Emotion Processing and its Relationship to Social Functioning in Schizophrenia Patients

Schizophrenia patients have demonstrated deficits in affect recognition. Whether this deficit is part of a general difficulty in face perception or a specific problem in affect recognition is debatable. However, there is little research investigating the functional consequences of difficulties in identifying emotion in schizophrenia patients. We tested 20 chronic, medicated schizophrenia patients and 27 normal control participants on a battery of face recognition and affect recognition tasks. A subset of 14 patients was rated on the Social Dysfunction Index. Results demonstrated that schizophrenia patients were less accurate than normal control participants on face recognition, facial affect recognition and vocal affect recognition tasks, but among schizophrenia patients, only affect recognition performance was related to social functioning. These results suggest that schizophrenia patients have general face processing deficits, but affect recognition deficits may lead to more problems in social behavior.Psycholog

Working memory impairment as an endophenotypic marker of a schizophrenia diathesis

AbstractThis review focuses on the viability of working memory impairment as an endophenotypic marker of a schizophrenia diathesis. It begins with an introduction of the construct of working memory. It follows with a consideration of the operational criteria for defining an endophenotype. Research findings regarding the working memory performance of schizophrenia and schizophrenia-spectrum patients, first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and healthy controls, are reviewed in terms of the criteria for being considered an endophenotypic marker. Special attention is paid to specific components of the working memory deficit (namely, encoding, maintenance, and manipulation), in terms of which aspects are likely to be the best candidates for endophenotypes. We examine the extant literature regarding working memory performance in bipolar disorder and major depression in order to address the issue of relative specificity to schizophrenia. Despite some unresolved issues, it appears that working memory impairment is a very promising candidate for an endophenotypic marker of a schizophrenia diathesis but not for mood disorders. Throughout this review, we identify future directions for research in this exciting and dynamic area of research and evaluate the contribution of working memory research to our understanding of schizophrenia

Implementation Of Automated Systems For Target Cost Management And Assessing Performance: A Case Study In A Global Automobile Component Company

We examine the implementation of automated systems for target cost management and assessing firm performance in global automobile component company. After financial crisis, companies need to make strategic decisions as fast as possible. However, global companies are difficult to make fast decisions because of taking time for sorting the internal data through oversea companies. Also there are difficult to build systems of cost management and assessment of performance achievement. In this study, as we explain elaborately about the automatic process of cost management and assessment of performance achievement systems in global automobile component companies, we provide practical implications of this benchmark case for other companies’ automated target cost management systems and assessing performance system’s innovations

Lexical Collocation Use by Korean EFL College Learners

This study investigated Korean EFL college students' lexical collocation use. The specific research questions were as follows: 1) Which factors affect the collocational competence?; 2) Which collocation types are the most problematic to Korean EFL college learners?; 3) What are the possible causes of collocational errors? 133 subjects and 6 interviewees participated in this study. They were divided into three groups according to their English proficiency and were asked to complete the two tests: a collocation test and a vocabulary test. The results of the study showed that there were considerably high correlations between English proficiency and lexical collocation competence and between vocabulary knowledge and lexical collocation competence. Among the five types of lexical collocation in the collocation test, it was found that the most problematic lexical collocation type of all three groups was adverb and adjective type, whereas the least problematic collocation was noun and verb type. The qualitative analyses of the participants' answers and the interview data showed that most of the collocation errors were caused by L1 transfer or substituting the synonyms of collocates.Supported by the Grant for the Reform of University Education under the BK21 Project of SNU

Is Foreign Direct Investment Effective From The Perspective Of Tax Avoidance? An Analysis Of Tax Avoidance Through The International Transfer Pricing Behaviors Of Korean Corporations

This study examines whether multinational companies carry out tax avoidance through subsidiaries. An empirical analysis was conducted of 4,585 Korean firms from 2001 to 2010 by company and year. The results are as follows. First, MNCs that have become more internationally diversified through the establishment of overseas subsidiaries generally show a higher tendency to avoid tax. Thus, the analysis results show a positive correlation between globally diversified MNCs and corporate tax avoidance. This correlation is established due to the firms' active use of tax strategies (investment tax credits, tax cuts) applicable to the various countries in which they have expanded their businesses. Second, the analysis results showed that these firms actively avoided tax with overseas transfer pricing behaviors when compared to companies without overseas subsidiaries. Thus, the adjustment of sales prices and purchase value through actual transactions increased the propensity of the parent company to avoid tax.

Forecasting Inflation and Output Growth with Credit-Card-Augmented Divisia Monetary Aggregates

This paper investigates the performance of the Credit-Card-Augmented Divisia monetary aggregates in forecasting U.S. inflation and output growth at the 12-month horizon. We compute recursive and rolling out-of-sample forecasts using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ADL) model based on Divisia monetary aggregates. We use the three available versions of those monetary aggregate indices, including the original Divisia aggregates, the credit card-augmented Divisia, and the credit-card-augmented Divisia inside money aggregates. The source of each is the Center for Financial Stability (CFS). We find that the smallest Root Mean Square Forecast Errors (RMSFE) are attained with the credit-card-augmented Divisia indices used as the forecast indicators. We also consider Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) for forecasting annual inflation and output growth

The impact of peripheral neuropathy symptoms, self-care ability, and disturbances to daily life on quality of life among gynecological cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy: a cross-sectional survey

Purpose This study investigated the effects of peripheral neuropathy symptoms, self-care ability, and disturbances to daily life on quality of life (QoL) among gynecological cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Methods The participants included 144 patients with gynecological cancer undergoing anticancer chemotherapy at a tertiary hospital in Seoul, South Korea, from December 1, 2021 to January 28, 2022. Convenience sampling was used to recruit patients who had received 4 or more cycles of chemotherapy using a paclitaxel-platinum regimen, and a self-reported questionnaire was used to collect data. Descriptive statistics, the t-test, analysis of variance, Scheffé test, Pearson correlation coefficients, and multiple regression analysis were performed. Results Most of the participants had ovarian cancer (70.1%) or endometrial cancer (14.6%), and the most common number of treatment cycles was 6 to 10 (29.2%). The mean QoL (60.83±19.89) was greater than the midpoint. The regression model analyzing the patients’ QoL was statistically significant (F=15.38, p<.001) with an explanatory power of 56.7%. Self-care ability (β=.39, p<.001), disturbances to daily life (β=–.38, p<.001), the duration of peripheral neuropathy symptoms (β=2.14, p=.036), and regular exercise (β=–2.12, p=.04) were found to significantly affect QoL. Conclusion Efforts to improve the self-care ability of gynecological cancer patients who have experienced peripheral neuropathy after receiving chemotherapy and mitigate disturbances to their daily life can improve their QoL. Healthcare professionals should identify peripheral neuropathy symptoms and examine the effects of the symptoms on patients’ daily lives. Improving the self-care ability of patients and alleviating their limitations in daily life may improve QoL

Exploring Empathic Space: Correlates of Perspective Transformation Ability and Biases in Spatial Attention

Separate lines of research have noted recruitment of parietal cortex during tasks involving visuo-spatial processes and empathy. To explore the relationship between these two functions, a self-other perspective transformation task and a task of spatial attention (line bisection) were administered to 40 healthy participants (19 women). Performance on these tasks was examined in relation to self-reported empathy. Rightward biases in line bisection correlated positively with trait-level self-reported empathic concern, suggesting a left hemisphere mediation of this prosocial personality trait. Unexpectedly, speed of perspective taking in the self-other transformation task correlated negatively with empathic concern, but only in women, which we interpret in light of gender differences in empathy and strategies for egocentric mental transformations. Together, the findings partially support the commonalities in visuo-spatial attention, perspective-taking and empathy. More broadly, they shed additional light on the relationship between basic cognitive functions and complex social constructs