Intersubject electroencephalogram (EEG) coherence of 11 couples was measured during an individual and joint practice of a guided mindful breathing exercise. Additionally, the relationship of personality dimensions of agreeableness and extraversion with intersubject coherence was examined. There were four male-male pairs, five female-female pairs, and two male-female pairs. The age of the participants ranged between 18 and 28 (M = 22.3, SD = 2.9). During the counterbalanced joint and individual conditions, the same mindfulness listening tape (3 min) was played, while during the individual task, a screen was placed between the two participants. Results showed an increase in intersubject coherence during joint practice compared to individual practice in frontal (F8) and temporal (T5 and T6) electrodes in the alpha band. With respect to personality characteristics, higher agreeableness of a dyad was associated with an increase in intersubject coherence in in temporal (T6) theta band. The increase in intersubject coherence in the theta band in high agreeableness subjects during joint practice might be associated with theory of mind activation. This study provides new insights concerning brain coherence in healthy people during joint mindful breathing, including the association with personality characteristics.

We carried out two cross-sectional studies (N1 = 240; N2 = 334) on a population of native Polishspeaking young adults to examine the relationships between trait anger, grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and self-reported sarcasm use, measured with a Polish translation of the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS, Ivanko et al., 2004). We found that trait anger was significantly and positively associated with self-reported sarcasm use generally and on the face-saving subscale. Additionally, grandiose, but not vulnerable narcissism showed a pattern of positive correlations with self-reported sarcasm use, both generally as well as on the individual SSS subscales. Trait anger and grandiose narcissism were also significant predictors of self-reported sarcasm use, although the influence of narcissism weakened upon the inclusion of trait anger in the regression models, suggesting that trait anger might contribute to perceiving oneself as sarcastic among narcissistic individuals.

This paper reports an investigation of the influence of method effects on the measurement of reasoning and of the relationships of these effects to basic cognitive processes. For this purpose, the variation due to the item-position and difficulty effects was separated from the variation due to the measured latent source of inductive reasoning. Data were collected by means of inductive reasoning items and cognitive tasks measuring working memory (WM) updating, rule learning, and automatization. Confirmatory factor analysis models served the decomposition of the variation of inductive reasoning data into a purified version of inductive reasoning, item-position, and difficulty components. The investigation of the relationships of corresponding latent variables and basic cognitive processes revealed two major associations: (a) the purified version of reasoning correlated with WM updating and (b) the item-position effect correlated with variants of learning. These results could be interpreted as signifying a two-dimensional structure of reasoning associated with executive functioning and learning processes.

Though there has been immense progress in the field, early detection and reliable prediction of major depressive disorder (MDD) still remains a challenge. In the present study, we used multi fractal analysis (MFA) to perform statistical analysis on fMRI resting-state data of depressed patients and normal controls to find out the singularity spectrum, an important tool of MFA, and derive various supporting attributes, leading to a quantification of the geometrical pattern formation in the brain. It was found, and reported for the first time, that the estimates of Hurst exponent and fractal dimension values vary significantly for the depressed subjects and normal controls, helping in detecting and predicting early signs of depression.

Conversion is one of many concepts of a philosophical origin that are used in both the psychology of religion and other social sciences as well as canonical texts. Although Plato is commonly believed to have been its creator, scholars do not agree on the term he used to refer to it. The prototype of the Christian religious conversion is taken to be the Greek verb epistrephō (“convert,” “turn,” “return,” or “go back”), whose prototype is the Old Testament Hebrew verb šȗbh (“to become converted”). The term epistrephō ascribed to Plato does not occur in those fragments of his myth of the cave in Book VII of the Republic in which he mentions conversion, first as a metaphor (the emblematic image of turning one’s head in the opposite direction) and then literally (conversion as a specific art). In both instances, Plato uses the term periagō (“turn around”) and periagōgē (“[the act of] turning around”). The latter word is used in the title of this article, which references Plato’s myth of the cave. Plato’s philosophical metaphor for conversion was then taken up by Christians, who imbued it with a religious sense. Why did they also take up the word epistrephō, which has no relation to conversion as understood by Plato? To answer this question, one must first know why the authors of the Septuagint translated the Hebrew term šȗbh as the Greek term epistrephō and not as periagō. Thus, ascribing to Plato the authorship of the term epistrephō as related to his understanding of conversion clashes with historical evidence. Instead, the author’s intentions are reflected in periagō and periagōgē.

The Satisfaction With Family Life scale (SWFL) was developed by Zabriskie and McCormick to assess individuals’ satisfaction with family relationships and family life. The aim of our study was twofold: (a) to verify the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the SWFL scale, and (b) to confirm if it maintains the single-factor structure of the original SWFL. A total of 474 subjects from the general population were involved in the study, of whom 205 were women and 269 men. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed a very good fit of the single-factor structure of the tool. The Polish version of the SWFL scale demonstrated good psychometric properties with excellent test-retest reliability. The obtained results support the utility of the Polish version of the SWFL scale as a valuable measure of global satisfaction with own family.

This correlational study investigated the relationship between cognitive aptitudes and online and offline processing of L2 syntactic structures. As a measure of online processing, the study used a self-paced reading task. To tap into offline L2 knowledge, it employed an untimed grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The main analyses focused on the correct placement of relative pronouns. The supplementary analyses were carried out on a range of other structures used as fillers in the GJT. In terms of cognitive aptitudes, the study considered the role of explicit learning aptitude and working memory in the processing of L2. Explicit aptitude was operationalized as an ability to infer rules of a new language and measured by the LLAMA F task, and working memory was measured by a digit span task. Moreover, the design included a measure of general L2 proficiency. The results showed that L2 learners’ scores in the GJT were positively related to their explicit language aptitude. However, this type of relationship was observed only for ungrammatical items. In contrast, working memory was not a significant predictor of the performance on the GJT. As regards online processing, no links were found between the predictor variables and participants’ sensitivity to errors in the self-paced reading task. Taken together, the results corroborate the role of explicit learning abilities in offline processing of L2 grammar. Additionally, supplementary analyses suggest that this relationship may hold even when general L2 proficiency is controlled for.