Schizophrenia has been associated to a distorted time clock. By subtracting contact duration from Inter Response Interval, we report evidence for preserved internal clock in schizophrenia, with normal spontaneous tapping tempo. Contact durations were however increased in patients suggesting a specific problem in the fast integration of incoming haptic feedback ...

Suicide is an important public health problem that results from the interaction of both psychosocial and biological factors. Although it is known that particular neurobiological processes underlie suicidal ideation and behavior, there still remains limited knowledge about the specific factors involved. To explore the neurobiology of suicide we generated microarray ...

Activation-induced deaminase (AID), a cytidine deaminase, can accelerate the acquisition of BCR-ABL1 kinase domain mutations in human CML. In the present study, we investigated the expression of AID and Bcr-Abl in CML cells derived from 35 clinical patients. We found that both AID and Bcr-Abl were correlatively over-expressed in CML-LBC ...

Attachment theory is a theory of affect regulation as it occurs in the context of close relationships. Early research focused on regulation of emotions through maintenance of proximity to supportive others (attachment figures) in times of need. Recently, emphasis has shifted to the regulation of emotion, and the benefits of ...

Two studies examine how the time at which problem solving is suspended relative to an impasse affects the impact of incidental hints. An impasse is a point in problem solving at which a problem solver is not making progress and does not know how to proceed. In both studies, work ...

Problem solving is a signature attribute of adult humans, but we need to understand how this develops in children. Tool use is proposed as an ideal way to study problem solving in children less than 3 years of age because overt manual action can reveal how the child plans to ...

Pediatric summer camps are emerging as a means to increase social support and improve children's attitudes about their chronic illness. Because of the high rate of camp attendance, it may be feasible to implement interventions within that setting; however, it has yet to be determined what components of camp are ...

In the present study, we examined the link between goal and problem-solving strategy preferences in 130 young and older adults using hypothetical family problem vignettes. At baseline, young adults preferred autonomy goals, whereas older adults preferred generative goals. Imagining an expanded future time perspective led older adults to show preferences ...

Preference for tools with either rigid or flexible properties was explored in orangutans (Pongo spp.) through an extension of D. J. Povinelli, J. E. Reaux, and L. A. Theall's (2000) flimsy-tool problem. Three captive orangutans were presented with three unfamiliar pairs of tools to solve a novel problem. Although each ...

Recent years have seen a proliferation of problem solving courts designed to rehabilitate certain classes of offenders and thereby resolve the underlying problems that led to their court involvement in the first place. Some commentators have reacted positively to these courts, considering them an extension of the philosophy and logic ...

Therapeutic programs for binge eating disorder (BED) often include the mediation of problem-solving skills to deal with the desire to binge. In women with BED, problem-solving abilities have not been studied yet. Knowing that reasons for binge episodes are often linked to interpersonal topics, we expected women with BED to ...

This study investigated the internal consistency, factor structure, and concurrent validity of the Social Problem Solving Inventory-Spanish Version for Hispanics (SPSI-R-Hispanic), a translation of the Social Problem Solving Inventory-Revised (SPSI-R; D'Zurilla, Nezu & Maydeu-Olivares, 2002), in a North American sample of 325 Spanish speaking Hispanics. The scales of the SPSI-R-Hispanic ...

A tanglegram is a pair of trees on the same set of leaves with matching leaves in the two trees joined by an edge. Tanglegrams are widely used in biology--to compare evolutionary histories of host and parasite species and to analyze genes of species in the same geographical area. We ...

In the present article, we examine the contribution of working memory (WM) to solution of the nine-dot problem, a classic insight problem. Prior research has generally demonstrated a limited role for WM in the solution of insight problems, which are typically assumed to be solved without conscious planning. However, MacGregor, ...

An improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve reliability problems in this paper. The IPSO designs two position updating strategies: In the early iterations, each particle flies and searches according to its own best experience with a large probability; in the late iterations, each particle flies and ...

A distinct type of mental preparation (activity in medial frontal and temporal areas) had been found to facilitate insight problem solving independent of specific problems [25]. In order to explore whether neural activity during a preparatory interval (mental preparation) is associated with which insight problems would be solved or not, ...

In genome rearrangement, given a set of genomes G and a distance measure d, the median problem asks for another genome q that minimizes the total distance [Formula: see text]. This is a key problem in genome rearrangement based phylogenetic analysis. Although this problem is known to be NP-hard, we ...

Consider a classification problem involving only discrete features that are represented as random variables with some prescribed discrete sample space. In this paper, we study the complexity of two feature selection problems. The first problem consists in finding a feature subset of a given size k that has minimal Bayes ...

OBJECTIVE: Poor problem-solving and low self-esteem are frequently cited as significant factors in the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa. The current study examines the multi-dimensional elements of these measures and postulates a model whereby self-esteem mediates the relationship between social problems-solving and anorexic pathology and considers the implications of ...

We analyze the effect of electrode mislocation on the electroencephalography (EEG) inverse problem using the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for single dipolar source parameters. We adopt a realistic head shape model, and solve the forward problem using the Boundary Element Method; the use of the CRB allows us to obtain general ...

This paper introduces a simple direct manipulation algorithm for the popular blendshape facial animation approach. As is the case for body animation, direct manipulation of blendshape models is an inverse problem: when a single vertex is moved, the system must infer the movement of other points. The key to solving ...

Previous research has characterized insight as the product of internal processes, and has thus investigated the cognitive and motivational processes that immediately precede it. In this research, however, we investigate whether insight can be catalyzed by a cultural artifact, an external object imbued with learned meaning. Specifically, we exposed participants ...

Given two genomic maps G and H represented by a sequence of n gene markers, a strip (syntenic block) is a sequence of distinct markers of length at least two which appear as subsequences in the input maps, either directly or in reversed and negated form. The problem Maximal Strip ...

This study compared African Americans' and Caucasians' willingness to participate in an indicated intervention to prevent depression with problem-solving therapy. It also examined participants' problem-solving skills. Hypotheses stated that there would be no racial differences in consent rates and that social problem-solving coping skills would be lower among African Americans ...

Recurrent neural networks for solving constrained least absolute deviation (LAD) problems or L(1)-norm optimization problems have attracted much interest in recent years. But so far most neural networks can only deal with some special linear constraints efficiently. In this paper, two neural networks are proposed for solving LAD problems with ...

The aim of this study was to investigate associations between COMT Val(158)Met polymorphism, and interpersonal problem solving capacity and cognitive functions in schizophrenia. COMT Val(158)Met polymorphism was studied with ARMS-PCR method in 99 outpatients with schizophrenia. Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale was used to assess symptom severity. The Assessment of Interpersonal ...

This exploratory study examined the relationship between problem-solving styles and multicultural personality dispositions among 91 graduate students enrolled in an urban university located in the northeast United States. Problem-solving style was assessed with the three dimensions of the VIEW: an Assessment of Problem Solving Style. Multicultural personality was assessed with ...

This study examined the performance of adults with an acquired brain injury (ABI) on social cognition tasks assessing mentalistic interpretation and social problem-solving. These tasks were based on an earlier version described by Channon and Crawford (1999). Twenty participants with an ABI (10 resulting from a traumatic brain injury, 10 ...

The aim of this paper is to report the results of a preliminary examination of the efficacy of the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) 10-14 in improving parent and youth problem-solving skill. The Hypotheses in this paper include: (1) youth and parents who participated in SFP would have lower mean scores ...

Objective: Two studies were performed to assess both divergent and convergent thinking in adults with ADHD. Method: The first study compared the problem-solving abilities of healthy participants (N = 144) and unmedicated adults with ADHD (N = 144). In the second study, problem-solving abilities of adults with diagnosed ADHD (N ...

Two experiments tested whether differences in problem-solving strategies influence the ability of people to monitor their problem-solving effectiveness as measured by confidence judgments. On multiple choice problems, people tend to use either a constructive matching strategy, whereby they attempt to solve a problem before looking at the response options, or ...

This contribution to the International Congress on Production of Safe Water, Izmir, Turkey, 20-24 January, 2009, relates to general aspects of a water supply undertaking rather than to particular technologies or chemistries for water treatment. The paper offers a "creative problem solving" approach following Fogler and LeBlanc (Strategies for creative ...

In 4 studies we examined the relationship between self-concept clarity and conflict management. Individuals with higher self-concept clarity were overall more active and showed more cooperative problem-solving behavior than people with low self-concept clarity. There were no relationships with contending or yielding. The positive relationship with cooperative behavior was mediated ...

Married couples (N = 172) were observed as newlyweds and observed again 1 year later while engaging in 2 problem-solving and 2 personal support discussions. Microanalytic coding of these conversations was used to examine associations between problem-solving and social support behaviors for 1 year and their relative contributions to 10-year ...

Modern drug discovery demands large amounts of high-quality protein and, therefore, begins by expressing target genes in heterologous systems such as bacteria or insect cells. However, some of the most attractive drug targets have proven challenging to clone and express. A technology called Combinatorial Domain Hunting has been developed to ...

The Tower of London (TOL) task has been widely used in both clinical and research realms. In the current study, 104 healthy participants attempted all possible moderate- to high-difficulty TOL problems in order to determine: (1) optimal measures of problem solving performance, (2) problem characteristics, other than the minimum moves ...

In this paper, a novel hybrid Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Quantum Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) is proposed for solving continuous optimization problems. ABC is adopted to increase the local search capacity as well as the randomness of the populations. In this way, the improved QEA can jump out of the ...

In the present study, 258 doctoral students working in the health, biological, and social sciences were asked to solve a series of field-relevant problems calling for creative thought. Proposed solutions to these problems were scored with respect to critical creative thinking skills such as problem definition, conceptual combination, and idea ...

Some road safety problems have persisted for a long time in nearly all motorised countries, suggesting that they are not easily solved. This paper documents the persistence over time of five such problems: the high risk of accidents involving young drivers; the high risk of injury run by unprotected road ...

Bilevel optimization problems involve two optimization tasks (upper and lower level), in which every feasible upper level solution must correspond to an optimal solution to a lower level optimization problem. These problems commonly appear in many practical problem solving tasks including optimal control, process optimization, game-playing strategy developments, transportation problems, ...

Before instruction, children solve many arithmetic word problems with informal strategies based on the situation described in the problem. A Situation Strategy First framework is introduced that posits that initial representation of the problem activates a situation-based strategy even after instruction: only when it is not efficient for providing the ...

The ability of some bird species to pull up meat hung on a string is a famous example of spontaneous animal problem solving. The "insight" hypothesis claims that this complex behaviour is based on cognitive abilities such as mental scenario building and imagination. An operant conditioning account, in contrast, would ...

A new treatment to determine the Pareto-optimal outcome for a non-zero-sum game is presented. An equilibrium point for any game is defined here as a set of strategy choices for the players, such that no change in the choice of any single player will increase the overall payoff of all ...

Conventional burr-hole buttons sometimes do not fit the burr hole well due to the curvature of the surrounding bone. An irregular surface at the border between the button and the surrounding skull may appear unaesthetic. The major problem is the difference between the curvature radius of the skull and the ...

Inverse lithography technology (ILT) treats photomask design for microlithography as an inverse mathematical problem. We show how the inverse lithography problem can be addressed as an obstacle reconstruction problem or an extended nonlinear image restoration problem, and then solved by a level set time-dependent model with finite difference schemes. We ...

Defining an organism has long been a tricky problem for biologists. Recent work has shown how an approach based on adaptation can solve this problem, giving a conceptually simple two-dimensional measure of 'organismality'.

This study examined 25 university students' use of addition to solve large single-digit subtractions by contrasting performance in the standard subtraction format (12-9=.) and in the addition format (9+.=12). In particular, we investigated the effect of the relative size of the subtrahend on performance in both formats. We found a ...

Using Heppner, et al.'s data from 2004, this study tested career counseling clients in the United States on problem-solving appraisal scores and career-related variables. A cross-lagged panel design with structural equation modeling was used. Results supported the link between clients' precounseling problem-solving appraisal scores and career outcome. This finding held ...

Complex problem solving (CPS) emerged in the last 30 years in Europe as a new part of the psychology of thinking and problem solving. This paper introduces into the field and provides a personal view. Also, related concepts like macrocognition or operative intelligence will be explained in this context. Two ...

In the first experiment reported here, adults were given an unexpected task of problem recognition after a resolution task. During the recognition task, participants were presented with the original problems, inconsistent problems that had never been solved, and paraphrases, which respected the relational structure of the original problems but not ...