The effect of phosphatidylserine-containing omega-3 fatty acids on memory abilities in subjects with subjective memory complaints: a pilot study

Yael Richter1, Yael Herzog1, Tzafra Cohen1, Yael Steinhart21Enzymotec LTD, Migdal-HaEmeq, Israel; 2Department of Marketing, Haifa Graduate School of Management, University of Haifa, IsraelObjective: To evaluate for the first time the efficacy of safe-sourced phosphatidylserine-containing omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (PS-omega-3) in improving memory abilities.Methods: PS-omega-3 was administered daily for 6 weeks to eight elderly volunteers with subjective memory complaints. The Cognitive Drug Research test battery was used to assess the effect on their cognitive abilities.Results: PS-omega-3 supplementation resulted in 42% increase in the ability to recall words in the delayed condition.Conclusion: PS-omega-3 may have a favorable effect on memory in subjects with subjective memory complaints. PS-omega-3 may serve as a safe alternative to phosphatidylserine extracted from bovine cortex.Keywords: cognitive, memory, omega-3, phosphatidylserin

The Obstacles to the Integration of Muslims in Germany and France: How Muslims and the States Impair the Smooth Transition From Immigrant to Citizen

The place of Islam has been an ongoing debate for decades and still remains unresolved. Since the inception of the guest worker program initiated by European countries following the devastation of WWII, particularly France and Germany, Europe’s largest economies, the unanticipated occurred; what was conceived to be a temporary imported labor force which would eventually return home, turned into permanent settlement. For France, the labor pool emanated from colonial holdings predominantly from Maghreb, North Africa. Germany had no such labor source, but had a long ongoing relationship with Turkey which dated back to the Ottoman Empire. The entrance of this particular labor force into the French and German space brought Muslim populations to countries which have very clear models of self-identity and which are at odds with Islam. France’s model of national ideology is based on jus soli— promoting the territorial notion of nationhood. It sheds any connection to religion, particularly in the public sphere, and is ideologically secular, promoting the concept of laïcité. Germany’s national model is based on jus sanguinis, or blood-ties, and sees itself as Christian-Occidental. Both countries have promoted their specific models as a precondition to citizenship and belonging. Although changes have occurred, Muslims still find themselves viewed as aliens in both France and Germany, and are socially and economically marginalized. This situation has driven younger generations of Muslims, born and raised in France and Germany to find a place of belonging within their religious community rather than in mainstream society. Even so, some Muslim leadership in France is attempting to find a compromise between being both Muslim and French at the same time as a path towards integration, while in Germany, Turks have formed a parallel society through the strong organizations which they have developed to better serve the Muslim community and provide services which the German Government can’t or won’t

Towards non-ageist housing and caring in old age

This article investigates aging-in-place among seniors who live with caretakers, particularly domestic workers who immigrate to Israel from poorer countries. In recent decades, new apartment designs are intended for families with children. Drawing on Dolores Hayden’s (1980) "Non-Sexist City", we expound on Non-Ageist architecture for the aging population and migrant caregivers. We examine how this kind of residence can include additional and vulnerable groups in the population, such as seniors and their caregivers. Our study explores the design of Tel Aviv Metropolis apartments. We argue that typical apartment design affects the ethics of everyday living. Following Michel de Certeau (2011), our research observes everyday behaviors and creative tactics through which seniors and caregivers re-appropriate shared living space. Most seniors house caretakers in a room within the bedroom area of the apartment, for instance, while others use a separate room by the entrance. These practices point to hierarchy and equality as spatial aspects of typical apartments' layout and their effect on their usage by seniors and caregivers. Our research explores the potential of a planning proposal -dividing the seniors’ apartment into a primary apartment and a secondary unit- suggested by the inter-ministerial government team in the National Housing Headquarters and by the Israeli Affordable Housing Center, an academic-social organization. We argue this division could enable better housing solutions for shared residency. Thus, the article combines qualitative research of residence in old age with analysis of the role of social values such as equality, autonomy, inclusion, affordability and communal values in old-age housing and care

Is a Good Student Also a Happier One? Traditional Measures of School Functioning as Predictors of Students\u27 Well-Being

Academic achievement, behavior, and school connectedness have long been considered central measures for assessing students’ optimal functioning in school. With the growing interest in positive education and its’ inclusion of well-being as a central educational goal, attention has been turned to the extent to which these traditional measures of school functioning are related to students’ well-being. Based on a sample of 314 Israeli middle school students from one school, this study focuses on the relationship between the latter measures of school functioning and students’ well-being, operationalized as life satisfaction, positive and negative affect, hope, and gratitude. Using structural equational modelling, our findings revealed that GPA, teachers’ reports of disruptive behavior, and students’ reports of school connectedness predict students’ well-being, with school connectedness as the strongest predictor of all five well-being measures. This suggests that a sense of connectedness is more crucial to students’ well-being than their academic achievements or behavior in school. Surprisingly, students’ disruptive behavior as reported by teachers was slightly, but significantly, positively associated with life satisfaction, hope and positive affect. Further inquiry into this curious finding revealed that disruptive behavior is related to higher well-being primarily for students of middle range academic attainment (GPA of 64-84) when controlling for connectedness to school. Based on this finding, we suggest that within the school context better behavior among average achievers may be a potential sign of a maladaptive response to being left outside the schools’ radar while disruptive behavior among average achievers may in fact be the more resilient response. Attention is given to this interpretation of the finding as well as to more general implications of the importance of school connectedness for students’ well-being

Emotion Word Comprehension from 4 to 16 Years Old: A Developmental Survey

Background: Whilst previous studies have examined comprehension of the emotional lexicon at different ages in typically developing children, no survey has been conducted looking at this across different ages from childhood to adolescence. Purpose: To report how the emotion lexicon grows with age. Method: Comprehension of 336 emotion words was tested in n = 377 children and adolescents, aged 4–16 years old, divided into 6 age-bands. Parents or teachers of children under 12, or adolescents themselves, were asked to indicate which words they knew the meaning of. Results: Between 4 and 11 years old, the size of the emotional lexicon doubled every 2 years, but between 12 and 16 years old, developmental rate of growth of the emotional lexicon leveled off. This survey also allows emotion words to be ordered in terms of difficulty. Conclusions: Studies using emotion terms in English need to be developmentally sensitive, since during childhood there is considerable change. The absence of change after adolescence may be an artifact of the words included in this study. This normative developmental data-set for emotion vocabulary comprehension may be useful when testing for delays in this ability, as might arise for environmental or neurodevelopmental reasons

Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control

Recent large-scale text-driven synthesis models have attracted much attention thanks to their remarkable capabilities of generating highly diverse images that follow given text prompts. Such text-based synthesis methods are particularly appealing to humans who are used to verbally describe their intent. Therefore, it is only natural to extend the text-driven image synthesis to text-driven image editing. Editing is challenging for these generative models, since an innate property of an editing technique is to preserve most of the original image, while in the text-based models, even a small modification of the text prompt often leads to a completely different outcome. State-of-the-art methods mitigate this by requiring the users to provide a spatial mask to localize the edit, hence, ignoring the original structure and content within the masked region. In this paper, we pursue an intuitive prompt-to-prompt editing framework, where the edits are controlled by text only. To this end, we analyze a text-conditioned model in depth and observe that the cross-attention layers are the key to controlling the relation between the spatial layout of the image to each word in the prompt. With this observation, we present several applications which monitor the image synthesis by editing the textual prompt only. This includes localized editing by replacing a word, global editing by adding a specification, and even delicately controlling the extent to which a word is reflected in the image. We present our results over diverse images and prompts, demonstrating high-quality synthesis and fidelity to the edited prompts