Impact of the improvement in the etiological diagnosis of community pneumonia.

Background And Objective: Etiological diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is only reached in 30-40% of cases, which frequently requires keeping empirical antibiotic regimens. The new nucleic acid amplification techniques (NAAT) in respiratory samples raise the possibility of improving this clinical practice. Our objective was to analyze TAANs contribution estimating both their costs and benefits.

Comparing adaptation in emotional and non-emotional conflict in patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.

Research on conflict adaptation suggests that complex networks are involved in the detection and resolution of conflicts. These networks are believed to be different depending on whether the conflict occurs in emotional or non-emotional contexts. In addition, the adaptation to both types of conflict also seems to have different neural bases.

Diagnostic errors in emergency departments.

Diagnostic errors have to be recognised as a possible adverse event inherent to clinical activity and incorporate them as another quality indicator. Different sources of information report their frequency, although they may still be underestimated. Contrary to what one could expect, in most cases, it does not occur in infrequent diseases.

Are executive functions related to emotional intelligence? A correlational study in schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.

This research explored the relationship between executive functions (working memory and reasoning subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Trail Making and Stroop tests, fluency and planning tasks, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) and emotional intelligence measured by the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test in patients with schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder compared to a control group. As expected, both clinical groups performed worse than the control group in executive functions and emotional intelligence, although the impairment was greater in the borderline personality disorder group. Executive functions significantly correlated with social functioning.

Recollection and familiarity for words and faces: a study comparing Remember-Know judgements and the Process Dissociation Procedure.

Measures of recollection and familiarity often differ depending on the paradigm utilised. Remember-Know (R-K) and Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) methods have been commonly used but rarely compared within a single study. In the current experiments, R-K and PDP were compared by examining the effect of attention at study and time to respond at test on recollection and familiarity using the same experimental procedures for each paradigm.

Unconscious biases in task choices depend on conscious expectations.

Recent studies highlight the influence of non-conscious information on task-set selection. However, it has not yet been tested whether this influence depends on conscious settings, as some theoretical models propose. In a series of three experiments, we explored whether non-conscious abstract cues could bias choices between a semantic and a perceptual task.

[On hospital emergency department crowding].

Recent years have seen a range of measures deployed to curb crowding in hospital emergency departments, but as episodes of overcrowding continue to occur the discussion of causes and possible solutions remains open. The problem is universal, and efforts to revamp health care systems as a result of current socioeconomic circumstances have put emergency services in the spotlight. Consensus was recently achieved on criteria that define emergency department overcrowding.

Unconscious context-specific proportion congruency effect in a stroop-like task.

Cognitive control is a central topic of interest in psychology and cognitive neuroscience and has traditionally been associated with consciousness. However, recent research suggests that cognitive control may be unconscious in character. The main purpose of our study was to further explore this area of research focusing on the possibly unconscious nature of the conflict adaptation effect, specifically the context-specific proportion congruency effect (CSPCE), by using a masked Stroop-like task where the proportion of congruency was associated to various masks.

[Functional magnetic resonance imaging: a critical analysis of its technical, statistical and theoretical implications in human neuroscience].

Introduction: The use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has represented an important step forward for the neurosciences. Nevertheless, it has also been subject to rather a lot of criticism.

Aim: To study the most widespread criticism against fMRI, so that researchers who are starting to use it may know the different elements that must be taken into account to be able to take a suitable approach to this technique.

Correlation of inflammatory and cardiovascular biomarkers with pneumonia severity scores.

Purpose: To assess the correlation of procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive protein (CRP), neopterin, mid-regional pro-atrial natriuretic peptide (MR-proANP), and mid-regional pro-adrenomedullin (MR-proADM) with severity risk scores: severe CAP (SCAP) and SMART-COP in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), as well as short term prognosis and to determine the correlation with mortality risk scores.

Methods: Eighty-five patients with a final diagnosis of pneumonia were consecutively included during a two month period. Epidemiological, clinical, microbiological, and radiological data were recorded.

Cognitive and affective control in a flanker word task: common and dissociable brain mechanisms.

In the present study we compared the nature of cognitive and affective conflict modulations at different stages of information processing using electroencephalographic recordings. Participants performed a flanker task in which they had to focus on a central word target and indicate its semantic category (cognitive version) or its valence (affective version). Targets were flanked by congruent or incongruent words in both versions.

Interactions between perceived emotions and executive attention in an interpersonal game.

The emotions displayed by others can be cues to predict their behavior. Happy expressions are usually linked to positive consequences, whereas angry faces are associated with probable negative outcomes. However, there are situations in which the expectations we generate do not hold.

Focusing on the bodily self: the influence of endogenous attention on visual body processing.

The present study explores whether endogenous attention can modulate body perception. A modified version of the Posner paradigm was used to direct participants' attention toward the appearance of distinct body images, which differed only in detailed idiosyncratic features: one's own and another person's hands. Hand stimuli were preceded by symbolic cues that predicted their identity with high probability, which made it possible to compare the processing of expected (valid) and unexpected (invalid) targets.

Category expectations: a differential modulation of the N170 potential for faces and words.

The goal of the present study was to explore whether endogenous attention can be oriented to different perceptual categories and to examine how these expectations modulate visual stimulus processing. We designed a cueing paradigm that prepared participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, for the most likely stimulus category of the target, which could be either a face or a word. Participants were asked to discriminate the gender of the stimuli, regardless of their category.

Emotional conflict in interpersonal interactions.

Facial displays of emotions can help to infer the mental states of other individuals. However, the expectations we generate on the basis of people's emotions can mismatch their actual behaviour in certain circumstances, which generates conflict. In the present study, we explored the neural mechanisms of emotional conflict during interpersonal interactions.