The impact of persisting hyperactivity on social relationships: a community-based, controlled 20-year follow-up study.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine whether persisting hyperactivity into adulthood was associated with impaired family, friendship, and partner relationships or poor coping skills in everyday life.

Method: A 20-year community-based follow-up of 6- to 7-year-old boys showing pervasive hyperactivity (n = 40) and unaffected controls (n = 25) was conducted. At age 27 years, participants were assessed with detailed interview techniques as well as self-report ratings.

How metaphors influence semantic relatedness judgments: the role of the right frontal cortex.

We used event-related fMRI (ER-fMRI) to test the hypothesis that metaphors bias cognitive processing of semantic relatedness towards a search for a wider range of associations. Twelve right-handed male volunteers read a mixture of metaphoric and literal sentences, each sentence being followed by a single word, which could be semantically related or not to the preceding sentence context. We found that judging unrelated words as contextually irrelevant was associated with increased blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in the metaphoric but not in the literal condition.

Deriving meaning: Distinct neural mechanisms for metaphoric, literal, and non-meaningful sentences.

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric (Some surgeons are butchers), literal (Some surgeons are fathers), or non-meaningful sentences (Some surgeons are shelves) and had to decide whether they made sense or not. We demonstrate that processing of the different sentence types relied on distinct neural mechanisms.