Effects of male postpartum depression on father–infant interaction: The mediating role of face processing

It is estimated that postpartum depression affects up to 25% of men. Despite such high prevalence, the majority of studies on postpartum depression are focused on mothers, and the role of paternal depression and its effects on infant development have been overlooked by researchers and clinicians. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating the effect of paternal postpartum depression on father–infant interactions. In addition, we examined whether differences in face recognition mediated the effects of paternal postpartum depression on father–infant interactions. A total of 61 father–infant dyads (17 postpartum depression, 44 controls) took part in the study. Results revealed that compared to controls, fathers with postpartum depression had a worse pattern of interaction with their infants on measures of responsiveness, mood, and sensitivity; they also had greater difficulty in recognizing happy adult faces, but greater facility in recognizing sad adult faces. Depressed fathers attributed greater intensities to sad adult and infant faces. The tendency to attribute greater intensity to sad adult faces was confirmed as a partial mediator of the effect of paternal postpartum depression on measures of father responsiveness and as a full mediator of the effects of paternal depression on father sensitivity. Clinical implications and suggestions for further studies are discussed.     

Some Weakened Gödelian Ontological Systems

We describe a KB Gödelian ontological system, and some other weak systems, in a fully formal way using theory of types and natural deduction, and present a completeness proof in its main and specific parts. We technically and philosophically analyze and comment on the systems (mainly with respect to the relativism of values) and include a sketch of some connected aspects of Gödel's relation to Kant.     

汉字识别中形音义激活时间进程的研究（Ⅱ）

两个实验分别采用基于语义的和基于语音的启动范畴判断作业,在不同的SOA条件下,考察低频汉字形、音、义信息激活的相对时间进程。实验结果表明,低频汉字字形的激活在先,字音和字义的激活同时进行。低频汉字形、音、义激活的这种顺序不受基于语义还是基于语音的实验任务的影响,但实验任务影响了低频汉字字音、字义激活出现时间的早晚。     

Differential effectiveness of explicit verbal feedback on children's communication skills

In order to specify by which combination of content and form dimensions the explicit verbal feedback comes to be most effective in enhancing communication skills, a training experiment was designed where both dimensions were factorially manipulated. Forty children (mean age, 5–10) were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: Interrogative Cognitive feedback, Declarative Cognitive feedback, Interrogative Perceptual feedback, and Declarative Perceptual feedback. The Cognitive type of feedback specified the successive cognitive steps underlying the comparison activity whereas the Perceptual type of feedback stressed only the necessity of describing perceptual differences when communicating. These two contents of feedback were either provided by a set of standardized questions or of declarative statements, after each trial of a speaking training task. Subjects were given a pretest, and immediate and delayed posttests comprised of a speaking task and a listening generalization task. A 2 (Contents) × 2 (Forms) × 2 (Tasks) × 2 (Post-tests) analysis of variance showed that all subjects performed significantly better on the speaking task than on the listening generalization task and that subjects in the Interrogative Cognitive condition performed better than subjects in the three other conditions, on both post-test tasks. Results emphasize the mutual facilitating effects of the Interrogative Form and the Cognitive Content of explicit feedback and are discussed in terms of the generalization and stability of the induced learning.     

Language in right-handers with right-hemisphere lesions: A preliminary study including anatomical, genetic, and social factors

A comprehensive test battery was devised to study the effects of right hemisphere lesions on the speech and language of “nonaphasic” dextrals. Data were thus obtained for 62 subjects, 20 of them neurologically healthy and 42 with a focal right hemisphere lesion resulting from a cerebro-vascular accident. A preliminary global analysis of these data is reported. Anomalies were observed in 33 brain-damaged subjects. Although discreet in all cases, these anomalies were shown to have various degrees of severity. Given the population submitted to this study, the subject most likely to show such anomalies was defined, genetically, as a right-handed adult with a family history of ambidextrality or left-handedness and, socially, as one with a relatively limited education. The implications of these findings are discussed together with the problem of the anatomo-clinical correlations of language disorders resulting from right hemisphere lesions in “nonaphasic” dextrals.     

Increased susceptibility of aphasics to a distractor task in the recall of verbal commands

The ability of 15 control, 15 nonaphasic brain-damaged, and 15 aphasic patients to carry out three-word commands on the Token Test was studied under three conditions: no delay, 20-sec unfilled delay, and 20-sec delay filled with a counting task. Only aphasics with mild to moderate comprehension deficit participated in the experiment and their scores in the no-delay condition were not inferior to those of the other two groups. The 20-sec unfilled delay did not bring about a decrement of the performance in any group, while all of them were impaired with 20-sec filled delay. The rate of forgetting was, however, significantly greater in aphasics than in patients without language disorders, even when the scores of the no-delay condition were introduced as covariates in the analysis of the filled-delay condition. The same result was obtained when, in a second experiment, 4 sec elapsed between the end of the command and the beginning of the counting activity. The increased susceptibility of aphasics to the disruptive effect of the distractor task is viewed as following a failure in organizing verbal information, a deficit that may contribute to lowering their comprehension level.     

Sequences of phonemic approximations in aphasia

The trends of sequences of phonemic approximations to a single target were studied in three types of aphasia (Broca's, conduction, and Wernicke's), as gathered in five tasks (spontaneous speech, repetition of meaningful words, repetition of nonsense words, reading aloud, and automatized sequences). A phonemic error ratio was defined in order to quantify the distance between each approximation of a given sequence and its target. The results of a computer analysis based on this ratio were analyzed according to three parameters. A study of three types of patients revealed that conduction aphasics exhibited the most regular trend toward the target in sequences of phonemic approximations; the analysis of the various tasks indicated that sequences produced in repetition by conduction aphasics form an exception to the regularity of this trend, and an examination of the various lengths of sequences indicated that longer sequences showed a less decisive trend toward the target than shorter sequences. The discussion bears on some theoretical aspects of the phonological production mechanism and its control: the initial strength and permanence of the internal representation of the target emerge as important factors required for the good functioning of this mechanism.     

Naming and Diagonalization, from Cantor to Godel to Kleene

We trace self-reference phenomena to the possibility of namingfunctions by names that belong to the domain over which thefunctions are defined. A naming system is a structure of theform (D, type( ),{ }), where D is a non-empty set; for everya D, which is a name of a k-ary function, {a}: D^k D is thefunction named by a, and type(a) is the type of a, which tellsus if a is a name and, if it is, the arity of the named function.Under quite general conditions we get a fixed point theorem,whose special cases include the fixed point theorem underlyingGödel's proof, Kleene's recursion theorem and many othertheorems of this nature, including the solution to simultaneousfixed point equations. Partial functions are accommodated byincluding "undefined" values; we investigate different systemsarising out of different ways of dealing with them. Many-sortednaming systems are suggested as a natural approach to generalcomputatability with many data types over arbitrary structures.The first part of the paper is a historical reconstruction ofthe way Gödel probably derived his proof from Cantor'sdiagonalization, through the semantic version of Richard. Theincompleteness proof–including the fixed point construction–resultfrom a natural line of thought, thereby dispelling the appearanceof a "magic trick". The analysis goes on to show how Kleene'srecursion theorem is obtained along the same lines.     

Undecidability without Arithmetization

In the present paper the well-known Gödels – Churchs argument concerning the undecidability of logic (of the first order functional calculus) is exhibited in a way which seems to be philosophically interestingfi The natural numbers are not used. (Neither Chinese Theorem nor other specifically mathematical tricks are applied.) Only elementary logic and very simple set-theoretical constructions are put into the proof. Instead of the arithmetization I use the theory of concatenation (formalized by Alfred Tarski). This theory proves to be an appropriate tool. The decidability is defined directly as the property of graphical discernibility of formulas.