Mindreading abilities and borderline personality disorder: A comprehensive assessment using the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale.

Numerous studies have examined mindreading in borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, the empirical data obtained to date have not facilitated the development of a clear clinical profile of mindreading impairment in BPD due to a lack of consistency or incongruence across studies. One possible explanation for these inconsistencies and divergences in the current literature may lie in the multidimensional character of the mindreading construct; moreover, the heterogeneity of the experimental measures used to assess individuals with BPD mindreading skills may also need to be taken into account. The aim of the present study is to investigate mindreading skills and impairments in patients with BPD through direct comparison of a wide range of mindreading dimensions using a comprehensive semistructured interview, the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale (Th.o.m.a.s.) (Bosco et al., 2009). Our results show that the performance of patients with BPD differs from that of healthy controls only in certain specific dimensions of mindreading. The difficulties encountered by the patients with BPD typically emerge when mindreading tasks require them to disentangle their own subjective mindreading from that of another person, in other words, when they were required to assume an allocentric perspective.

Communicative impairment in traumatic brain injury: a complete pragmatic assessment.

The aim of the present study was to examine the communicative abilities of traumatic brain injury patients (TBI). We wish to provide a complete assessment of their communicative ability/disability using a new experimental protocol, the Assessment Battery of Communication, (ABaCo) comprising five scales--linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, context and conversational--which investigate all the main pragmatic elements involved in a communicative exchange. The ABaCo was administered to 21 TBI subjects and to a control group. The results showed that performance by TBI patients was worse than that of controls on all scales; moreover they showed a trend of increasing difficulty in understanding and producing different pragmatic phenomena, i.e., standard communication acts, deceits and ironies, whether such phenomena are expressed through the linguistic or extralinguistic modality.

Communicative abilities in autism: evidence for attentional deficits.

Although there are many theories about autism, something all of them agree upon is that autistics are impaired in the ability to communicate. The explanation is either their incapacity to attribute mental states to others or the interference of irrelevant stimuli with the access and processing of the communication (low). Our study on mute autistic children aims to investigate their communicative ability in order to bring some new evidence on the debate. We used an experimental technique that allows autistic children to access and process the communicative acts in a familiar context for as long as needed. The experimental results show that our sample of autistic children performs as well as the control group of normal children in dealing with directs, indirects, ironies, deceits, and recoveries of failure. Independent of their respective difficulty, the felicitous outcome of any of these acts requires the capacity to attribute an adequate communicative intention to the actor. Moreover, our results show that, contrary to the established findings in the literature, autistics' performance in the standard false belief task, a task that requires one to understand the mental states of other people, is equivalent to the performance of normal subjects. We argue that an attentional deficit affects the communicative performance of autistics in experiments where classic methodologies are used; with the proper methodology, we can access the unexplored world where mute autistic children also communicate. As far as we know, this is the first systematic experiment on pragmatic abilities in mute autistic children. Indeed, our work shows that tests and methodologies which help to focus on the communicative task improve the autistics' performance with respect to those used in the literature. We conclude that the autistic communicative deficit is at the performance level and that it has an attentional nature.

Have the invisible children become visible?

Over the past 30 years much information has been collected on children whose parents suffer from psychiatric illness. Research has shown that many of these children are at high risk for significant psychopathology but there have been few investigations examining whether or not they are being identified and are receiving mental health care. The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate to what extent the children of psychiatrically ill adult patients are identified and referred to the mental health services. Results of structured interviews with the patients indicate that a considerable number had school-aged children and that in many instances no inquiry had been made concerning the children's psychological health. Although some of the children were reported to have received treatment, few had been referred by their parent's psychiatrists. Recommendations to improve the identification and treatment of such children are outlined in this study.

Circling induced by intra-accumbens amphetamine injections.

Microinjections of d-amphetamine (5.0, 10.0 and 20.0 micrograms/0.5 microliters) into the nucleus accumbens caused reliable dose-dependent circling away from the side of injection. Injections of l-amphetamine were not effective, ruling out non-specific effects of pH, osmolarity and the like and also ruling out noradrenergic actions as explanations of the behavioral effects. Injections of d-amphetamine into the ventral caudate were less potent than those into the nucleus accumbens, suggesting nucleus accumbens rather than more dorsal tissue as the site of this behavioral effect. These data suggest that asymmetrical activation of the nucleus accumbens is a sufficient condition to induce circling behavior and raise questions for the commonly accepted view that asymmetrical activation of the caudate is a necessary condition for dopamine dependent circling behavior.

Facilitation of feeding by nucleus accumbens amphetamine injections: latency and speed measures.

Food-deprived rats were offered food in small meal segments, and latency to initiate feeding and time to complete it were recorded for each segment. Bilateral microinjections of d-amphetamine into nucleus accumbens dramatically increased the mean speed with which meal segments were eaten, but had no reliable effect on mean latency to initiate eating of new segments; l-amphetamine had similar but weaker effects. While mean eating speed was increased, this increase resulted from a decrease in the frequency of slow trials and not from an increase in the absolute speed of the fastest trials. These data suggest that amphetamine facilitates feeding by some other means than simple improvement of the motoric capacity of the animal, and they indicate that nucleus accumbens is an important site for amphetamine's established but not widely appreciated facilitory effects on feeding.

Concurrent facilitory and inhibitory effects of amphetamine on stimulation-induced eating.

At low doses (0.125 and 0.25 mg/kg, i.p.), amphetamine facilitated eating induced by lateral hypothalamic electrical stimulation. It decreased the frequency threshold for the behavior and it increased the probability of eating across a range of suprathreshold stimulation frequencies; it also accelerated eating, decreasing the average time to eat three 45-mg food pellets across the range of stimulation frequencies tested. At high doses (1.0 and 2.0 mg/kg), amphetamine increased the frequency threshold and decreased the probability of eating across the range of suprathreshold stimulation frequencies; on those trials where eating was observed, however, even these doses of amphetamine accelerated feeding. Several lines of evidence suggest that amphetamine influences feeding through multiple mechanisms, and that present data may be explained by independent facilitory and inhibitory mechanisms, with the inhibitory mechanism less sensitive to low doses but generally dominant when the two mechanisms are both activated by higher doses. Another possibility is that the well-known anorexic effects of amphetamine result at least in part from over-stimulation of the same mechanism as is involved in the more subtle facilitory effects of the drug.

Effects of nucleus accumbens amphetamine on lateral hypothalamic brain stimulation reward.

The effects of amphetamine were examined in a brain stimulation reward paradigm in which response rate was measured across a range of stimulation frequencies. Both low (0.0625 and 0.125 mg/kg) and high (1.0, 2.0 and 4.0 mg/kg) doses of systemic amphetamine decreased the stimulation frequency needed to sustain low rates of responding; high doses decreased the maximal response rates that were sustained by the highest stimulation frequencies. Ipsilateral microinjections (2.5, 5.0 and 10.0 micrograms/0.5 microliter) of D-amphetamine sulfate into the nucleus accumbens also caused shifts to the left of the rate-frequency function; no central dose caused a change in the asymptotic response rate associated with high stimulation frequencies. Contralateral injections of D-amphetamine (10.0 micrograms) also shifted the rate-frequency functions to the left, but were much less potent. Ipsilateral injections of D-amphetamine into the caudate were also less potent, suggesting nucleus accumbens rather than more dorsal tissue as the site of this behavioral action. Also less potent were the effects of L-amphetamine, ruling out non-specific effects of pH, osmolarity and the like and also ruling out noradrenergic actions as explanations of the behavioral effects of the injections. These data suggest that nucleus accumbens is a site of amphetamine's reward-enhancing and threshold-lowering effects on brain stimulation reward.

Opposite effects of unilateral forebrain ablations on ipsilateral and contralateral hypothalamic self-stimulation.

Unilateral ablations of frontal cortex, rostral striatum, nucleus accumbens, septal area and olfactory tubercle decreased ipsilateral hypothalamic self-stimulation; the same ablations had the opposite effect on contralateral self-stimulation. The ablations shifted the function relating response rate to stimulation frequency (rate-frequency function) to the right for ipsilateral self-stimulation and to the left for contralateral self-stimulation, suggesting a reduction and an augmentation, respectively, of the rewarding impact of the stimulation. The inhibition of ipsilateral self-stimulation was neither total nor permanent; 20-30% shifts in threshold were seen at first, but behavior returned to near-normal levels over a period of several weeks. In contrast, the augmentation of contralateral self-stimulation showed no significant change over the same period; in this case the 20-30% shifts in threshold were immediate and permanent. The degree of change in ipsilateral threshold was positively correlated with lesion size; the degree of change in the contralateral threshold was not. Ablations restricted to cortical tissue caused a lesser degree of augmentation of contralateral self-stimulation and had no effect on ipsilateral self-stimulation. The small effects of large ablations on ipsilateral self-stimulation confirm similar observations of Huston and Stellar and their co-workers and raise questions for current theories regarding the role of dopamine in brain stimulation reward. The facilitation of contralateral self-stimulation indicates that brain stimulation reward does not involve a completely lateralized mechanism.

Correlation between behavioral status and cerebral glucose utilization in rats following freezing lesion.

Standard small, superficial freezing lesions placed along the anterior-posterior plane of the left cortex produced behavioral changes in rats. One to 3 days following the lesion, rats showed asymmetries in somatosensory responsiveness, decreases in running wheel activity and difficulty with limb coordination. No changes in spontaneous circling were seen. At the completion of the behavioral testing on day 3 the [14C]2-deoxyglucose method confirmed the presence of widespread depression in local cerebral glucose utilization with cortical areas ipsilateral to the lesion being most affected. At this time the degree of the somatosensory deficit was significantly correlated with the extent of the depression of glucose utilization in the cortical areas of the lesioned hemisphere. At 6 days following the lesion only deficits in limb coordination remained, while local cerebral glucose utilization had returned to within normal limits. It is concluded that the demonstrated behavioral changes were a manifestation of widespread functional depression, as reflected by decreased cortical glucose utilization throughout the lesioned hemisphere.

Pimozide attenuates free feeding: best scores analysis reveals a motivational deficit.

Pimozide treatment (1.0 and 2.0 mg/kg) decreased free feeding in rats. The animals were presented daily with 35 meal segments, each consisting of five 45-mg pellets; pimozide resulted in longer mean latencies to initiate eating, longer mean eating times per segment (duration scores) and more pellets left uneaten. The increase in durations was progressive both within and across test sessions; toward the end of the final session many pellets were left uneaten. Failure to initiate eating of the first pellet of each segment was rare, and was always preceded by failure to eat the fifth pellet of the preceding meal segment. To assess whether either the increase in latencies or the increase in durations reflected an impairment of absolute response capability, 'best scores' in the pimozide and control conditions were compared; the shortest latencies and durations in the pimozide condition were as 'good' as those of the control condition. However, the animals generally produced 'best' scores on fewer trials in the pimozide condition. An exception was on day 1 of testing, when the frequency of 'best' latencies was higher in the pimozide condition. The fact that the 'best' scores under pimozide equalled the 'best' scores under vehicle suggests that the pimozide-treated animals had the motoric capacity to respond normally. The facts that the pimozide-treated animals did not perform to the demonstrated limits of that capacity in a normal percentage of trials and that performance on days 2 and 3 of testing were 'worse' than performance on day 1 of testing suggest that pimozide causes a motivational deficit that has not been widely recognized.

Isolation versus grouped housing in rats: differential effects of low doses of heroin in the place preference paradigm.

Male Long Evans rats were reared from weaning (21-23 days) either in isolation or in groups of four for 40 days. Animals were then individually introduced to a testing apparatus consisting of two distinct chambers. A modified place preference paradigm was used consisting of 3 phases: (1) An habituation phase (4 days) during which rats were allowed free access to the entire test apparatus for 15 min. periods daily; (2) A conditioning phase (4 days) during which rats were confined to their non-preferred side for 15 minutes each day immediately following subcutaneous injection of 0, 20, 40 and 80 micrograms/kg of heroin HCl; (3) A test phase (1 day) during which rats were again allowed free access to the testing chamber following injection of vehicle. The difference in time spent on the conditioned side during habituation and test periods was determined. The group-reared rats showed similar effects for all doses of heroin whereas the same magnitude of drug effect was attained only at the highest dose used in the isolated rats. This differential sensitivity to heroin in the place preference paradigm is discussed in terms of the modification of behavioral effects of opiates by environmental influences.