No abstract

Controlled and automatic aspects of semantic-associative functioning in schizophrenia were investigated by evaluating performance on animal word list generation (WLG). Responses from control (n = 47) and patient (n = 38) participants were subjected to multidimensional scaling (MDS), cluster analysis (CA), and indices on the basis of number of shared attributes (SA) between consecutive responses. Patient MDS results accounted for less variance and contained more error than control data. CA results yielded fewer and less clear animal-response subgroups among patients yet demonstrated intact associations among strongly related exemplars. The SA indices revealed better clustering and more effective switching among response clusters in controls than patients. Results suggest that animal WLG in schizophrenia is compromised both by aberrant automatic semantic-associative network activation and by controlled processes such as search, access, and selection. This pattern is consistent with prominent frontotemporal pathology evident in the disorder.

The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between psychological distress and taste and sense of smell dysfunctions on healthcare workers (HCW) who contracted the COVID-19 infection in the midst of the disease outbreak. Reports of sudden loss of taste and smell which persist even after recovery from COVID-19 infection are increasingly recognized as critical symptoms for COVID-19 infections. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional study on COVID-19 HCW (N = 104) who adhered to respond to a phone semistructured interview addressing the virus symptoms and associated psychological distress. Data were collected from June to September 2020. Findings confirm the association between experienced taste/olfactory loss and emotional distress and suggest that dysfunctions of taste and smell correlate positively with anxiety and depression. Furthermore, their psychological impact tends to persist even after the recovery from the disease, suggesting the need for appropriate psychological interventions to prevent people from developing more serious or long-lasting psychological disorders and, as far as HCW, to reduce the risk of work-related distress.

We report the case of OTM who presented with dynamic aphasia following a stroke that occurred in the left basal ganglia. He showed drastically reduced spontaneous speech in the context of well preserved naming, repetition and comprehension skills. OTM was particularly impaired in generating words, sentences and phrases when cued by a stimulus allowing many response options. By contrast, when a single response was strongly suggested by a stimulus, he could generate verbal responses adequately. OTM's non-verbal response generation abilities varied across tasks. He performed in the normal range in a motor movement generation test and he produced as many figures as controls when tested on a figural fluency task. He showed, however, many perseverations on this test. Moreover in a random number generation task he produced more responses that were part of ascending and descending series of numbers. The patient's impairments are interpreted as a consequence of two deficits. The first of these consists of an inability to generate verbal responses particularly in situations of high competition and involves the function of left frontal regions. The second deficit is one of impaired novel thought generation as evidenced by perseverations. This second deficit has been proposed to be a function of basal ganglia damage.