Emotional sensitivity predicts internship performance of medical students enrolled under different admission screening protocols.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: People with heightened emotional sensitivity can perceive better how others feel. Students admitted to medical school by interviews for assessing pre-set personal qualities, such as emotional sensitivity, may be more likely to meet patients' satisfaction in the future. We tested whether a student enrolled by passing the interview would have more emotional sensitivity than those by taking an exam. We also investigated what impact the enrolment protocols might have on students' internship performance. METHODS: Participants were first- and second-year medical students and assigned into the interviewed group or examined group according to the entrance protocols. Two emotion-related tasks and one control task were adopted. Subsequently, the performance evaluation of clinical work from students' advisors about these two groups of participants were collected after they finished the internship training at the hospital. CONCLUSIONS: Students selected through the pre-programmed interview which is based on personal qualities showed greater emotional sensitivity than those selected by the exam. Those students with better emotional sensitivity also performed better when they were in the internship training. Emotional sensitivity is a valid index to predict students' future performance and could be used in the selection protocol for medical students.

Impact of putamen stroke on task context updating: Evidence from P300 brain waves.

According to the context updating theory, the oddball P300 component indexes brain activities underlying revision of the mental representation induced by incoming stimuli. It involves an attention-driven comparison process that evaluates the representation of the previous event in working memory. Delayed latencies have been reported for various types of stroke such as unilateral thalamic stroke. We investigated memory updating effects in patients with putamen stroke. Two groups of patients with putamen and thalamic stroke were recruited along with two control groups of young and old healthy participants. Auditory and visual P300 were elicited respectively in a two-stimulus oddball paradigm. The auditory P300 peak latencies were significantly longer in patients with a putamen lesion than in the aged and young control groups and the same pattern was found in the thalamus-lesioned patient. The delayed auditory P300 component in both patient groups but neither control group suggests impairment of memory updating in patients with putamen stroke comparable with thalamic stroke. Our study illustrates the important role of subcortical structures subserved in context updating.

Degraded Impairment of Emotion Recognition in Parkinson's Disease Extends from Negative to Positive Emotions.

Because of dopaminergic neurodegeneration, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) show impairment in the recognition of negative facial expressions. In the present study, we aimed to determine whether PD patients with more advanced motor problems would show a much greater deficit in recognition of emotional facial expressions than a control group and whether impairment of emotion recognition would extend to positive emotions. Twenty-nine PD patients and 29 age-matched healthy controls were recruited. Participants were asked to discriminate emotions in Experiment 1 and identify gender in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, PD patients demonstrated a recognition deficit for negative (sadness and anger) and positive faces. Further analysis showed that only PD patients with high motor dysfunction performed poorly in recognition of happy faces. In Experiment 2, PD patients showed an intact ability for gender identification, and the results eliminated possible abilities in the functions measured in Experiment 2 as alternative explanations for the results of Experiment 1. We concluded that patients' ability to recognize emotions deteriorated as the disease progressed. Recognition of negative emotions was impaired first, and then the impairment extended to positive emotions.

Isolation, identification, and complete genome sequence of an avian reticuloendotheliosis virus isolated from geese.

Naturally occurring lymphoreticular tumors in geese have been found from time to time in Taiwan, but their etiology has not been determined except through morphological descriptions. This study observed a reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV) infection occurring in a white Roman goose (Anser anser) farm in Yunlin, Taiwan in 2006. These geese showed growth-retarded and nodular lymphoma-like tumors in the liver, lung, kidney, and pancreas. Thirty blood samples were taken for REV detection and 21 (70%) of them contained REV genetic sequences using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Virus isolation was attempted from 11 blood samples by inoculating the buffy coat onto DF1 cells. Nine (81%) REVs were isolated after three blind passages. The complete proviral sequence from one isolate was determined for phylogenetic analysis by direct sequencing using overlapping PCR products. The length of the provial genome is 8284 nucleotides. By comparing with other published REV complete sequences, the nucleotide percent identity ranged from 93.5% to 99.8% with most LTR varieties, ranging from 74.9% to 99.8%. The present isolated goose REV is most close to REV APC-566, a REV isolated from Attwater's Prairie chickens.