Potenzialità neuroprotettive dei bioflavonoidi del cacao

Studi recenti hanno evidenziato le potenzialità neuroprotettive dei flavonoidi contenuti nel cacao; si cerca di spiegare i meccanismi a livello cellulare cerebrale per cercare di prevenire, potenzialmente, tutti i disturbi fisiologici legati all'invecchiament

Lexical Stress Effects in Italian Spoken Word Recognition

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether Italian listeners rely on lexical stress information in spoken word recognition. In both experiments participants performed a lexical decision task on visual targets; however in the trials where there was a relation between prime and target, the relation was one of identity in Experiment 1, whereas it was a semantic association in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, the match condition (e.g., the prime ['go.mi] from gomito, elbow, for the target GOMITO), produced facilitation relative to the control condition, and the mismatch condition (e.g., the prime [go.’mi] from gomitolo, clew, for the target GOMITO) produced inhibition. In Experiment 2, responses were faster in the related (e.g, the prime ['go.mi] from gomito, elbow, for the target BRACCIO, arm) than in the control condition. This, however, did not differ from the unrelated condition (e.g, [go.’mi] from gomitolo, clew, for the target BRACCIO, arm). The methodological and theoretical implications of the results are discussed

The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker

Qualitative Approach to Clinical Psychology. Explorative Studies

This article is aimed to present a new approach to clinical research and also to clinical work based on Grounded Theory and on the software developed from it, Atlas.ti. It includes two practical applications of this software, one is the analysis of a clinical interview and the other the assessment of nine interviews taken with the Five Minutes Speech Sample belonging to five couples of parents. As it is presented below, each analysis was performed as a circular process, starting from the data, grouping them into categories, creating codes and then returning to the data in order to sustain them and to establish relations between them. In our view, this is a new and interesting way of approaching clinical data which gives the clinician the possibility of developing a deeper understanding of the patient/client without loosing himelf/herself in the theories of the psychological orientation the psychotherapist belongs to