Colorful descriptions and loud movement: Does hippocampal damage impair the use of metaphor?

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Pickett, C.*, Kurczek, J. & Duff, M.C. (2012, November). Colorful descriptions and loud movement: Does hippocampal damage impair the use of metaphor? <i>Poster presentation at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students</i>, San Jose, CA.</p><p>In contrast to traditional neuropsychological studies of metaphor, this study looks at the use of novel metaphor. </p> <p>• This study also looks at metaphor production in a unique population. In doing so, we are broadening the network of cognitive and neural systems that contribute to metaphor in specific and language in general. </p> <p>• All participants appear to be able to use figurative comparisons in near equivalent style. The number of episodes, expressions and tokens were very similar as well as figurative comparison type and resources used </p> <p>• It appears that although amnesic participants in the matcher condition were part of a near equivalent number and style of figurative comparisons, they did not comprehend the comparisons as their card placement accuracy was far different from comparisons pairs </p> <p>• Future directions will investigate the number of embedded expressions, the number of token repetitions and number of figurative themes used to get at the question of density. </p> <p>• This study may prompt the further investigation of metaphor in these participants, as it appears that our understanding of “metaphor” is not as unitary as previously thought. The ability to use “metaphor” may be described by three abilities 1) the ability to make comparisons or see things as other things 2) use conventional metaphoric expressions and 3) generate, blend and juxtapose novel representations from distinct representation </p> </div> </div> </div> </div

Is the ability to produce metaphor a sole product of the right hemisphere?

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Hill, J.*, Pickett, C.*, Kurczek, J., & Duff, M. C. (2012, July). Is the ability to produce metaphor a sole product of the right hemisphere? <i>Poster presentation at the University of Iowa Summer Undergraduate Research Conference</i>, Iowa City, IA.</p><p>• Often thought to be restricted to the 1lowery language of literature, metaphor is in fact ubiquitous in daily language (Coulson, 2007). Metaphor used to express emotions and abstract concepts and our everyday understanding and communication of thoughts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). </p> <p>• Neuropsychological studies of language have historically focused on contributions of the left hemisphere to language but more recently the contributions of right hemisphere have been documented. </p> <p>• Damage to the right hemisphere will often cause right hemisphere syndrome whose symptoms include: 1) inattention 2) spatial reasoning problems, and 3) non-linguistic and paralinguistic problems. </p> <p>• Patients with ight hemisphere damage (RHD) also have impairments in the use of 1igurative (Brownell 1984) and divergent semantic processing and 1igurative language (Schmidt, 2007). However, this remains disputed as neuroimaging studies have been inconclusive. </p> <p>• Here we investigate the contribution of the RH to metaphor production using a novel coding procedure and predict that since the RH contributes to the use of 1igurative language, patients with RHD will produce less instances of 1igurative language. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div

Self-Esteem and Optimism as Predictors of Resilience among Selected Filipino Active Duty Military Personnel in Military Camps

Knowing the immense physical and psychological distress that military personnel undergo, it is almost impossible not talk about its adverse psychological consequences, particularly in the context of the mental health profession. Resilience, optimism, and self-esteem are just among the many factors that frequent the discussion about the effects of adverse situations. According to Fergus and Zimmerman’s Resilience Theory (2005), individuals possess innate traits such as resilience, that allow them to withstand distress, highlighting the predictive application of self-esteem and optimism for resilience. Mental health awareness has likewise risen in the Philippines, shedding more light on mental health issues that were previously considered to be too shallow and usually dismissed. As such, utilizing a predictive non-experimental research design, this present study aimed to determine whether self-esteem and optimism can predict resilience among 360 military personnel in activity duty. Military personnel from military camps who were selected using a non-probability technique completed a test battery consisting of three scales to measure the variables: Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R), and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Significant results revealed that a relationship exists among the research variables and that self-esteem and optimism predicts resilience among the present study’s selected active duty military personnel in military camp

The Scaling of Blood Flow Resistance: From a Single Vessel to the Entire Distal Tree

Although the flow resistance of a single vessel segment is easy to compute, the equivalent resistance of a network of vessel segments or the entire vasculature of an organ is difficult to determine in an analytic form. Here, we propose what we believe is a novel resistance scaling law for a vascular tree (i.e., the resistance of a vessel segment scales with the equivalent resistance of the corresponding distal tree). The formulation can be written as (Rs/Rc)∝(Ls/Lc) (where Rs and Ls are the resistance and length of a vessel segment, respectively, and Rc and Lc are the equivalent resistance and total length of the corresponding distal tree, respectively), which was validated for the coronary vascular systems of the heart. The scaling law was also shown to apply to the vascular systems of the lung, mesentery, muscle, eye, and so on. The novel resistance scaling law, coupled with the 3/4-power scaling law for metabolic rates, can predict several structure-function relations of vascular trees, albeit with a different exponent. In particular, the self-similar nature of the scaling law may serve as a diagnostic tool with the help of noninvasive imaging modalities