Impaired pitch production and preserved rhythm production in a right brain-damaged patient with amusia

Pre- and postmorbid singing of a patient with amusia due to a right-hemispheric infarction was analyzed acoustically. This particular patient had a premorbid tape recording of her own singing without accompaniment. Appropriateness of pitch interval and rhythm was evaluated based on ratios of pitch and duration between neighboring notes. The results showed that melodic contours and rhythm were preserved but individual pitch intervals were conspicuously distorted. Our results support a hypothesis that pitch and rhythm are subserved by independent neural subsystems. We concluded that action-related acoustic information for controlling pitch intervals is stored in the right hemisphere.     

Subjectivity and environmental influence in relation to sense of authenticity

The authors responded to criticisms raised recently by Giannini (2010) of the authors' 2009 study in which cross-age differences were examined in the sense of authenticity. Comments address three aspects of the criticism, interpretation of the results, and misunderstanding of the method used as well as the concepts. In particular, future research likely needs to focus on the subjective aspects of sense of authenticity.     

Bodily perspective taking goes social: the role of personal,interpersonal, and intercultural factors

Mentally placing the self in the physical position of another person might engage social perspective taking because participants have to match their own position with that of another. We investigated the influence of personal (sex), interpersonal (siblings, parental marital status), and cultural (individualistic, collectivistic) factors on individuals' abilities to mentally take the position of front‐facing and back‐facing figures in an online study (369 participants). Replicating findings from laboratory studies responses were slower for front‐facing than back‐facing figures. Having siblings, parents' marital status, and cultural background influenced task performance in theoretically predictable ways. The present perspective‐taking task is a promising experimental paradigm to assess social perspective taking and one that is free from the response biases inherent in self‐report.     

Culture,Emotion, and Well-being: Good Feelings in Japan and the United States

We tested the hypothesis that “good feelings”—the central element of subjective well-being—are associated with interdependence and interpersonal engagement of the self in Japan, but with independence and interpersonal disengagement of the self in the United States. Japanese and American college students (total N = 913) reported how frequently they experienced various emotional states in daily life. In support of the hypothesis, the reported frequency of general positive emotions (e.g. calm, elated) was most closely associated with the reported frequency of interpersonally engaged positive emotions (e.g. friendly feelings) in Japan, but with the reported frequency of interpersonally disengaged positive emotions (e.g. pride) in the United States. Further, for Americans the reported frequency of experience was considerably higher for positive emotions than for negative emotions, but for Japanese it was higher for engaged emotions than for disengaged emotions. Implications for cultural constructions of emotion in general and subjective well-being in particular are discussed.     

Repetition priming in an auditory lexical decision task: Effects of lexical status

The effect of lexical status on the time course of repetition priming was examined in an auditory lexical decision task. Words and nonwords were repeated at lags of 0, 1, 4, and 8 items (Experiment 1A) and 0, 2, 4, and 8 items (Experiment 1B). The pattern of repetition effects differed for words and nonwords in that repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 was significantly greater than for words. The magnitude of this effect decreased when one or more items intervened. A second experiment, replicating Experiment 1A with visual presentation, clarified that the greater magnitude of repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 is unique to the auditory modality. This finding suggests that in the course of forming a stable perceptual representation, the details of the acoustic/phonological information of an auditory stimulus are more readily available for nonwords than for words. The capacity to carry this phonological information is limited, however, and can only be maintained until another stimulus is encountered.     

Japanese normative set of 359 pictures

This study provides Japanese normative measures for 359 line drawings, including 260 pictures (44 redrawn) taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). The pictures have been standardized on voice key naming times, name agreement, age of acquisition, and familiarity. The data were compared with American, Spanish, French, and Icelandic samples reported in previous studies. In general, the correlations between variables in the present study and those in the other studies were relatively high, except for name agreement. Naming times were predicted in multiple regression analyses by name agreement. The full set of the norms and the new pictures may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

A linear conservative extension of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory

In this paper, we develop the system LZF of set theory with the unrestricted comprehension in full linear logic and show that LZF is a conservative extension of ZF^– i.e., the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of regularity. We formulate LZF as a sequent calculus with abstraction terms and prove the partial cut-elimination theorem for it. The cut-elimination result ensures the subterm property for those formulas which contain only terms corresponding to sets in ZF^–. This implies that LZF is a conservative extension of ZF^– and therefore the former is consistent relative to the latter. Hiroakira Ono