention Program Among Japanese Children

Japan and Denmark represent two different educational cultures. Where Danish students in general report high scores on self‐esteem, Japanese children report low. A student‐centered and interaction‐based prosocial intervention program that was designed according to Danish educational culture was administered to children aged 11–12 years in Japan. Questionnaires measuring the children's quality of life (QoL) and metacognitive awareness were applied. Overall, the results showed that the student‐centered intervention improved the emotional well‐being aspect of QoL among Japanese boys. In contrast, Japanese boys’ scores on the declarative knowledge of metacognitive regulation declined. The teachers’ attitudes towards the intervention program were analyzed by use of interviews. The effect of the student‐centered intervention program is discussed with respect to the educational cultures in Japan.     

Outside‐In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or ‐ Knowing me,Knowing Jung – ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one‐sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the ‘inner life’ over the ‘outer’ can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on‐going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The ‘ambiguation’ of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.     

Risk and Prisoner's Dilemma: A Reinterpretation of Coombs' Re‐parameterization

We propose a model to measure risk in a prisoner's dilemma based on Coombs' (1973) re‐parameterization of the game as an individual risk decision‐making task that chooses between a gamble of cooperation and another gamble of defection. Specifically, we propose an index, r, to represent the risk associated with cooperation relative to defection. In conjunction with Rapoport's (1967) index of cooperation (K), our formulation of risk allows us to construct games that vary in risk (as indexed by r) while controlling for cooperativeness (as indexed by K). Following utility analysis that models risk seeking as a convex utility function and risk averse as a concave function, we predict that risk‐seeking people cooperate more in games that the cooperation choice is more risky, whereas risk‐averse people cooperate more in games that the cooperation choice is less risky. In the three studies that we varied game parameters, used different measures of risk orientation and prosocial orientation and used different experimental procedures, we found robust results supporting our predictions. Theoretical analysis of our formulation further suggests that risk and cooperativeness of a prisoner's dilemma game is not entirely independent. Games that have a higher cooperativeness index are necessarily more risky. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

对影响病人满意度相关因素的医学伦理思考

设计调查问卷对深圳某基层医院实施病人满意度调查及相关因素的医学伦理分析。结果显示病人满意度不高,门急诊病人的总满意度明显低于住院病人;病人对服务态度、就医环境和诊疗费用等都较不满意。其中医院未能遵循及时、准确、有效、择优和自主原则是主要影响因素。     

Elaboration et validation de tests de jugement situationnel comme outil de sélection professionnelle : guide méthodologique

Current views in personnel selection recognize the necessity for situational judgements tests (SJT) which are closed to the real work context of companies. The SJTs have also become a popular selection tool across Europe. SJTs are attractive because they show good validity, positive applicants reactions and can be cost effective to test large group of applicants at once. The aim of this paper is to describe a structured methodology for the elaboration of such test. Each stage is illustrated by examples and psychometrics validation issues are discussed.     

Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room

This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS?D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.     

Understanding alexithymia within a psychoanalytical framework

The object of this paper is to provide a metapsychological definition of alexithymia as described in 1967 in terms of operational thinking and negative hallucination. This is a familiar and established concept in the fields of psychopathology, psychology, and of clinical and psychosomatic medicine. From a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view, the term is conceptually close to P. Marty's “operative thinking”, as described in 1963, even though we know they do not belong to the same epistemological field: on one hand Neuroscience, Psychiatry and the objectalization of the symptom at different levels, and on the other, as regards mechanical functioning, a psychoanalytic clinical approach within the dynamics of the relationship between transference and counter‐transference. The present authors consider that Freudian metapsychology, as now complexified by Andrè Green, allows for a metapsychological approach to alexithymia insofar as it relates to Marty's operative thinking. Thus does Green’s conceptualization of the mother’s negative hallucination, of negative introjection, of a psychically ‘dead (and insecure) mother’, now provide us with the opportunity to describe, in metapsychological terms, the genesis of this particular mode of psychical functioning. Given the mother’s negative hallucination produces a host structure as a background to negativity that will fit future object representations, we will assume that in the case of … future operational or alexithymic …?, this negative hallucination will pathologically and defensively involve the endo‐psychic perception of affect.