Hercules and Cancer: A Metaphorical Attempt to Beat Mortality

Journal of Religion and Health - Art offers a visual document of ancestral suffering, as such mythological images in the arts can provide cathartic relief in our patients with existential anxiety....     

Gesture and metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence of cross-modal coordination by audiovisual stimulation

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaphorical expressions and producing bodily gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the metaphorical meaning of such expressions. This modality of stimuli presentation allows a more ecological approach to meaning integration. When ERPs were calculated using gesture stroke as time-lock event, gesture incongruity with metaphorical expression modulated the amplitude of the N400 and of the late positive complex (LPC). This suggests that gestural and speech information are combined online to make sense of the interlocutor’s linguistic production in an early stage of metaphor comprehension. Our data favor the idea that meaning construction is globally integrative and highly context-sensitive.     

AULA virtual reality test as an attention measure: Convergent validity with Conners’ Continuous Performance Test

The majority of neuropsychological tests used to evaluate attention processes in children lack ecological validity. The AULA Nesplora (AULA) is a continuous performance test, developed in a virtual setting, very similar to a school classroom. The aim of the present study is to analyze the convergent validity between the AULA and the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) of Conners. The AULA and CPT were administered correlatively to 57 children, aged 6–16 years (26.3% female) with average cognitive ability (IQ mean = 100.56, SD = 10.38) who had a diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) according to DSM-IV-TR criteria. Spearman correlations analyses were conducted among the different variables. Significant correlations were observed between both tests in all the analyzed variables (omissions, commissions, reaction time, and variability of reaction time), including for those measures of the AULA based on different sensorial modalities, presentation of distractors, and task paradigms. Hence, convergent validity between both tests was confirmed. Moreover, the AULA showed differences by gender and correlation to Perceptual Reasoning and Working Memory indexes of the WISC-IV, supporting the relevance of IQ measures in the understanding of cognitive performance in ADHD. In addition, the AULA (but not Conners’ CPT) was able to differentiate between ADHD children with and without pharmacological treatment for a wide range of measures related to inattention, impulsivity, processing speed, motor activity, and quality of attention focus. Additional measures and advantages of the AULA versus Conners’ CPT are discussed.     

Evidence for an illusion of causality when using the Implicit Association Test to measure learning

Our ability to detect causal relations and patterns of covariation is easily biased by a number of well-known factors. For example, people tend to overestimate the strength of the relation between a cue and an outcome if the outcome tends to occur very frequently. During the last years, several accounts have attempted to explain the outcome-density bias. On the one hand, dual-process performance accounts propose that biases are not due to the way associations are encoded, but to the higher-order cognitive processes involved in the retrieval and use of this information. In other words, the outcome-density bias is seen as a performance effect, not a learning effect. From this point of view, it is predicted that the outcome-density bias should be absent in any testing procedure that reduces the motivation or opportunity to engage in higher-order cognitive processes. Contrary to this prediction, but consistent with the most common single-process learning accounts, our results show that the outcome-density effect can be detected when the Implicit Association Test is used to measure the strength of cue–outcome associations.     

Interparty Attitudes in Chile: Coalitions as Superordinate Social Identities

This paper reports a survey (N  =  1,465) conducted in Chile that was conceived to understand the role of coalition identification as an important sociopsychological mechanism for promoting positive affects toward own-coalition party members in a multiparty system, above and beyond interparty political differences. Participants judged their own political party, parties within coalitions (fellow coalition members and opposing parties), and political coalitions as a whole on affective dimensions (trust, liking, and admiration). The results provide substantial support for the five hypotheses addressed in the study. Overall, perceived interparty distance and political identity threat had a negative impact on affect toward coalition party members. Above and beyond these effects, identification with the coalition positively predicted affect toward allies. Ingroup party affect was positively correlated with affect toward own-coalition party members and own coalition as a whole, but was not negatively associated with affect toward opposing-coalition parties. Moreover, the relationship between own-party affect and affect toward own-coalition party members was mediated by affect toward own coalition. Overall, evidence for the benefits of promoting coalition identification in a multiparty system is provided and discussed alongside the limitations and practical implications derived from the study.     

Electrophysiological Evidence of Different Interpretative Strategies in Irony Comprehension

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.