The question is: what is medicine supposed to be all about?

The Hippocratic Oath has survived, with overriding power, the test of time. Written somewhere between 600 B.C. and 100 A.D., it addresses the intrinsic nature of medicine. Even those of us who know little of it or reject parts of it acknowledge it to be a symbol of the values of medicine. Such "canonization" is unlikely to be arbitrary; it is more likely that the oath strikes some key chord of truth. I suggest that it is its drive to the heart of medicine that makes the Hippocratic Oath inspiring today.     

Politics and school psychology: A case study

School psychology is one of several professions in education which offer services beyond the regular school curriculum and program. Psychologists who work in school systems have long recognized the need to cooperate with these other professionals in school settings. In addition, they have been aware of the pressures from parents, teachers, and community groups which can impinge upon their jobs. However, limited availability of funding, federally mandated services, and legislation regarding certification are rapidly placing local, state, and national politics into prominance for school psychologists. An example is provided using the Commonwealth of Kentucky.     

Demand for Space: Elderly Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People,Healthcare, and Theological Ethics

Journal of Religion and Health - Visibility for transgender and gender nonconforming people and the elderly is growing; however, thus far the overlap of the two groups has rarely been considered....     

Correction to: The development of dynamic perceptual simulations during sentence comprehension

Cognitive Processing - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-021-01027-4     

A video game-based investigation of power stress moderators in children

Motivation and Emotion - In this paper, we examine the relationship between the implicit power motive (nPow) and power stress in primary school children under the additional consideration of...     

Somebody hit the button! The implicit power motive and the frequency of verbal persuasion behavior in children

Motivation and Emotion - We examined the relationship between the implicit power motive (nPow) and the frequency of verbal persuasion behavior (VPB) in dyads of children, while they negotiated a...     

Feature binding contributions to effect monitoring

Monitoring the perceptual effects of body movements is supposed to be a capacity-limited process that can interfere with processing of a concurrent task. Here we studied the contribution of feature binding to such effect monitoring interference. In three experiments, we varied the possibility of feature overlap between responses and effects in a primary task and responses in a secondary task. We show that responses in a secondary task are delayed when they partially, rather than completely, alternate or repeat features of responses/effects of a primary task. Yet, these partial feature repetition/alternation costs are small, and they occur on top of other factors that lengthen the critical effect monitoring process, such as the spatial compatibility of responses and effects in the primary task. The results thus show that feature binding contributes to, but cannot fully account for, delays in a secondary task caused by monitoring effects of a primary task.

     

EMG activity in selected target muscles during imagery rising on tiptoes in healthy adults and poststroke hemiparetic patients

The authors sought to gain further knowledge about activation of target muscles during imagery engagement in a motor task. Six hemiparetic patients and 9 healthy participants performed 3 real rises on tiptoes and then, after pausing, 3 imagery rises on tiptoes. Metronome beats guided the rate of rises and descents. Electromyographic (EMG) activity from the medial gastrocnemius and the rectus femoris muscles were monitored bilaterally throughout the performance of both tasks. In 3 healthy participants and 3 individuals with hemiparesis, EMG activity was related to the imagery task in at least 1 of the target muscles. Conversely, in the other participants, motor imagery practice was not accompanied by task-related EMG activity in the monitored muscles. In all cases, the increment in activation level during motor imagery practice was very low in comparison with that of real performance. The findings were not unequivocal; therefore, EMG activity may sometimes, but not always, be recorded during motor imagery practice both in healthy individuals and in poststroke hemiparetic participants. Further research is needed to align motor imagery practice with the objectives of motor rehabilitation.     

Synaptic Reliability Correlates with Reduced Susceptibility to Synaptic Potentiation by Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor

Recent studies have implicated brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in use-dependent modification of hippocampal synapses. BDNF can rapidly potentiate synaptic transmission at glutamatergic synapses by enhancing transmitter release. Using simultaneous perforated patch recording from pairs and triplets of glutamatergic hippocampal neurons, we have examined how the initial state of the glutamatergic synapse determines its susceptibility to synaptic modification by BDNF. We found that the degree of synaptic potentiation by BDNF depends on the initial reliability and strength of the synapse: Relatively weak connections were strongly potentiated, whereas the effect was markedly reduced at stronger synapses. The degree of BDNF-induced potentiation strongly correlated with the initial coefficient of variation (CV) of the amplitude of excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs) and inversely correlated with the initial paired–pulse facilitation, suggesting that synapses with lower release probability (P_r) are more susceptible to the action of BDNF. To determine whether saturation of P_r could have masked the potentiation effect of BDNF in the stronger synapses, we lowered the initial P_r either by reducing the extracellular Ca²⁺ concentration ([Ca²⁺]_o) or by bath application of adenosine. Synapses that were initially strong remained unaffected by BDNF under these conditions of reduced P_r. Thus, the lack of BDNF effect on synaptic efficacy cannot simply be accounted for by saturation of P_r, but rather may be due to intrinsic changes associated with synaptic maturation that might covary with P_r. Finally, the dependence on initial synaptic strength was also found for divergent outputs of the same presynaptic neuron, suggesting that synaptic terminals with different degrees of responsiveness to BDNF can coexist within in the same neuron.