Assessing the construct validity of the Chinese-Version Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief on male and female undergraduate students.

BACKGROUND: Screening for the schizotypal personality trait is one strategy to identify people who may be susceptible to early psychosis or be at high risk for prodromal psychosis. The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B) has been widely used to assess the schizotypal personality and has been translated into Chinese. However, the psychometric properties of the Chinese-version scale have yet to be evaluated. PURPOSE: This study evaluates the construct validity of the Chinese-version SPQ-B on a sample of male and female undergraduate students in Taiwan. METHODS: A cross-sectional design with convenient sampling was used for this study. The data were collected using the Chinese-version SPQ-B between October 2008 and June 2009. Participants included 513 male and 675 female undergraduate students in Taiwan. The factor construct validity of the scale was examined by confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modeling with SPSS AMOS version 17 software. RESULTS: The results show that the three-factor model fits the data better than the one-factor model for both male and female participants. The male participants scored significantly higher than their female counterparts in terms of total scale, interpersonal subscales, and disorganized subscales. CONCLUSIONS/IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: The Chinese version of the SPQ-B adequately achieves three-factor construct validity for undergraduate students. The scale may be used to screen for the schizotypal personality trait in both male and female college students to identify those at an elevated risk for mental illness.

Seeing and doing: ability to act moderates orientation effects in object perception.

We investigated whether the impact of an object's orientation on a perceiver's actions (an orientation effect) is moderated by the perceiver's ability to act on the object in question. To do this, we manipulated the physical location of presented objects (Experiment 1) and the perceiver's action capacity (Experiment 2). Regardless of the physical distance of the object, manual responses were sensitive to the object's orientation (the orientation effect) when the object was within the participant's action range but not when the object was outside of the action range. These results support an embodied view of object perception and shed light on peripersonal space representation.

Sensitivity and specificity of the Chinese version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief for identifying undergraduate students susceptible to psychosis.

BACKGROUND: Early interventions can improve treatment outcomes for individuals with major psychiatric disorders and with nonspecific symptoms but increasingly impaired cognitive perception, emotions, and behaviour. One way used to identify people susceptible to psychosis is through the schizotypal personality trait. Persons with schizotypal characteristics have been identified with the widely used Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief. However, no suitable instruments are available to screen individuals in the Taiwanese population for evidence of early psychotic symptoms. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to test the sensitivity and specificity of the Chinese version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief for identifying undergraduate students' susceptibility to psychosis. DESIGN: Two-stage, cross-sectional survey design. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The self-administered scale was tested in a convenience sample of 618 undergraduate students at a medical university in Taiwan. Among these students, 54 completed the scale 2 weeks apart for test-retest reliability, and 80 were tested to identify their susceptibility to psychosis. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: In Stage I, participants with scores in the top 6.5% were classified as the high-score group (n=40). The control group (n=40) was randomly selected from the remaining participants with scores <15 and matched by gender. These 80 students were asked to participate in psychiatric interviews in Stage II. The instrument was tested for reliability using intraclass correlation coefficients and the Kuder-Richardson formula 20. The instrument was analysed for optimal sensitivity and specificity using odds-ratio analysis and receiver operating characteristic curves. RESULTS: The 22-item Chinese version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief had a 2-week test-retest reliability of 0.82 and internal consistency of 0.76. The optimal cut-off score was 17, with odds ratios of 24.4 and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.83. The instrument had a sensitivity of 80.0% and specificity of 85.9% in identifying undergraduate students' susceptibility to psychosis. CONCLUSIONS: The Chinese version Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief is a reliable instrument, but should not be used as a screening tool until its psychometric properties have been evaluated in more detail. Other screening tools need to be used in future studies with the CSPQ-B to improve the accuracy of identifying susceptibility to psychosis among young adults.

Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language?

Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months of age. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S. Yang, & S. Carey, 2007). The authors used 3 experiments to explore the causal relation between these 2 capacities. Relative to English, Japanese and Mandarin had impoverished singular-plural marking. Using the manual search task, in Experiment 1 the authors found that by around 22 months of age, Japanese children also distinguished between singular and plural sets. Experiments 2 and 3 extended this finding to Mandarin-learning toddlers. Mandarin learners who were 20-24 months of age did not yet comprehend Mandarin singular-plural marking (i.e., yige vs. yixie, or -men), yet they did distinguish between singular and plural sets in manual search. These experiments suggest that knowledge of singular-plural morphology is not necessary for deploying the nonlinguistic distinction between singular and plural sets.

Embodied memory judgments: a case of motor fluency.

It is well known that perceptual and conceptual fluency can influence episodic memory judgments. Here, the authors asked whether fluency arising from the motor system also impacts recognition memory. Past research has shown that the perception of letters automatically activates motor programs of typing actions in skilled typists. In this study, expert typists made more false recognition errors to letter dyads which would be easier or more fluent to type than nonfluent dyads, while no typing action was involved (Experiment 1). This effect was minimized with a secondary motor task that implicated the same fingers that would be used to type the presented dyads, but this effect remained with a noninterfering motor task (Experiment 2). Typing novices, as a comparison group, did not show fluency effects in recognition memory. These findings suggest that memory is influenced by covert simulation of actions associated with the items being judged-even when there is no intention to act-and highlight the intimate connections between higher level cognition and action.

Finding one's meaning: a test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development.

We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. Daedalus, 59-68) that children's initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two, three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular and plural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languages without singular-plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, children acquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languages like English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate this relation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English. We found a significant correlation between children's comprehension of numerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners, even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that 2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology and the word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular noun phrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example, in a Truth-Value Judgment task, most children judged that a banana was consistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for the numeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nouns did not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children who did not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that children distinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning, assigning exact interpretations only to numerals.

Ca++ influx is essential for the hypotensive response to arginine vasopressin-induced neuron activation of the area postrema in the rat.

We attempted to relate the signal pathway to the hypotension induced by arginine vasopressin (AVP) injection into the area postrema (AP) in urethane-anesthetized and ventilated rats with vagotomy. A femoral artery and vein were catheterized to measure the blood pressure (BP) and administer drugs, respectively. The rat was placed on a stereotaxic apparatus to expose the calamus sriptorius (CS) by craniostomy and maintained at normocapnia in hyperoxia. In protocol 1, hypotension evoked by AVP (3.0 x 10(-5) IU) microinjected into the AP 0.2 mm rostral to the CS of the midline was abolished by V(1A) antagonist, U73122 (phospholipase C blocker), and BAPTA-AM (Ca(++) chelator), suggesting that an increasing intracellular Ca(++) is essential for AVP-induced hypotension. In protocol 2, AVP-induced hypotension was abolished by EGTA (extracellular Ca(++) chelator) and Ca(++) blockers such as nifedipine, nimodipine (L-types), and omega-conotoxin MVIIC (P/Q-type), but not by omega-conotoxin GVIA (N-type). In protocol 3, AVP-induced hypotension was blocked by calphostin C (protein kinase C inhibitor) and mimicked by an increase in intracellular K(+) ions that was reversed by EGTA. Vehicle injections produced no changes in BP. In protocol 4, glutamate-induced hypotension was reversed by BAPTA-AM but not by EGTA or V(1A) antagonist. Our data suggest that AVP-induced hypotension depends on Ca(++) influx through a signal pathway from phospholipase C to protein kinase C which inactivates K(+) channels that may depolarize AP neurons to activate L- and P/Q-type Ca(++) channels. This may provide new insights into establishing a relationship between the signal pathway and physiological functions.

On the relation between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and the conceptual distinction between one and more than one.

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not four objects from one. Thus, they failed to represent four objects as 'plural' or 'more than one'. Experiment 2 found that children continued to fail at the 1 vs. 4 manual-search task at 20 months of age, even when told, via explicit morpho-syntactic singular-plural cues, that one or many balls are being hidden. However, 22- and 24-month-olds succeeded both with and without verbal cues. Parental report data indicated that most 22- and 24-month-olds, but few 20-month-olds, had begun producing plural nouns in their speech. Also, the success among the older children was due to those children who had reportedly begun producing plural nouns. We discuss a possible role for language acquisition in children's deployment of set-based quantification and the distinction between singular and plural sets.

Vasopressin produces inhibition on phrenic nerve activity and apnea through V(1A) receptors in the area postrema in rats.

The area postrema (AP) is the most caudal circumventricular organ in the central nervous system and contains arginine vasopressin (AVP) receptors. To investigate that AVP receptors in the AP might participate in the modulation of respiration, the adult rat was anesthetized with urethane (1.2 g/kg, i.p.), paralyzed, ventilated artificially, and maintained at normocapnia in hyperoxia. The phrenic nerve was separated at C4 level. Phrenic burst was amplified, filtered, integrated, and then stored in the hard disc via the PowerLab system. Three doses of AVP and an AVP V(1A) receptor antagonist, [beta-mercapto-beta,beta-cyclopentamethylenepropionyl1,-O-Me-Tyr2,Arg8]-vasopressin, were microinjected into the AP through a pair of microelectrodes. The moderate and high doses of AVP reduced the PNA to 72% and 45% of the control (P < 0.05), extended the mean TE from 1.4 s before AVP to 4.0 s and 7.6 s, (P < 0.05), and decrease in BP by 26 and 37 mmHg (P < 0.05), respectively. These significant reductions in PNA and BP and elongation of TE were totally abolished by the pre-treatment of the AVP V(1A) receptor antagonist and by application of lidocaine or CoCl2 at the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS). Moreover, pulmonary inhibition caused by AVP was significantly attenuated by hypercapnia. These results strongly suggest that AVP V(1A) receptors in the AP may participate in the modulation of cardiopulmonary functions through the activation of V(1A) receptors and the pathway connected to the NTS. They may also indicate that a putative vasopressinergic pathway has a projection to the AP to alter the excitability of neurons having AVP V(1A) receptors and results in an inhibition of cardiopulmonary functions via the connection between the AP and NTS.

Activation of ventrolateral medulla neurons by arginine vasopressin via V1A receptors produces inhibition on respiratory-related hypoglossal nerve discharge in the rat.

Arginine vasopressin (AVP) is an important neurohormone in the regulation of many aspects of central nervous system, yet its modulation on the respiratory function remains largely unknown. The aims of this study were to investigate the modulation of phrenic (PNA) and hypoglossal nerve activity (HNA) by central administration of AVP and to identify the involvement of AVP V1A receptors in this modulation. Animals were anesthetized with urethane (1.2 g/kg, i.p.), paralyzed with gallamine triethiodide (5 mg/kg, i.v.), and artificially ventilated. The rat was then placed on a stereotaxic apparatus in a prone position. PNA and HNA were monitored at normocapnia in hyperoxia. Microinjection of AVP into the medial ventrolateral medulla (VLM) and/or rostral ventral respiratory group (rVRG) produced a dose-dependent inhibition on both PNA and HNA, whereas the microinjection of AVP into the region of lateral VLM resulted in a similar inhibition of these nerve activities and a pressor response. Systemic administration of phentolamine abolished the pressor effect but did not affect the inhibition of PNA and HNA evoked by AVP injection into the lateral VLM and/or rVRG, suggesting that AVP-induced inhibition of PNA and HNA was not due to the side effect of pressor response. These cardiopulmonary modulations were totally abolished by the central pretreatment of AVP V1A receptor antagonist. Our results suggested that AVP may activate neurons located at the VLM and/or rVRG via the AVP V1A receptor to inhibit respiratory-related HNA and thus to regulate upper airway aperture.