Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments were performed to answer this question. Experiment 1 investigated the network of moral aesthetic judgments and facial aesthetic judgments. Participants performed aesthetic judgments and gender judgments on both faces and scenes containing moral acts. The conjunction analysis of the contrasts ‘facial aesthetic judgment > facial gender judgment’ and ‘scene moral aesthetic judgment > scene gender judgment’ identified the common involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), inferior temporal gyrus and medial superior frontal gyrus, suggesting that both types of aesthetic judgments are based on the orchestration of perceptual, emotional and cognitive components. Experiment 2 examined the network of facial beauty and moral beauty during implicit perception. Participants performed a non-aesthetic judgment task on both faces (beautiful vs common) and scenes (containing morally beautiful vs neutral information). We observed that facial beauty (beautiful faces > common faces) involved both the cortical reward region OFC and the subcortical reward region putamen, whereas moral beauty (moral beauty scenes > moral neutral scenes) only involved the OFC. Moreover, compared with facial beauty, moral beauty spanned a larger-scale cortical network, indicating more advanced and complex cerebral representations characterizing moral beauty.     

Why are women from Venus and men from Mars when they abuse cocaine?

Both preclinical and clinical studies have shown sexually dimorphic patterns in behavioral responses to cocaine in all phases of the cocaine addiction process (induction, maintenance, and relapse). Thus, a clear picture is emerging which suggests that the biological basis of sex-specific differences in cocaine addiction resides in the disparate regulation of the CNS by male and female gonadal hormones. This review discusses the role that gonadal hormones play in these sexually dimorphic patterns of behavioral responses to cocaine.     

What prevents old people living alone from feeling lonely? Findings from the KORA-Age-study

Objectives: Living alone in later life is an important risk factor of loneliness for elderly people unless they have resources to compensate for that. The aim of this investigation was to identify these resources.

Method: Data were drawn from the population-based KORA-Age-study (KOoperativen Gesundheitsforschung in der Region Augsburg) conducted in the Region of Augsburg, Germany in 2008/2009 with 1079 elderly men and women (64–94 years). Loneliness was measured by the short version of the UCLA-Loneliness-Scale in a face-to-face interview. Multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify associations between loneliness and potential protecting resources.

Results: A total of 346 (32%) subjects reported to be living alone, among them 70% (n = 241) expressed no feelings of loneliness. Participants with a stable social network had a fourfold higher chance (OR 4.08, 95% CI 1.20–13.88, p = 0.025) and with the absence of depression a threefold higher chance (OR 3.04, 95% CI 1.59–5.78, p-value < 0.001) of not feeling lonely. Physical or mental resources were not correlated with lower levels of loneliness.

Conclusion: Absence of depression and a functioning social network are the most important protecting resources against loneliness for elderly people living alone, while income, level of education and age-related limitations have no impact. These findings should be considered when supporting the elderly in successful aging.     

Excerpts from “The Organism”

In this article, I contend that John Macmurray's philosophy of community provides a perspective that can add to our understanding of parent–infant interactions, omnipotence, transference, and psychoanalytic goals. In brief, Macmurray defines community as mutual/personal forms of associations wherein persons recognize and treat each other as persons—unique, responsive, agentic, centers of subjectivity. From a developmental view, for Macmurray, it is the parent's intentional recognition and omnipotent construction of the baby as a person that shape and govern the infant's impulse to communicate. Initially, the infant's impulse to communicate involves omnipotent impersonal recognition of objects—whereby the objects are recognized primarily in terms of utility, benefit, and function. The parent's personalization enables the child, in time, to subordinate impersonal recognition to personal recognition. Transference, from this standpoint, is understood as a confluence of past forms of impersonal associations and the wish for mutual/personal associations. The psychoanalytic relationship, while a contractual association, instantiates mutual/personal associations. Thus, an aim of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is community, which for Macmurray is the crucible where persons experience freedom, as well as being alive and real.     

Where do perseverations come from?

RB, a patient with probable Alzheimer's disease, makes continuous perseverations of single letters when writing (e.g. fruit-->fruuit), particularly on high frequency letters. An analysis of her errors reveals that her perseverations do not reflect letter substitutions or transpositions, nor do they suggest difficulty with geminates. No continuous perseverations were found in oral production, in graphic and simple motor tasks, and in oral spelling. RB's data do not support an attention deficit as the basis of her continuous perseverations. It is proposed that a deficit at the level of abstract letter representations is the source of RB's perseverations. The implications of this conclusion for accounts of perseveration and of spelling models are discussed.     

Where do aphasic phonological errors come from? Evidence from phoneme movement errors in picture naming

This paper analyses the incidence and distribution of phonemic misordering errors (or ''contextual'' errors) in the phonologically related nonword responses of aphasic individuals. A diverse group of 22 individuals was examined in two separate picture naming studies. Contextual error rates were found to be above chance for only two of the participants. These participants had one unique feature: both were more accurate at word endings than word beginnings. Both also had a diagnosis of conduction aphasia and produced errors that were phonologically close to their targets, and at least one showed strong word length effects; however, none of these features was unique to them. The ''contextual'' individuals were not distinguishable from the other participants on the basis of: their production of formal paraphasias; their relative performance on word naming and repetition; or their performance on words relative to nonwords. The findings from this study are inconsistent with the notion that contextual errors result from a malfunction involving a dedicated postlexical phoneme sequencing stage. An alternative, single-stage account of phonological encoding is offered, in which differences in contextual error rates are attributed to individual variation in word production strategies.     

Dissociation of β-amyloid from lipoprotein in cerebrospinal fluid from Alzheimer's disease accelerates β-amyloid-42 assembly

Monoclonal 2C3 specific to β-amyloid (Aβ) oligomers (AβOs) enabled us to test our hypothesis that the alteration of lipoprotein-Aβ interaction in the central nervous system (CNS) initiates and/or accelerates the cascade favoring Aβ assembly. Immunoprecipitation of frontal cortex employing 2C3 unequivocally detected soluble 4-, 8-, and 12-mers in Alzheimer's disease (AD) brains. Immunoblot analysis of the entorhinal cortex employing 2C3 revealed that the accumulation of soluble 12-mers precedes the appearance of neuronal loss or cognitive impairment and is enhanced as the Braak neurofibrially tangle (NFT) stages progress. The dissociation of soluble Aβ from lipoprotein particles occurs in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and the presence of lipoprotein-free oligomeric 2C3 conformers (4- to 35-mers) was evident, which mimic CNS environments. Such CNS environments may strongly affect conformation of soluble Aβ peptides, resulting in the conversion of soluble Aβ(42) monomers into soluble Aβ(42) assembly. The findings suggest that functionally declined lipoproteins may accelerate the generation of metabolic conditions leading to higher levels of soluble Aβ(42) assembly in the CNS.     

Do autism spectrum disorders differ from each other and from non-spectrum disorders on emotion recognition tests?

 We tested whether dimensional measures of empathic ability, theory of mind, and intelligence would differentiate autism spectrum disorders from each other and from non-spectrum disorders. Tests were administered to children with a diagnosis of Autistic Disorder (AutD; n = 20), Asperger's Disorder (AspD; n = 28), Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (Inattentive Type) (ADHD; n = 35), Mental Retardation (Mild) (MR; n = 34), Anxiety Disorder (AnxD; n = 14), or No Psychological Disorder (NPD; n = 36). Results showed that empathic ability discriminated among groups on the autism spectrum (AutD < AspD < NPD). Because empathic ability is not independent of intelligence (AutD < AspD < NPD on intelligence; MR < ADHD < NPD on empathic ability), both dimensions are necessary to discriminate autism spectrum from non-spectrum disorders. When intelligence is covaried, empathic ability discriminated AutD, but not AspD, from other disorders (AutD < MR < ADHD <  NPD = AnxD = AspD). Accepted: 11 October 2000     

Where do semantic errors come from?

We report the performance of two brain-damaged subjects (RGB and HW) whose frequent errors in spoken production are nearly always semantically related to the target word. Both subjects show similar, high rates of these "semantic" errors in oral naming and oral reading; yet neither subject makes semantic errors in comparable written tasks. Further, results of a variety of lexical tasks with the same stimuli demonstrate unimpaired comprehension of printed or spoken words, including those that are orally produced as semantic errors. These patterns of performance are interpreted as resulting from damage to the phonological output lexicon. The postulated deficit is contrasted to the hypothesis of impairment to the lexical-semantic component, required to explain performance by brain-damaged subjects described elsewhere who make seemingly identical types of oral production errors to those of RGB and HW, but, in addition, make comparable errors in writing and comprehension tasks.     

Involuntary admission from the patients’ perspective

Background  

Involuntary admission legislation and rates differ greatly throughout the European Union Member States. In Ireland, the Mental Health Act 2001 has introduced significant changes in the care for patients admitted involuntarily, including mental health tribunals that review the involuntary admission orders.