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Frontiers in Psychology 2020Semantic processing underpins the organization of verbal information for both storage and retrieval. Deficits in semantic processing are associated with both the risk...
Semantic processing underpins the organization of verbal information for both storage and retrieval. Deficits in semantic processing are associated with both the risk for and symptoms presented in schizophrenia. However, studies are mixed and could reflect the confounding effects of medication and symptom heterogeneity. Therefore, we considered whether two risk phenotypes, positive schizotypy and hallucinatory predisposition, present in the general population were associated with differential responding profiles for a semantic processing task. One hundred and eighty-three participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale, National Adult Reading Test, a handedness measure, and a computerized semantic relatedness judgment task. Pairs of words were related through their dominant or subordinate meanings, or unrelated. Participants were divided into four groups using a mean split on cognitive-perceptual (positive) schizotypy and hallucination proneness. Significant differences between groups were found for reaction time on the semantic relatedness task, with the high cognitive-perceptual schizotypy groups responding significantly slower to all word pairs compared to their low scoring counterparts. There was some evidence that high hallucination proneness was associated with significantly faster reaction times which may reflect disinhibitive processes, however additional support is required. The results suggest that these two components of psychosis risk are associated with different patterns of responding to semantic processing. More diffuse activation of semantic information appeared to be associated with positive schizotypy, while those predisposed to hallucinations appeared to respond quicker. These results have significant implications in the re-conceptualization of hallucination proneness as distinct from positive schizotypy. Additional research is required to investigate the association between psychotic-like experiences separate from personality variables such as positive schizotypy and semantic processing.
PubMed: 32982899
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.542002 -
Nucleic Acids Research Jan 2020We present the Small RNA Expression Atlas (SEAweb), a web application that allows for the interactive querying, visualization and analysis of known and novel small RNAs...
We present the Small RNA Expression Atlas (SEAweb), a web application that allows for the interactive querying, visualization and analysis of known and novel small RNAs across 10 organisms. It contains sRNA and pathogen expression information for over 4200 published samples with standardized search terms and ontologies. In addition, SEAweb allows for the interactive visualization and re-analysis of 879 differential expression and 514 classification comparisons. SEAweb's user model enables sRNA researchers to compare and re-analyze user-specific and published datasets, highlighting common and distinct sRNA expression patterns. We provide evidence for SEAweb's fidelity by (i) generating a set of 591 tissue specific miRNAs across 29 tissues, (ii) finding known and novel bacterial and viral infections across diseases and (iii) determining a Parkinson's disease-specific blood biomarker signature using novel data. We believe that SEAweb's simple semantic search interface, the flexible interactive reports and the user model with rich analysis capabilities will enable researchers to better understand the potential function and diagnostic value of sRNAs or pathogens across tissues, diseases and organisms.
Topics: Animals; Bacterial Infections; Cattle; Databases, Nucleic Acid; Humans; Internet; Mice; Organ Specificity; Parkinson Disease; RNA, Bacterial; RNA, Small Untranslated; RNA, Viral; Rats; Virus Diseases
PubMed: 31598718
DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkz869 -
Journal of Dental Education Jun 2023The aim of this study is to investigate the literature to evaluate dental students' attitudes regarding the treatment of older adults. (Review)
Review
PURPOSE
The aim of this study is to investigate the literature to evaluate dental students' attitudes regarding the treatment of older adults.
METHODS
A scoping review was performed following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses/PRISMA guidelines to identify articles from four electronic databases: MEDLINE via the PubMed interface, Embase, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and AgeLine. Gray literature searches were also performed in Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses-Health and Medicine.
RESULTS
Eleven articles were assessed. The majority (72, 72%) were published between 2011 and 2020, evidencing various contexts of dental students, such as different countries and cultures, and levels of education. The most commonly used tool/instrument to survey dental students' attitudes was the Aging Semantic Differential Scale. Student age, race, and marital status did not seem to interfere with dental students' attitudes regarding the treatment of older adults.
CONCLUSIONS
Dental students tend to have a positive attitude toward older people. In this context, female students, students who interact with older people, and clinical students have more positive attitudes than male and nonclinical students.
Topics: Aged; Female; Humans; Male; Attitude; Educational Status; Students, Dental; Students, Nursing
PubMed: 36928643
DOI: 10.1002/jdd.13193 -
Psychiatria Danubina 2022It is known that an interactive design and good participants' involvement strengthens the motivation to engage in learning processes. Previous research suggests... (Observational Study)
Observational Study
BACKGROUND
It is known that an interactive design and good participants' involvement strengthens the motivation to engage in learning processes. Previous research suggests attitude-behaviour consistency with relevance of subjective meaning and interest in learning. This observational study aims to measure the attitude of medical students.
METHODS
The connotative meaning and perception of e-learning were explored. A semantic differential scale was given to all students (N=328) of a case-based blended-learning (CBBL) course, 296 medical students were included in this study.
RESULTS
The online-survey completion rate was 100%. An exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation was performed. Five components could be extracted that explained 47.21% of the total variance. The five components are best described by the following adjectives taken from the item pool: "soft, emotional, playful", "clear and organised", "vigorous and serious", "vivid and outgoing", "economical and introverted". An additional qualitative analysis revealed relevant positive connotations ascribed to e-learning by the students: freedom in time and space for learning, interdisciplinary approach and communication, playfulness and clear, structured procedure.
CONCLUSION
Our study demonstrated that a specific set of aspects is essential for students to feel comfortable and affect-cognitively engaged to learn and gain the best exam grades.
Topics: Communication; Humans; Language; Learning; Motivation; Students, Medical
PubMed: 35772130
DOI: 10.24869/psyd.2022.209 -
Current Issues in Personality Psychology 2022From 2014 to the present, Ukrainian military personnel have been fighting in Eastern Ukraine against illegal armed formations of separatists. The resulting combat stress...
BACKGROUND
From 2014 to the present, Ukrainian military personnel have been fighting in Eastern Ukraine against illegal armed formations of separatists. The resulting combat stress negatively affects servicemen's mental health status. This study aimed to examine the factor structure of a scale to assess the psychological safety of a soldier's personality (PSSP), taking into account changes in the conditions of military service to improve the professional and psychological training of military personnel.
PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE
The study involved 118 officers of the National Guard of Ukraine. The semantic differential method, expert judgment, and exploratory factor analysis were used to determine the factor structure of the PSSP.
RESULTS
The PSSP model to maintain combat readiness in daily activities includes four components: "Moral and communicative", "Motivational and volitional", "Value and meaning of life" and "Inner comfort". For activities in extreme conditions (during combat deployment), the personality potential of four structural components is used: "Moral and volitional regulation", "Coping strategies", "Value and meaning of life" and "Post-traumatic growth/regression".
CONCLUSIONS
The PSSP model consists of four components that have different content depending on the conditions for performance of professional tasks by military personnel. It is advisable to use the obtained results of the content of the PSSP model in the development of professional and psychological training programs for the purposeful formation of the resilience of military personnel, taking into account the conditions of their activities.
PubMed: 38013921
DOI: 10.5114/cipp.2021.108684 -
Memory & Cognition Jul 2023Growing evidence indicates that a domain-general executive control supports semantic memory retrieval, yet the nature of this interaction remains elusive. To shed light...
Growing evidence indicates that a domain-general executive control supports semantic memory retrieval, yet the nature of this interaction remains elusive. To shed light on such control mechanisms, we conducted two dual-task experiments loading distinct executive capacities (working memory maintenance, monitoring, and switching), while participants carried out automatic (free-associative) and controlled (dissociative) word retrieval tasks. We found that these forms of executive load interfered with retrieval fluency in both tasks, but these negative effects were more pronounced for the dissociative performance. Together, these findings indicate that the domain-general executive control supports accessing contextually relevant knowledge as well as the inhibition of automatically activated but task-inappropriate retrieval candidates, putatively via an adaptive gating of semantic activation and interference control. Moreover, the processing costs related to retrieval inhibition and switching were negatively correlated, suggesting a trade-off between the ability to constrain semantic activation (i.e., inhibition) and the ability to initiate flexible transitions between semantic sets (i.e., switching), which may thus represent two complementary control functions governing semantic memory retrieval.
Topics: Humans; Semantics; Executive Function; Memory, Short-Term; Inhibition, Psychological
PubMed: 36650348
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-022-01388-x -
NeuroImage Oct 2022Our ability to understand and interact with our environment relies upon conceptual knowledge of the meaning of objects. This process is supported by a distributed...
Our ability to understand and interact with our environment relies upon conceptual knowledge of the meaning of objects. This process is supported by a distributed network of frontal, parietal, and temporal brain regions. Insight into the differential roles of various elements of this system can be inferred from the timing of activation, and here we use similarity-based fMRI-MEG fusion to understand when the representational spaces in different elements of the semantic system converge with representational spaces in the evolving MEG signal. Participants performed a semantic-typicality judgement of written words drawn from nine different semantic categories in separate fMRI and MEG sessions. Results indicate an initial period of congruence between MEG and fMRI informational spaces dominated by the posterior inferior temporal gyrus and the ventral temporal cortex between 350 and 450 msec. This is followed by a second period of convergence between 450 and 795 msec where MEG and fMRI representational spaces conform in left angular gyrus and precuneus in addition to ventral temporal cortex. Results are consistent with the multistage recruitment of the semantic system, initially involving automatic aspects of the representational system and later extending to broader elements of the semantic system more strongly associated with internalised cognition.
Topics: Brain; Brain Mapping; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Semantics; Temporal Lobe
PubMed: 35752412
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119405 -
Current Issues in Personality Psychology 2021The main research question of the article is how the perception of help and the style of interpersonal relations are connected. In a broad sense, the question refers to...
BACKGROUND
The main research question of the article is how the perception of help and the style of interpersonal relations are connected. In a broad sense, the question refers to the problem of constant and situational variables of prosocial activity. The main methodological framework is Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology, in particular, the mechanism of interiorization and the interaction of interpsychological and intrapsychological processes.
PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE
Over 215 participants (students attending school and university, living in Ukraine, aged from 12 to 22 years) took part in our experiment, but because not all of them completed all the necessary forms correctly, only 193 participants' answers were further analyzed. Our two research techniques were Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle Personal Inventory and the semantic differential ( = 193).
RESULTS
Each disposition from Leary's questionnaire had at least one significant correlation with the way Ukrainian adolescents perceive help. The semantic aspects of perceiving help were investigated with the help of ranking the qualities of the semantic differential for the words "help the other".
CONCLUSIONS
The identified correlations contribute to the psychological analysis of the detailed characteristics of perceiving help concerning personal dispositions. Personal, communicational and semantic aspects of help are interconnected and their further research can bring rich insights.
PubMed: 38013700
DOI: 10.5114/cipp.2021.104594 -
Journal of Communication Disorders 2020Language decline has been associated with healthy aging and with various neurodegenerative conditions, making it challenging to differentiate among these conditions....
PURPOSE
Language decline has been associated with healthy aging and with various neurodegenerative conditions, making it challenging to differentiate among these conditions. This study examined the utility of linguistic measures derived from a short narrative language sample for 1) identifying language characteristics and cut-off scores to differentiate between healthy aging, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's dementia (AD); and 2) differentiating among PPA variants in which language is the primary impairment.
METHOD
Participants were 25 neurologically healthy English speakers, 20 individuals with MCI, 20 with AD, and 26 with PPA (non-fluent/agrammatic N = 10, logopenic N = 9, semantic N = 7). Narrative language samples of the Cookie Theft Picture of persons with healthy aging, MCI and AD were retrospectively obtained from the DementiaBank database (https://talkbank.org/DementiaBank/) and PPA samples were obtained from an ongoing research study. The language samples were analyzed for fluency, word retrieval success, grammatical accuracy, and errors using automated and manual analysis methods. The sensitivity and specificity of various language measures was computed.
RESULTS
Participants with PPA scored lower than neurologically healthy and MCI groups on fluency (words per minute and disfluencies), word retrieval (Correct Information Units and number of errors), and sentence grammaticality. PPA and AD groups did not differ on language measures. Agrammatic PPA participants scored lower than logopenic and semantic PPA groups on several measures, while logopenic and semantic PPA did not differ on any measures.
CONCLUSION
Measures derived from brief language samples and analyzed using mostly automated methods are clinically useful in differentiating PPA from healthy aging and MCI, and agrammatic PPA from other variants. The sensitivity and specificity of these measures is modest and can be improved when coupled with clinical presentation.
Topics: Aged; Alzheimer Disease; Aphasia, Primary Progressive; Cognitive Dysfunction; Diagnosis, Differential; Humans; Language; Middle Aged; Neurodegenerative Diseases; Retrospective Studies
PubMed: 32388191
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.105994 -
Psychiatria Danubina Dec 2021The review outlines the importance of understanding speech and language difficulties that occur among the first symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, as well as the role...
The review outlines the importance of understanding speech and language difficulties that occur among the first symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, as well as the role of speech therapists in the management of people with frontotemporal dementia. Frontotemporal dementia is one of the most common types of dementia in adults under the age of 65. The main variations of frontotemporal dementia are behavioral, progressive nonfluent aphasia, semantic dementia, and logopenic progressive aphasia. Speech and language difficulties are often among the first indicative signs of frontotemporal dementia, and their proper recognition and understanding play a significant role in the differential diagnosis. Speech and language therapists have to be involved both in the diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia and its treatment to provide the highest quality services to people with dementia and their carers.
Topics: Adult; Aphasia, Primary Progressive; Cognition; Diagnosis, Differential; Frontotemporal Dementia; Humans; Speech
PubMed: 35150484
DOI: No ID Found