Mes: junio 2015

Although the notion of world language has been variously defined, most accounts acknowledge inter-user performance variability as a key aspect of the construct. The sociocultural aspects of such a phenomenon have been extensively treated in the literature. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to its neurocognitive underpinnings. This paper addresses the biopsychological bases of performance variability among word-language users, focusing on bilingual speakers of English. Available evidence reveals four neurocognitive determinants of variability, namely manner of appropriation, age of acquisition, level of proficiency, and degree of formal similarity between the native and the non-native language. In its concluding section, the paper highlights the benefits of incorporating neurocognitive evidence into the study and conceptualization of world languages.

IMPORTANCE: Several clinical reports have stated that patients with prefrontal lesions or patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia share social cognition impairments. Moral reasoning is impaired in both conditions but there have been few investigations that directly compare this domain in the 2 groups. OBSERVATIONS: This work compared the moral judgments of these patient groups using a task designed to disentangle the contributions of intentions and outcomes in moral judgment. For both disorders, patients judged scenarios where the protagonists believed that they would cause harm but did not as being more permissible than the control group. Moreover, patients with frontotemporal dementia judged harmful outcomes in the absence of harmful intentions as less permissible than the control participants. There were no differences between the 2 conditions. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Both disorders involved impairments in integrating intention and outcome information for moral judgment. This study was the first, to our knowledge, to directly compare a social cognition domain in 2 frontal pathologies with different etiology. Our results highlighted the importance of comparing patients with vascular lesions and patients with neurodegenerative diseases.

Impaired social cognition has been claimed to be a mechanism underlying the development and maintenance of borderline personality disorder (BPD). One important aspect of social cognition is the theory of mind (ToM), a complex skill that seems to be influenced by more basic processes, such as executive functions (EF) and emotion recognition. Previous ToM studies in BPD have yielded inconsistent results. This study assessed the performance of BPD adults on ToM, emotion recognition, and EF tasks. We also examined whether EF and emotion recognition could predict the performance on ToM tasks. We evaluated 15 adults with BPD and 15 matched healthy controls using different tasks of EF, emotion recognition, and ToM. The results showed that BPD adults exhibited deficits in the three domains, which seem to be task-dependent. Furthermore, we found that EF and emotion recognition predicted the performance on ToM. Our results suggest that tasks that involve real-life social scenarios and contextual cues are more sensitive to detect ToM and emotion recognition deficits in BPD individuals. Our findings also indicate that (a) ToM variability in BPD is partially explained by individual differences on EF and emotion recognition; and (b) ToM deficits of BPD patients are partially explained by the capacity to integrate cues from face, prosody, gesture, and social context to identify the emotions and others’ beliefs.

Este estudio evaluó los componentes múltiples de la empatía por dolor (afectivos, cognitivos, morales) en pacientes con demencia frontotemporal (bvFTD) mediante una tarea experimental que presenta acciones cotidianas. Aunque los pacientes presentaron déficits in los tres dominios, solamente la dimensión propiamente empática (empathic concern) resultó ser un déficit primario, no relacionado ni explicado por otros déficits de funciones ejecutivas u otras tareas de cognición social. Dichos resultados son cruciales tanto para la clínica de la bvFTD como para los modelos neuroanatómicos de la empatía.

En este trabajo se revisa el solapamiento genético y neuropatológico de la demencia frontotemporal (DFT) y la esclerosis lateral amiotrófica (ELA), en particular respecto al descubrimiento de la TDP43 (Transactive Response DNA Binding Protein 43 kDa) y la expansión del intron del C9ORF72 (cromosoma 9p21). Finalmente se destaca la necesidad de una aproximación multinivel a estas patologías en base registros nacionales.

En este trabajo se reportan por primera vez los correlatos cerebrales del procesamiento emocional en ex-guerrilleros colombianos (EGC) que participaron en actividades armadas. Aunque los EGC presentaron correlatos cerebrales de procesamiento emocional preservado, se observaron señales neuronales exacerbadas asociadas a la saliencia emocional de los estímulos. Dicha anomalía estuvo asociada a los niveles de empatía y funciones ejecutivas entre los EGC.

Emerging theories on embodied cognition have caused high expectations, ambitious promises, and strong controversies. Several criticisms have been explained elsewhere (Mahon and Caramazza, 2008; Cardona et al., 2014) and will not be discussed further here. In this paper, we will focus on a specific explanatory strategy frequently assessed by the radical embodied cognition approaches: the use of homuncular explanations for the explicit (or implicit) attribution of causal roles in the comprehension of language understanding. We first present this criticism regarding a prototypical example: the mirror neuron system (MNS) (Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004; Iacoboni and Dapretto, 2006) in the field of language understanding and then extend our conclusions to other programs of embodied cognition. Here we discuss the radical claims that propose the MNS as the putative mechanism for multiple cognitive and social psychology constructs (e.g., Gallese, 2008; Cattaneo and Rizzolatti, 2009; Iacoboni, 2009) and the critical role of the MNS in language understanding (Heyes, 2010a; Hickok, 2013).

El presente trabajo analiza las variables que inciden en la reincidencia penal. Se analizaron 333 casos del Hospital Psiquiátrico del Servicio Penitenciario Federal Argentino, con el objetivo de hallar diversos indicadores que se asocien al riesgo de reincidencia. Los resultados indican con un grado de significación (p < 0.01), que la edad de inicio de consumo de drogas y la presencia de antecedentes penales se asocian con la reincidencia delictiva. También el nivel educativo presentó una fuerte asociación (p=.006). La presencia de trastornos mentales no ha resultado estadísticamente significativa como variable pronóstico de reincidencia (p=.218), pero en el análisis de ese factor se pudo advertir una diferencia en la tendencia del tipo de delito cometido entre el grupo de personas con diagnóstico de psicosis y el grupo de personas con trastornos de la personalidad. Este tipo de información puede aportar en la toma de decisiones a la hora de planificar o implementar políticas públicas vinculadas a la prevención y a la inclusión social.

Bipolar disorder (BD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults share clinical symptoms. Both disorders present with executive functioning impairment. The detection of executive dysfunction usually requires the administration of an extensive neuropsychological battery. The Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO) Frontal Screening (IFS) is an efficient tool, which has been demonstrated to be useful for the detection of executive deficits in other diseases involving the prefrontal cortex. This study assessed the usefulness of the IFS in detecting the executive dysfunction of BD and ADHD adults, by means of a receiver-operating characteristic curve analysis and a multigroup discriminant function analysis. Twenty-four BD, 25 ADHD patients and 25 controls were assessed with a battery that included the IFS and other measures of executive functioning. Our results showed that both patient groups performed significantly lower than controls on the IFS total score. Using a 27.5 point cut-off score, the IFS showed good sensitivity and acceptable specificity to detect executive impairments in BD and ADHD patients. The IFS discriminated between controls and each patient group more reliably than other executive functions measures. Our results suggest that this tool could be a useful instrument to assess executive functions in BD and ADHD patients.

BACKGROUND: Medical practitioners such as physicians are continuously exposed to the suffering and the distress of patients. Understanding the way pain perception relates to empathetic dispositions and professional quality of life can contribute to the development of strategies aimed at protecting health professionals from burnout and compassion fatigue. In the present study we investigate the way individual dispositions relate to behavioral measures of pain sensitivity, empathy, and professional quality of life. METHODS: A secure Web-based series of self-report measures and a behavioral task were administered to 1,199 board-certified physicians. Additionally, surveys were used to obtain measures of demographic and professional background; dispositional empathy (empathic concern, personal distress, and perspective taking); positive (compassion satisfaction) and negative (burnout and secondary traumatic stress) aspects of their professional life. In the behavioral task, participants were asked to watch a series of video clips of patients experiencing different levels of pain and provide ratings of pain intensity and induced personal distress. RESULTS: Perceived pain intensity was significantly lower among more experienced physicians but similar across specialty fields with varying demands of emotional stress. Watching videos of patients in pain, however, elicited more personal distress among physicians in highly demanding medical fields, despite comparable empathy dispositions with other fields. The pain of male patients was perceived as less intense than the pain of female patients, and this effect was more marked for female physicians. The effect of dispositional empathy on pain perception and induced personal distress was different for each sub-component, with perspective taking and empathic concern (EC) being predictive of the behavioral outcomes. Physicians who experience both compassion satisfaction and fatigue perceive more pain and suffer more personal distress from it than those who only suffer the negative aspects of professional quality of life. CONCLUSIONS: Professional experience seems to desensitize physicians to the pain of others without necessarily helping them down-regulate their own personal distress. Pain perception is also related with specific aspects of empathy and varies depending on context, as is the case with the gender of their patients. Minimum levels of empathy appear necessary to benefit from the positive aspects of professional quality of life in medicine.