An on-line program to calculate respiratory sinus arrhythmia amplitude

A variety of evidence shows that the amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)—the peak-to-peak variations in heart rate caused by respiration—is a valid and reliable index of para-sympathetic cardiac control. An on-line program to calculate RSA amplitude on a breath-by-breath basis is described. The validity of the RSA amplitude values obtained through the computer pro-gram were tested in two studies. From the first one, the correlations between RSA amplitude and a set of cardiorespiratory variables, under both rest and auditory stimulation conditions, are reported. In the second study, the effect of atropine administration on the RSA amplitude, under both rest and mental load conditions, was examined. The results of both studies are con-gruent with predictions and suggest the usefulness of the software.     

A program to assess baroreceptor cardiac reflex function

This paper describes a computer program for the noninvasive evaluation in the time domain of the part of the baroreceptor reflex that relates blood pressure to interbeat interval from spontaneous hemodynamic patterns in which the reflex is operating. The program obtains the sensitivity of the baroreceptor reflex (slope of the regression line between the interbeat interval and systolic blood pressure in msec/mmHg) and an index of the baroreceptor power to regulate cardiac activity. These statistics are obtained differentially both when the systolic blood pressure is increasing and when it is decreasing. The results obtained by using this software during a mental load task were compared with those obtained through spectral analysis.     

Conditioned tilt naming: A modified absolute judgment method is used to measure the oblique effect

Two naive human observers were conditioned to report on the slant of a 3.8-cpd sinusoidal grating viewed monocularly with a light-adapted eye and presented at various orientations extending from ?45 to +135 deg. The procedures used yielded a baseline measure of performance and measures obtained during conditioning, extinction, and reconditioning of the tilt-naming response. Both subjects learned rapidly, achieving a level of performance that permits efficient measurement of meridional differences in perceived orientation Ithe oblique effect) at a large number of angles.     

Examining Temporal Cognition in Preschoolers With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Insights From Parent–Child Interactions

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Increasing evidence supports the existence of time-related impairments in school-aged children and adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),...     

Employee Happiness: Why We Should Care

Albert Schweitzer once stated that “success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success.” Despite this widespread belief, employee happiness is often perceived by organizations as an insubstantial topic, irrelevant to bottom-line outcomes. Equally as problematic, past investigations have primarily utilized other positive emotion variables as a proxy for happiness, thus convoluting the relationships between happiness and work outcomes. As such, taking a scientist-practitioner approach, the present study sought to address the need to: (a) directly measure employees’ happiness, (b) link employee happiness to outcomes of organizational interest, and (c) assess the impact that organizational psychosocial factors have in decreasing employee happiness levels. Therefore, by measuring employee happiness, job demands, and organizational outcomes through a two-wave full panel design, the present study provided evidence for employee happiness’s ability to significantly mediate the relationship between job demands and organizational outcomes. Explicitly, a high level of job demands decreased employee happiness, which subsequently decreased employees’ organizational commitment, task performance, and contextual performance, while increasing turnover intentions and counterproductive work behaviors. These results carry significant theoretical and practical implications. Future QOL (Quality of Life) and organizational research would benefit from building on the present findings and establishing a nomological net of employee happiness. Additionally, practitioners have the opportunity to utilize this evidence to demonstrate the impact that employee happiness has on organizationally-relevant outcomes and the role that organizations can have in fostering employee happiness.

     

Infants of “depressed” mothers interact better with their nondepressed fathers

To determine whether infants of “depressed” mothers interact better with their nondepressed fathers, twenty-six 3- to 6-month-old infants were videotaped during face-to-face interactions with their parents. The “depressed” mother group consisted of twelve 3- to 6-month-old infants and their “depressed” mothers and nondepressed fathers. The control group was composed of 14 nondepressed mothers and nondepressed fathers and their 3- to 6-month-old infants. In the “depressed” mother group, the nondepressed fathers received better interaction ratings than the “depressed” mothers. In turn, the infants received better interaction ratings when they interacted with their nondepressed fathers than with their “depressed” mothers. In contrast, nondepressed fathers and mothers and their infants in the control group did not differ on any of their interaction ratings. These findings suggest that infants' difficult interaction behaviors noted during interactions with their “depressed” mothers may not extend to their nondepressed fathers. The data are discussed with respect to the notion that nondepressed fathers may “buffer” the effects of maternal depression on infant interaction behavior.     

Iterated Belief Revision and Conditional Logic

In this paper we propose a conditional logic called IBC to represent iterated belief revision systems. We propose a set of postulates for iterated revision which are a small variant of Darwiche and Pearl's ones. The conditional logic IBC has a standard semantics in terms of selection function models and provides a natural representation of epistemic states. We establish a correspondence between iterated belief revision systems and IBC-models. Our representation theorem does not entail Gärdenfors' Triviality Result.     

A comparative analysis of global and local processing of hierarchical visual stimuli in young children (Homo sapiens) and monkeys (Cebus apella)

Results obtained with preschool children (Homo sapiens) were compared with results previously obtained from capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) in matching-to-sample tasks featuring hierarchical visual stimuli. In Experiment 1, monkeys, in contrast with children, showed an advantage in matching the stimuli on the basis of their local features. These results were replicated in a 2nd experiment in which control trials enabled the authors to rule out that children used spurious cues to solve the matching task. In a 3rd experiment featuring conditions in which the density of the stimuli was manipulated, monkeys' accuracy in the processing of the global shape of the stimuli was negatively affected by the separation of the local elements, whereas children's performance was robust across testing conditions. Children's response latencies revealed a global precedence in the 2nd and 3rd experiments. These results show differences in the processing of hierarchical stimuli by humans and monkeys that emerge early during childhood.     

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.     

Apraxia is not associated to a disproportionate naming impairment for manipulable objects

The relevance of gesture knowledge for the semantic representation of manipulable objects was investigated in a series of 15 patients with a focal left-hemisphere lesion. The patients were classified according to the presence/absence of ideomotor and ideational apraxia. We investigated picture naming and word-picture matching (pointing to a picture on verbal command) with stimuli including items from three categories: manipulable objects, non-manipulable objects, and animals. The analysis was performed at group level and at single-patient level. Nine patients were affected by ideational apraxia and nine by ideomotor apraxia: two cases presented ideomotor but not ideational apraxia, and two cases presented the opposite dissociation. Patients affected by ideational apraxia were more severely impaired in all tasks, but did not show a disproportionate impairment with the category of manipulable objects in contrast to the other categories. The presence of ideomotor apraxia did not cause a greater impairment in any task or category. Finally, we observed a patient with ideational apraxia who performed flawlessly in naming and word-picture matching for all the stimuli, including manipulable objects. In conclusion, we did not find a relationship between ideational apraxia and a disproportionate impairment of the semantic knowledge of manipulable objects.