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ObjectiveTo investigate cognitive inhibition in presymptomatic C9orf72 mutation carriers (C9+) and its associated neuroanatomical correlates.MethodsThirty-eight presymptomatic C9orf72 mutation carriers (C9+, mean age 38.2±8.0 years) and 22 C9− controls from the PREV-DEMALS cohort were included in this study. They underwent a cognitive inhibition assessment with the Hayling Sentence Completion Test (HSCT; time to completion (part B−part A); error score in part B) as well as a 3D MRI.ResultsC9+ individuals younger than 40 years had higher error scores (part B) but equivalent HSCT time to completion (part B−part A) compared to C9− individuals. C9+ individuals older than 40 years had both higher error scores and longer time to completion. HSCT time to completion significantly predicted the proximity to estimated clinical conversion from presymptomatic to symptomatic phase in C9+ individuals (based on the average age at onset of affected relatives in the family). Anatomically, we found that HSCT time to completion was associated with the integrity of the cerebellum.ConclusionThe HSCT represents a good marker of cognitive inhibition impairments in C9+ and of proximity to clinical conversion. This study also highlights the key role of the cerebellum in cognitive inhibition.

Children’s happiness is an important issue that needs to be addressed around the world; however, limited research has explored how children define happiness. In this study, we conducted a survey of elementary school children living in different countries and clarified the contextual definitions of happiness by a total of 842 children (Mean age = 11.01, SD  = 1.05, effective rate = 97.34%) from Grades 4 to 6 living in Japan ( n  = 474), Mongolia ( n  = 121), and Finland ( n  = 247). We investigated the definition of children’s happiness using the stimulus sentence completion test. For Mongolian children, happiness was predominantly characterized by references to family relationships. For Finnish children, happiness appeared to be linked to autonomous involvement with things, personal achievement, and success. Furthermore, the happiness of Japanese children was largely characterized by pleasant versus unpleasant experiences. In addition, Japanese children often referred to “being scolded” and their happiness was not related to school success. Our findings concurred with the elements of Seligman’s ( 2012 ) concept of flourishing as a new criterion for judging well-being. It was also suggested that the dominant elements of happiness may differ depending on an individual’s country and culture.

The growth of adult ego development to post-conventional levels is associated with many adaptive advantages for the individual and society. However, the vast majority of adults across a wide range of samples demonstrate ego stages well below the maximum potential. In an effort to advance understanding of why and how development to higher ego levels might occur for some individuals and not others, we explored whether particular personality preferences and combinations thereof (as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI) are associated with higher ego levels and whether particular personality preferences might act as inhibiting or facilitating factors in ego development. Participants were 374 adults (aged 18–61; 50 % female) undertaking 11 community leadership development and 2 professional management development programs. After adjusting for effects of age and education, a preference for Intuition on the MBTI was associated with significantly higher ego development on program entry and with greater ego development during the programs. These results are consistent with previous research and provide support for Manners’ and Durkin’s (Developmental Review, 20:475–513, 2000 ) proposal that dispositional personality characteristics may enhance or constrain ego development.

This paper reports on leadership program participants’ experience of, and readiness for, stage transition (when one adult developmental stage gives way to another—as in Loevinger’s (Ego development. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1976 ) stage theory of consciousness, or ego, development). This appears to be the first study reporting the subjective experience of recent shifts in consciousness specifically within the context of leadership development programs. Using qualitative thematic methods to analyse survey responses from 84 individuals graduating from three Australian community leadership programs, we compared the accounts of those who had shifted a stage of consciousness (‘shifters’), those who had changed but not transitioned (‘movers’), and those who had not experienced change (‘non-shifters’). We found support for theoretical predictions concerning the types of changes shifters noticed in themselves, consistent with the small but growing body of research showing positive associations between consciousness development and better leadership performance and organisational outcomes. The data additionally provide support for the conceptual framework of consciousness development articulated by Manners and Durkin (Dev Rev 20:475–513, 2000 . doi: 10.1006/drev.2000.0508 ), and contextual information which may help explain and predict the differing responses to leadership training of people with Myers Briggs Type Indicator Sensing and Intuition preferences—thus contributing to program selection and design. An important, if preliminary, finding was that when selecting candidates for developmental training programs, people who are experiencing significant work or other life changes and challenges should arguably be prioritised rather than sidelined: our shifters cited such challenges as influences promoting readiness for change. Although these conclusions are based on an analysis of survey data, they provide direction for future in-depth qualitative and quantitative research.

Auditory sentence comprehension involves processing content (semantics), grammar (syntax), and intonation (prosody). The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is involved in sentence comprehension guided by these different cues, with neuroimaging studies preferentially locating syntactic and semantic processing in separate IFG subregions. However, this regional specialisation has not been confirmed with a neurostimulation method. Consequently, the causal role of such a specialisation remains unclear. This study probed the role of the posterior IFG (pIFG) for syntactic processing and the anterior IFG (aIFG) for semantic processing with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in a task that required the interpretation of the sentence's prosodic realisation. Healthy participants performed a sentence completion task with syntactic and semantic decisions, while receiving 10 Hz rTMS over either left aIFG, pIFG, or vertex (control). Initial behavioural analyses showed an inhibitory effect on accuracy without task‐specificity. However, electric field simulations revealed differential effects for both subregions. In the aIFG, stronger stimulation led to slower semantic processing, with no effect of pIFG stimulation. In contrast, we found a facilitatory effect on syntactic processing in both aIFG and pIFG, where higher stimulation strength was related to faster responses. Our results provide first evidence for the functional relevance of left aIFG in semantic processing guided by intonation. The stimulation effect on syntactic responses emphasises the importance of the IFG for syntax processing, without supporting the hypothesis of a pIFG‐specific involvement. Together, the results support the notion of functionally specialised IFG subregions for diverse but fundamental cues for language processing. We investigated using transcranial magnetic stimulation whether subregions of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) underlie specific subdomains of language processing. The results suggest a domain‐specific role for the posterior IFG for grammatical processing, and a cross‐domain role for anterior IFG across language functions.

Linguistic disorders are one of the common problems in Alzheimer's disease, which in recent years has been considered as one of the key parameters in the diagnosis of Alzheimer (AD). Given that changes in sentence processing and working memory and the relationship between these two activities may be a diagnostic parameter in the early and preclinical stages of AD, the present study examines the comprehension and production of sentences and working memory in AD patients and healthy aged people. Twenty-five people with mild Alzheimer's and 25 healthy elderly people participated in the study. In this study, we used the digit span to evaluate working memory. Syntactic priming and sentence completion tasks in canonical and non-canonical conditions were used for evaluating sentence production. We administered sentence picture matching and cross-modal naming tasks to assess sentence comprehension. The results of the present study revealed that healthy elderly people and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease have a significant difference in comprehension of relative clause sentences (P 0.05). They had a significant difference in auditory and visual reaction time (P 0.05). The results of the present study showed that the mean scores related to comprehension, production and working memory in people with mild Alzheimer's were lower than healthy aged people, which indicate sentence processing problems at this level of the disease. People with Alzheimer have difficulty comprehending and producing complex syntactic structures and have poorer performance in tasks that required more memory demands. It seems that the processing problems of these people are due to both working memory and language problems, which are not separate from each other and both are involved in.

Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56 [3], 384–409, 2007 ). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent.

To avoid post-neurosurgical language deficits, intraoperative mapping of the language function in the brain can be complemented with preoperative mapping with fMRI. The validity of an fMRI ‘language localizer’ paradigm crucially depends on the choice of an optimal language task and baseline condition. This study presents a new fMRI ‘language localizer’ in Russian using overt sentence completion, a task that comprehensively engages the language function by involving both production and comprehension at the word and sentence level. The paradigm was validated in 18 neurologically healthy volunteers who participated in two scanning sessions, for estimating test-retest reliability. For the first time, two baseline conditions for the sentence completion task were compared. At the group level, the paradigm significantly activated both anterior and posterior language-related regions. Individual-level analysis showed that activation was elicited most consistently in the inferior frontal regions, followed by posterior temporal regions and the angular gyrus. Test-retest reliability of activation location, as measured by Dice coefficients, was moderate and thus comparable to previous studies. Test-retest reliability was higher in the frontal than temporo-parietal region and with the most liberal statistical thresholding compared to two more conservative thresholding methods. Lateralization indices were expectedly left-hemispheric, with greater lateralization in the frontal than temporo-parietal region, and showed moderate test-retest reliability. Finally, the pseudoword baseline elicited more extensive and more reliable activation, although the syllable baseline appears more feasible for future clinical use. Overall, the study demonstrated the validity and reliability of the sentence completion task for mapping the language function in the brain. The paradigm needs further validation in a clinical sample of neurosurgical patients. Additionally, the study contributes to general evidence on test-retest reliability of fMRI.

There are an increasing number of bilateral and single-sided-deafness cochlear-implant (CI) users who hope to achieve improved spatial-hearing abilities through access to sound in both ears. It is, however, unclear how speech is processed when inputs are functionally asymmetrical, which may have an impact on spatial-hearing abilities. Therefore, functionally asymmetrical hearing was controlled and parametrically manipulated using a channel vocoder as a CI simulation. In Experiment 1 , normal-hearing (NH) listeners performed a dichotic listening task (i.e., selective attention to one ear, ignoring the other) using asymmetrical signal degradation. Spectral resolution varied independently in each ear (4, 8, 16 channels, and unprocessed control). Performance decreased with decreasing resolution in the target ear and increasing resolution in the interferer ear. In Experiment 2 , these results were replicated using a divided attention task (attend to both ears, report one after sentence completion) in both NH and bilateral CI listeners, although overall performance was lower than in Experiment 1 . In Experiment 3 , frequency-to-place mismatch simulated shallow CI insertion depths (0, 3, 6-mm shifts, and unprocessed control). Performance mostly decreased with increasing shift in the target ear and decreasing shift in the interferer ear; however, performance nonmonotonicities occurred. The worst performance occurred when the shift matched across ears, suggesting that pitch similarity increases difficulty. The results show that it is more difficult to attend an ear that is relatively degraded or distorted, which may set spatial-hearing limitations for CI users when trying to attend to a target in complex auditory scenes.

It has been classically postulated that alexithymia is related to a pervasive inability of emotional recognition and expression. This leaves some individuals little choice but to somatise unprocessed emotions commonly caused by internal conflicts. The present study thus aimed to explore the nature of conflicts, controls and stress tolerance, affect, self-perception, and interpersonal perception and behavior in somatization patients with alexithymia. 30 individuals of both sexes and of the age range 20-50 years, diagnosed with somatization disorder and alexithymia, were purposively undertaken for the study. Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20, Sack’s Sentence Completion Test and the Rorschach Test – Exner’s Comprehensive System were used to screen for alexithymia, to measure conflicts and the other aforementioned domains respectively. Results revealed that conflicts related to self-concept, sex, and family were primarily present in this sample. Characteristic patterns of underlying vulnerabilities seemed to account for poor stress tolerance, affective complications, negative self-perception, and maladaptive interpersonal functioning. It is suggested that alexithymia and a tendency to develop conflicts in somatization are based on the foundation of certain fundamental personality predispositions. Identifying said personality patterns could aid in appropriate and effective goal-setting in psychotherapy, specific to this otherwise treatment-resistant patient population.