Hemispheric processing in conventional metaphor comprehension: The role of general knowledge.

This study explored the relation between general knowledge and the hemispheric processing of metaphoric expressions in college age students. We hypothesized that prior knowledge influences how the hemispheres process metaphors in these individuals. In this study, 97 young (college-aged) adults completed a general knowledge and vocabulary test, and were then divided into high-knowledge/high-vocabulary and low-knowledge/low-vocabulary groups.

Hemispheric processing of mental representations during text comprehension: evidence for inhibition of inconsistent shape information.

To successfully understand a text, readers often mentally represent the shape of an object described in a text (e.g., creating a mental image of a sliced tomato when reading about a tomato on a pizza).

A Longitudinal Analysis of Criminal and Aggressive Behaviors among a National Sample of Adults in Mutual-Help Recovery Homes.

Criminal and aggressive behaviors are frequently observed among those recovering from substance abuse problems. In the present one-year longitudinal study, a national sample of residents from self-governed, communal living recovery homes for substance abuse completed baseline and follow-up measures of criminal and aggressive behavior. Results indicated that a length of stay of six months or longer was associated with lower levels of self-reported criminal and aggressive behaviors at the one-year follow-up.

Evidence for dissociable neural mechanisms underlying inference generation in familiar and less-familiar scenarios.

In this study, we investigated whether the left and right hemispheres are differentially involved in causal inference generation. Participants read short inference-promoting texts that described either familiar or less-familiar scenarios. After each text, they performed a lexical decision on a letter string (which sometimes constituted an inference-related word) presented directly to the left or right hemisphere.