Hashimoto encephalopathy: Neurological and psychiatric perspective

Hashimoto encephalopathy (HE) is an autoimmune disease with neurological and neuropsychiatric manifestations and elevated titers of antithyroid antibodies in serum and cerebrospinal fluid. Patients are mostly women. Age varies from 8 to 86 years. Prevalence of HE is estimated to be 2.1/100,000. Neurological and/or psychiatric symptoms and signs constitute the clinical picture. The disease responds well to corticosteroid therapy, but sometimes other immunomodulatory therapies must be applied. Autoimmune mechanisms with antibodies against antigens in the brain cortex are suspected. The course of the disease can be acute, subacute, chronic, or relapsing/remitting. Some patients improve spontaneously, but a few died in spite of adequate therapy

The neuropsychology of hallucinations

Hallucinations are a psychopathological phenomenon with neuropsychological, neuroanatomical and pathophysiological correlates in specific brain areas. They can affect any of the senses, but auditory and visual hallucinations predominate. Verbal hallucinations reveal no gross organic lesions while visual hallucinations are connected to defined brain lesions. Functional neuroimaging shows impairments in modality specific sensory systems with the hyperactivity of the surrounding cerebral cortex. Disinhibition and expansion of the inner speech was noted with impaired internal monitoring in auditory verbal hallucinations. The subcortical areas and modal-specific associative cortex and cingulate cortex are essential for the occurrence of hallucinations

Elastic scattering of electrons from alanine

Differential cross sections (DCSs) for elastic scattering of electrons from alanine, have been measured using a crossed beam system for incident energies between 20 and 80 eV and scattering angles from 10° to 150°. The experimental data were placed upon an absolute scale by normalisation to calculated absolute integral cross sections obtained using the corrected independent-atom method incorporating an improved quasifree absorption model. The calculated data-set includes DCSs and integral elastic and inelastic cross sections in the incident energy range between 1 and 10,000 eV. These theoretical results are found to agree very well with the experimental data both in the shape and magnitude of DCSs except at the smallest scattering angles

Bounded and compact multipliers between Bergman and Hardy spaces

This paper studies the boundedness and compactness of the coefficient multiplier operators between various Bergman spaces A p and Hardy spaces H q . Some new characterizations of the multipliers between the spaces with exponents 1 or 2 are derived which, in particular, imply a Bergman space analogue of the Paley-Rudin Theorem on sparse sequences. Hardy and Bergman spaces are shown to be linked using mixed-norm spaces, and this linkage is used to improve a known result on ( A p , A 2 ), 1< p <2.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42949/1/20_2005_Article_BF01225524.pd

Personal life satisfaction as a measure of societal happiness is an individualistic presumption: Evidence from fifty countries

Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants across fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled

The anterior cingulate cortex

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has a role in attention, analysis of sensory information, error recognition, problem solving, detection of novelty, behavior, emotions, social relations, cognitive control, and regulation of visceral functions. This area is active whenever the individual feels some emotions, solves a problem, or analyzes the pros and cons of an action (if it is a right decision). Analogous areas are also found in higher mammals, especially whales, and they contain spindle neurons that enable complex social interactions. Disturbance of ACC activity is found in dementias, schizophrenia, depression, the obsessive-compulsive syndrome, and other neuropsychiatric diseases

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic

Preliminary geochemical investigation of karst barre from eastern Serbia Sokobanja basin

Karst bare is a hydrogeological phenomenon which denotes a karst terrain of limited area completely surrounded by rocks of low permeability, i.e. whose lower part is enclosed and bordered by more or less impervious rocks impeding ground water flowing out of the karst area. Sokobanja basin is one of the first localities where this kind of karst was detected. This study represents a preliminary geochemical analysis of karst bare samples from this locality. Atomic absorption spectrometric analysis shows that the studied samples are composed predominantly of Ca and contain minor amounts of Mg, probably in form of carbonate minerals obtained by dissolving with mineral acids. There are no detailed geochemical data about karst barre from this or any other locality in the available literature to date

Preliminary geochemical investigation of karst barre from eastern Serbia Sokobanja basin

Karst bare is a hydrogeological phenomenon which denotes a karst terrain of limited area completely surrounded by rocks of low permeability, i.e. whose lower part is enclosed and bordered by more or less impervious rocks impeding ground water flowing out of the karst area. Sokobanja basin is one of the first localities where this kind of karst was detected. This study represents a preliminary geochemical analysis of karst bare samples from this locality. Atomic absorption spectrometric analysis shows that the studied samples are composed predominantly of Ca and contain minor amounts of Mg, probably in form of carbonate minerals obtained by dissolving with mineral acids. There are no detailed geochemical data about karst barre from this or any other locality in the available literature to date