bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The contribution of depression and denial towards understanding the unawareness of symptoms in schizophrenic out‐patients
Authors: Dixon Mike , King Suzanne , Steiger Howard 
Published: July 2011

Objectives. Unawareness of schizophrenic symptoms was postulated to be partially attributable to patients denying symptoms in order to avoid depression.Method. The 24‐item version of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) was administered to 41 schizophrenic patients (chart diagnoses were validated by a DSM‐III‐R checklist). The first 14 of these items were then used to gather information about patients' symptomatology from 5 5 relatives of patients. Unawareness of symptoms was calculated by subtracting patients' total for these 14 items from parents' totals. Two measures of depression were obtained. Subjective depression was the score on the depression item based on patients responses to interview questions, objective depression was the score based on interviews with relatives about their ill family member. Family functioning was also assessed by administering patients' relatives the Camberwell Family Interview and the FACES III.Results. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that both subjective and objective measures of depression were significantly related to unawareness; subjective depression was negatively related, and objective depression was positively related. The employed measures of family functioning were unrelated to unawareness of symptomatology.Conclusion. This opposing pattern of subjective and objective depression was interpreted as evidence of the self‐deception which characterizes all defence mechanisms including denial.
Telling it as it isn't: Children's understanding of figurative language
Authors: Demorest Amy , Silberstein Lisa , Gardner Howard , Winner Ellen 
Published: July 2011

The comprehension of five common forms of figurative language, differing both in degree of discrepancy from the truth and in communicative purpose, was examined in six‐, eight‐, and 11‐year‐olds. Children heard a series of brief stories each ending with one of five types of figurative remark (sarcasm, metaphor, understatement, hyperbole, irony) or a literal remark. A straight‐explication task assessed understanding of discrepancy and communicative purpose. A humour‐explication task assessed whether understanding is facilitated by considering the utterance as funny. A memory task assessed recall errors as clues to comprehension.Six‐year‐olds usually recognized neither the discrepancy of the utterances nor the speaker's purpose. Eight‐year‐olds recognized the utterances' discrepancy from the truth. However, they offered few attributions of purpose, and those given were wrong as often as not. Eleven‐year‐olds recognized the discrepancy of the utterances and were also able to identify the communicative purpose. Results of humour‐explication yielded a similar pattern, but interpretations were somewhat more advanced on this task, suggesting that a humour context facilitates comprehension of these figurative utterances.Irony was most difficult to recognize as discrepant, followed in order by hyperbole, understatement, metaphor and sarcasm. With regard to recognizing communicative purpose, irony was least well understood, followed in order by metaphor, understatement, hyperbole and sarcasm. Recall errors in the memory condition supported the explication findings. Results are discussed in terms of the two tasks involved in understanding figurative language: the logical task of recognizing the statement as discrepant from the facts; and the social‐cognitive task of identifying the speaker's communicative purpose.
Visual laterality in two reading‐related tasks
Authors: Campbell Ruth , Watson David 
Published: July 2011

Nineteen English nine‐year‐olds from a single mixed‐ability school class were given two reading‐related tasks: a task which required spelling nonsense words to dictation (phonic spelling) and a written sentence classification task. Visual laterality (unilateral letter naming) was also tested.Significant intercorrelations emerged between performance on the phonic spelling task, susceptibility to homophones in the reading task and RVF letter naming. Reading ability also correlated with these scores. However, when reading ability was partialled out of the correlations, the significant relation between laterality and phonic spelling persisted. Performance on a (control) sentence classification task, while correlating with reading ability, failed to correlate with phonic spelling, or with susceptibility to homophones in the reading task or with RVF scores.We conclude that the mastery of reading involves a multiplicity of skills, only one of which (phonic skill) can be reliably related to cerebral lateralization: this may go some way towards resolving conflicting proposals on the relation between lateralization and reading skill.
Brain size and ‘intelligence’
Authors: Stott Denis H. 
Published: July 2011

This review was prompted by recent claims—made in the search for a biological basis to ‘intelligence’—of a relationship between the latter and brain size. Attention is drawn to the methodological deficiencies of the early studies which found such a relationship, and the carelessness and bias which have marked some of the earlier reviews. A recent—and by far the most satisfactory—study found no correlation between brain size and IQ.It is naïve to extrapolate from infrahuman to the human species since the evolved capabilities of all are ecologically conditioned and incomparable; and Homo sapiens has apparently shown no increase in brain size since its emergence as a species.Apart from its interest for present controversies over ‘intelligence’, the history of work on brain size and its review are a lesson in the devices of bias. They also point to the need to refer to original sources rather than rely on possibly biased middlepersons.
A longitudinal study of the acquisition of word knowledge: Evidence against gradual learning
Authors: Cromer Richard F. 
Published: July 2011

Earlier studies of the acquisition of adult comprehension of the structure ‘John is eager/easy to please’ have revealed three stages of acquisition. Two types of learning appear to be involved—the first being the awareness that this linguistic frame has two differing interpretations, and the second being the learning of the particular lexical items (e.g. ‘eager’ and ‘easy’) that indicate which of those abstract representations is to be recovered in order to interpret a particular instance of use. The current study examined longitudinally the processes occurring during the second type of acquisition by 48 children.Most theories of word meaning assume some kind of gradual acquisition process, whether consisting of the addition of features or of the growing awareness or differentiation of prototypical core meanings. Longitudinally, such theories imply a decreasing number of errors and a consistency of answers over time showing the acquisition of the correct subcategorizations of an increasing number of the lexical items examined. However, the results, while showing a slight but significant decrease in errors, gave evidence of great inconsistency on the various lexical items by each individual child. It would appear that a simple notion of gradual acquisition is inadequate and that some kind of reorganizational process must be hypothesized during lexical acquisition.
The role of sensory modality for the reproduction of shape by the severely retarded
Authors: Anwar Feriha 
Published: July 2011

Down's syndrome and non‐Down's syndrome subjects, matched for mental and chronological age, were compared on a drawing task. The stimulus shape had to be remembered and reproduced after either multimodal visual‐kinaesthetic stimulation or unimodal visual or kinaesthetic input only. Drawing took place either with or without visual guidance of the drawing hand. Drawing skill was assessed according to the dimensions of shape, size and orientation as well as movement control.It was found that in general the presence of visual input information was more helpful for those without than for those with Down's syndrome in shape approximation. In contrast, Down's syndrome subjects tended to make better use of kinaesthetically derived information, especially in regard to orientation and movement control.
Early social games and the acquisition of language
Authors: Camaioni Luigia , Laicardi Caterina 
Published: July 2011

The aim of this study was twofold: (a) to analyse developmental changes in the social games played by mothers and children during normal home activities; (b) to examine how mother's linguistic production during game episodes could be related to the child's pattern of language acquisition.Three mother‐child dyads were followed longitudinally for a 12‐month period starting when the children were 6 months old. Thirty‐minute observation sessions were carried out one in 20 days on average during a free‐play situation in the family environment. Videotapes were segmented into interaction episodes defined as games, and a distinction was made between conventional and non‐conventional games. Results were analysed in terms of both developmental changes and individual differences in characteristics of play behaviour. In all dyads, conventional games increased in significant linear fashion between 6 and 12 months of age and children became increasingly able to play an active role in them. The three dyads also showed consistent differences in some aspects of play behaviour as well as in mothers' style of linguistic production during game episodes and in children's rate of language acquisition. The role of early conventional games in assisting the child's transition to language is discussed.
Movement perception and identity constancy in the new‐born baby
Authors: Slater Alan , Morison Victoria , Town Carole , Rose David 
Published: July 2011

Five experiments using the visual preference method (Expt 1) and an infant‐controlled habituation procedure (Expts 2–5) are described. Their aim was to examine the salience of movement, both rotation and translation, as a stimulus for new‐borns, and to investigate under what conditions information about shape can be extracted from stationary and moving stimuli. A moving stimulus, whether rotating or translating, was found to be consistently preferred to an identical stationary stimulus (Expt 1). Following habituation to one direction of rotation, no novelty preferences were found for the other direction of rotation (Expt 2); this suggests that clockwise and anticlockwise movements may be comparable for the new‐born.The other experiments suggest that new‐borns can extract shape information from stationary and moving stimuli, and can transfer what is learned to moving and to stationary stimuli (Expts 3 and 5). This transfer occurred when (a) the spatiotemporal changes caused by stimulus rotation were the same from habituation to post‐criterion trials (Expt 3), and (b) orientation did not change (due to the use of translation movement) across conditions (Expt 5). There was no evidence that new‐borns could transfer learning from stationary to rotating stimuli or vice versa (Expt 4).This demonstrates that new‐borns can perceive a similarity between a stimulus when moving and when stationary, and suggests a degree of visual organization that is not usually attributed to the new‐born: Expt 5 in particular suggests that the perceptual potential for identity constancy is present from birth.
Change in the reading attainment of adults: A longitudinal study
Authors: Rodgers Bryan 
Published: July 2011

Little is known of the changes in reading attainment that take place after the years of compulsory education and yet this is an important aspect of intellectual development which has implications for adult literacy provision. Longitudinal studies of cognitive behaviour have demonstrated that improvements in performance can take place until late adulthood and, further, that some individuals show greater gains than others. Recent surveys of adult literacy students have indicated that certain sections of the population are particularly motivated to seek advancement in respect of their reading skills.Results from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development show a substantial improvement in reading attainment between the ages of 15 and 26, including a fall in the percentage of very poor readers. Appreciable normative change took place over this interval and this relative movement was associated with several features of individual life‐histories, including further education, employment, health and family background. These findings reinforce the contention that early adulthood is not a period of intellectual stagnation and that development during this period is influenced by many events and circumstances.
Vision‐to‐touch and touch‐to‐vision transfer of form in 5‐month‐old infants
Authors: Streri Arlette , Pêcheux Marie‐Germaine 
Published: July 2011

We investigated 5‐month‐old infants' cross‐modal transfer of form from vision to touch and from touch to vision. In the first experiment, 32 infants were familiarized with an object visually or tactually (in the hand), until a habituation criterion was reached, and then they received three tests in which the same or a different object appeared in the same or a different modality. The dependent variable was the duration of a look or of a grasp. If infants are capable of cross‐modal transfer they should (1) explore the familiar object presented in a new modality less than the novel object presented in the new modality, (2) remain habituated to the familiar object in the first modality after presentation of that object in the second modality, and (3) discriminate objects intra‐modally.Cross‐modal transfer was found from vision to touch, but not from touch to vision. In an attempt to employ a different test of touch‐to‐vision transfer, a second experiment was conducted, in which 16 infants were tactually familiarized with an object and then given a visual preference test; cross‐modal transfer from touch to vision again did not occur. Tentative explanations are presented, involving the perception of modality‐specific object properties and the development of eye‐hand coordination.
Multivariate genetic analysis of ‘environmental’ influences on infant cognitive development
Authors: Thompson Lee Anne , Fulker David W. , DeFries J. C. , Plomin Robert 
Published: July 2011

A multivariate path model of the relationship between environmental measures and measures of infant cognitive development in 183 adoptive and 165 non‐adoptive families was tested.Environment‐development relationships are not confounded by genetic similarity between parents and their offspring in adoptive families. The structure of the genetic factors that mediate ostensibly environmental influences was assessed by comparing multivariate relationships in adoptive families with those in non‐adoptive families. A maximum likelihood estimation procedure produced a highly satisfactory fit of the model to the data. The results obtained from fitting a series of simplified models to the data indicate that environmental variables measured by the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) have significant influences on Bayley Mental Development Index (MDI) scores, language development as assessed by the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development (SICD), and a factor from the Bayley Infant Behavior Record (IBR) termed task orientation. However, the relationships of the HOME to the MDI and SICD are mediated to a similar extent by hereditary influences.
Oral activity and exploration in 1–2‐month‐old infants*
Authors: Pêcheux Marie‐Germaine , Lepecq Jean‐Claude , Salzarulo Piero 
Published: July 2011

In order to study how information is processed through oral activity during infancy, its two main components, irregular mouthing (M) and non‐nutritive sucking (NNS), were investigated. It was hypothesized that if information is actually processed during M or NNS then it should subsequently be demonstrable in a recognition or a discrimination task.The first experiment tested this hypothesis through the use of cross‐modal transfer from oral touch to vision. Sixteen 1‐month‐old infants were first orally familiarized with a nubby or plain rubber nipple, and then tested for visual preference on corresponding shapes. Several results show that M rather than NNS involves information processing, but the amount of mouthing on such soft nipples was low and the links between M and subsequent preference were only marginally significant.A second experiment dealt with intra‐modal discrimination. Oral activity on hard nipples was video‐recorded in 24 2‐month‐old infants. During familiarization the amount of M decreased while the amount of NNS increased. The amount of M increased when a new oral shape was presented. Both experiments support the hypothesis that information about the stimulus is processed during mouthing rather than during NNS. Both approaches, cross‐modal and intra‐modal, are necessary to go beyond specific problems of transfer of information and adaptation of motor programmes.
What minds have in common is space: Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy
Authors: Butterworth George , Jarrett Nicholas 
Published: July 2011

A series of experiments is reported which show that three successive mechanisms are involved in the first 18 months of life in ‘looking where someone else is looking’. The earliest ‘ecological’ mechanism enables the infant to detect the direction of the adult's visual gaze within the baby's visual field but the mother's signal alone does not allow the precise localization of the target. Joint attention to the same physical object also depends on the intrinsic, attention‐capturing properties of the object in the environment. By about 12 months, we have evidence for presence of a new ‘geometric’ mechanism. The infant extrapolates from the orientation of the mother's head and eyes, the intersection of the mother's line of sight within a relatively precise zone of the infant's own visual space. A third ‘representational’ mechanism emerges between 12 and 18 months, with an extension of joint reference to places outside the infant's visual field.None of these mechanisms require the infant to have a theory that others have minds; rather the perceptual systems of different observers ‘meet’ in encountering the same objects and events in the world. Such a ‘realist’ basis for interpersonal knowledge may offer an alternative starting point for development of intrapersonal knowledge, rather than the view that mental events can only be known by construction of a theory.
The development of depth representation in children's drawings: Effects of graphic surface and visibility of the model
Authors: Klaue Karen 
Published: July 2011

This experiment investigates the role of the orientation of the drawing surface (horizontal vs. vertical) and the visibility of the model to be reproduced (visible vs. hidden) on children's drawings of partially occluded or fully visible objects placed one behind another. A total of 256 children, aged 5–11 years, were asked to make two drawings of two objects located at different distances from each other along an oblique line with reference to subject's viewing position. Drawings were analysed according to the reproduced inter‐object distance and angular relations between the two objects.Results show that the drawings were closer to the real spatial relations existing in the model on horizontal surfaces and closer to the projected spatial relations on vertical surfaces. Visibility of the model played a role only in interaction with orientation of graphic surface. Paradoxically, when the model remained visible, children who were drawing on a vertical transparent screen had difficulties in rendering the appearance of the scene. The main effects were salient between 7 and 9 years. These findings are discussed in terms of coordination and differentiation of physical and symbolic aspects of graphic surface paralleled by the construction of a unique stable viewpoint.
Gender‐typing1 in young children: Preferences, behaviour and cultural differences
Authors: Turner P. J. , Gervai J. , Hinde R. A. 
Published: July 2011

One hundred and sixty‐one 4‐4 1/2‐year‐old children (82 girls and 79 boys) from Cambridge (UK) and Budapest (Hungary) participated in a cross‐cultural study of the processes of gender differentiation. Children were individually interviewed to assess toy preference, awareness of stereotypes and sex‐role preference. Focal child observations were carried out during free play in preschool (120 observation periods over eight separate 30‐minute sessions per child). Behavioural categories included activities, use of specified toys, sex of playmates, and social interactions with peers and teachers. Variables which differentiated girls and boys were summed within each category to give sex‐typical measures.Girls and boys scored in the expected direction on the several measures, but girls in both locations were less stereotyped than boys in their toy and sex‐role preference. Intercorrelations among the gender‐typing measures were stronger for ‘masculine’ variables than for ‘feminine’ ones. Further, play activities and toys were more clearly differentiated than social interactions. Consistent with previous studies, relations between measures of gender‐typing were at most moderate, supporting a multidimensional approach. In contrast to previous reports, we found short‐term individual stability of same‐sex preference and contrary to expectations, sex‐ segregation was not related to sex‐differentiated behavioural styles. Comparing the samples, there were no differences in toy, sex‐role, or playmate preference, but Budapest children were significantly more ‘masculine’ and less ‘feminine’ on the behavioural measures.
Diphenylpyrazole-Derived Compounds Increase Survival Time of Mice after Prion Infection
Authors: Leidel Fabienne , Eiden Martin , Geissen Markus , Kretzschmar Hans A. , Giese Armin , Hirschberger Thomas , Tavan Paul , Schätzl Hermann M. , Groschup Martin H. 
Published: July 2011

ABSTRACT

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) represent a group of fatal neurodegenerative disorders that can be transmitted by natural infection or inoculation. TSEs include scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. The emergence of a variant form of CJD (vCJD), which has been associated with BSE, produced strong pressure to search for effective treatments with new drugs. Up to now, however, TSEs have proved incurable, although many efforts have been made both
in vitro
and
in vivo
to search for potent therapeutic and prophylactic compounds. For this purpose, we analyzed a compound library consisting of 10,000 compounds with a cell-based high-throughput screening assay dealing with scrapie-infected scrapie mouse brain and ScN
2
A cells and identified a new class of inhibitors consisting of 3,5-diphenylpyrazole (DPP) derivatives. The most effective DPP derivative showed half-maximal inhibition of PrP
Sc
formation at concentrations (IC
50
) of 0.6 and 1.2 μM, respectively. This compound was subsequently subjected to a number of animal experiments using scrapie-infected wild-type C57BL/6 and transgenic Tga20 mice. The DPP derivative induced a significant increase of incubation time both in therapeutic and prophylactic experiments. The onset of the prion disease was delayed by 37 days after intraperitoneal and 42 days after oral application, respectively. In summary, we demonstrate a high
in vitro
efficiency of DPP derivatives against prion infections that was substantiated
in vivo
for one of these compounds. These results indicate that the novel class of DPP compounds should comprise excellent candidates for future therapeutic studies.