Abstract The main objective of the present follow-up study was to investigate auditory processing by using auditory event related potentials (ERPs), and language development to determine whether a correlation exists between auditory ERPs and language development. Auditory processing was investigated in very low birth weight (VLBW) preterm children and matched controls at mean ages of 4 and 6 years to determine whether there are differences in ERPs between VLBW preterm children and controls. Language development was measured at the mean ages of 2, 4 and 6 years to investigate the developmental course of language learning and to determine whether a relationship exists between ERPs, especially mismatch negativity (MMN), and language development. Auditory ERPs were also measured in children with AS (mean age 9;1 years) and matched controls to assess whether differences can be found between these two groups of children. Language development in children with AS was not investigated for this study. VLBW preterm children exhibited difficulties in the auditory processing at the level of obligatory ERPs, MMN, late MMN (lMMN) and behavioural tests. Both language comprehension and production were deficient in the preterm group compared to their controls. Lexical development was the most prominent phenomenon differentiating preterm children from their controls. MMN and lMMN amplitudes were attenuated most in children with naming difficulty at the ages of 4 and 6 years. Weak or totally missing MMN at the age of 4 years was mainly found in children with naming difficulties. Children with AS also displayed abnormalities in auditory processing, as indexed by delayed MMN latency. MMN was most delayed in the right hemisphere and specifically for tones. In conclusion: VLBW preterm children and children with AS exhibited difficulties in auditory processing. MMN correlated well with language development in preterm children. Therefore, auditory ERPs, especially MMN, should be used in combination with language measures to identify the children at a risk for deficient auditory processing and language delays.

Event-related potentials play a significant role in error processing and attentional processes. Specifically, event-related negativity (ERN), feedback-related negativity (FRN), and the P300 are related to performance monitoring. The current study examined these components in relation to subjective probability, or confidence, regarding response accuracy on a complicated learning task. Results indicated that confidence ratings were not associated with any changes in ERN, FRN, or P300 amplitude. P300 amplitude did not vary according to participants’ subjective probabilities. ERN amplitude and FRN amplitude did not change throughout the task as participants learned. Future studies should consider the relationship between ERN and FRN using a learning task that is less difficult than the one employed in this study.

Rejection sensitivity (RS) can have significant effects on interpersonal relationships. Previous research has shown the negative social effects of RS, but less is known about the cognitive implications of having high levels of RS. The current study examined the effect of RS on various event-related potential (ERP) components associated with performance monitoring (error-related negativity, ERN; feedback-related negativity, FRN) and attention (P300; late positive potential, LPP). Participants completed a social or nonsocial Flanker task and an emotional Stroop task. Results showed an increased ERN on error trials for individuals with higher RS. Although the FRN, P300, and LPP were not influenced by RS, FRN was influenced by an expectancy-valence interaction. FRN amplitude was also sensitive to condition, with correct feedback eliciting significantly more negative FRN in the social condition compared to the nonsocial condition; FRN for unexpected feedback was also greater in the social condition. Overall, the results suggest a relationship between error monitoring and RS, as well as a relationship between social information and feedback processing. Future research should further explore the potential relationship between rejection sensitivity and attention throughout goal-directed tasks.

Diploma thesis The Rate of Negativity in Miloš Zeman's and Karel Schwarzenberg' Reflection in Media during Presidential Election in 2013 analyses the rate of negativity in the news production of three national newspapers - Mladá fronta Dnes, Lidové noviny and Právo - about these presidential candidates. Time range setting is one month before first round of presidential election and one month after first round of presidential election. The presidential election in January of 2013 was completely different from previous presidential elections. People voted in a direct presidential election. It was very important event, in which the media were very interested. Press, television and radio broadcasting were filled with presidential election, candidates, debates and many reflections. Media have taken it a bit contradictory. Apart from the ordinary information that were important for the public knowledge, the media resorted to the kind of media storm. There were a hight rate of negativity in the news against Miloš Zeman. On the contrary, Karel Schwarzenberg was reflected as an ideal president. The public was separated into two groups by media. First group was supporters of Miloš Zeman and the second one was supporters of Karel Schwarzenberg. The aim of this diploma thesis was to find out, how much...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit sollte anhand der error-related negativity (ERN) eine eingeschränkte Fehlerwahrnehmung und im weiteren Sinne eine eingeschränkte Handlungskontrolle bei Patienten mit Erkrankungn aus dem schizophrenen Formenkreis im Vergleich zu gesunden Probanden dargestellt werden. Für diesen Vergleich wurde zusätzlich die error- positivity (Pe) herangezogen. Anhand dieser Parameter erfolgte zusätzlich ein Vergleich der Patienten mit einer klassischen Schizophrenie und solchen mit einer Zykloiden Psychose mit Blick auf die bereits existierende klinische Differenzierung gemäß Leonhard. Als Ergebnis ließen sich im Vergleich zu den Kontrollprobanden eine eingeschränkte ERN und eine eingeschränkte Pe bei beiden Patientengruppen feststellen. Die Hypothese, dass Patienten mit einer Zykloiden Psychose sich nicht nur klinisch, sondern auch elektrophysiologisch von den Patienten mit einer klassischen Schizophrenie unterscheiden, ließ sich anhand der ERN und der Pe nicht untermauern. Anders als angenommen wiesen die Patienten mit einer Zykloiden Psychose keine weniger starke Einschränkung der beiden elektrophysiologischen Parameter auf. / In this study we used the error-related negativity (ERN) to show a restricted error- perception and in a broader sense, a limited executive control in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychoses compared to healthy subjects. Additionally we took the error-positivity (Pe) into account in order to compare these groups. Moreover we tried to differentiate patients with a classical schizophrenia from patients with a cycloid psychosis based on the parameters mentioned above in view of the already existing clinical differentiation according to Leonhard. As a result both patient groups showed lower amplitudes for the ERN and the Pe. The hypothesis that patients with cycloid psychosis differ not only clinically but also electrophysiologically from the patients with classical schizophrenia could not be corroborated by means of the ERN and the Pe. Unlike our assumption patients with a cycloid psychosis did not show less severe restrictions in both electrophysiological parameters compared to those with a classical schizophrenia.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy / It is well established that there are changes in cognition and in peripheral sensory mechanisms that occur with age. However, there is much less known about the cause of either change or indeed the relationship between age-related change in sensory processing and age-associated cognitive decline. Understanding these mechanisms could improve our capacity to devise strategies which could assist older adults in aging successfully. In this thesis, I aim to bridge a gap in our knowledge concerning the relationship between age-related change in sensory processing and age-associated cognitive decline by studying the effect of age on what can be considered an intermediary process, sensory memory (in the auditory modality). I continue this line of research by examining the relationship between auditory sensory memory and other types of memory for auditory information in young and older adults. To address these goals, I adopted a cognitive neuroscience approach, relating electrophysiological data to data derived from behavioural memory assessments. In the following thesis, I present a literature review, four studies, and a general discussion of results. Several waveforms of the auditory event-related potential (ERP), including N1, P2, repetition positivity (RP), and mismatch negativity (MMN) were studied. More specifically, in study 1, we looked at the effect of age on N1 and P2 amplitude. In study 2, we examined the conditions eliciting two repetition effects, RP and the MMN memory trace effect, in the auditory ERP of young adults. Studies 3 and 4 concerned the effect of age on RP and the relationship between RP and implicit memory for contextual information as well as explicit memory for auditory information. We concluded that i) age affects auditory sensory memory, ii) the potential relationship between auditory sensory memory and implicit memory for auditory information requires re-investigation, and iii) there is a relationship between auditory sensory memory and explicit memory for auditory information that is altered with age. That is, we concluded that RP occurring in the N1/P2 and MMN latency period indicates memory trace formation and that age affects RP amplitude (restricted to an anterior RP generator). In addition, we showed that RP may be related to implicit memory (priming) in both young and older adults. Across two studies, we found a positive correlation between the response to repetition in the ERP (due to RP activity) and explicit auditory verbal memory in young adults but a negative correlation in older adults. Therefore, although age-related change in RP could reflect the capacity of older adults to encode the context of auditory stimulation, this is potentially due to compensatory activity. We argue it is possible that implicit memory changes with age as a result of age-related change in explicit episodic memory. As a result of well established changes that occur in episodic memory with age, older adults may begin to rely on implicit memory as a source of memory more so than young adults. Our data shows that the implicit memory system may, as a result, favour content over contextual information. An important theme outlined in the discussion of results involves the idea that age-related changes in cognition that are commonly interpreted as cognitive deficits may in fact be beneficial in certain circumstances. We review our results in relation to cognitive theories of aging and find that several theories are applicable to the data, including the frontal hypothesis (incorporating the inhibitory deficit hypothesis), the information degradation hypothesis, and the speed of processing hypothesis. Future research in this area could focus on exploring whether top-down or bottom-up or influences primarily contribute to the age effect on auditory sensory memory and RP, as well as evaluating our hypothesis that the age-related change in RP may be beneficial for explicit item memory but detrimental for implicit contextual memory in older adults (i.e. compensatory mechanisms). While the studies presented in this thesis have provided the foundations guiding our understanding of these issues, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience are well equipped to resolve such questions in the future.

¡@What is literature?(Qu'est-ce que la littérature?) is a thesis on literature written by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, in 1947. By proposing the concept of literary engagement, Sartre attempted to prove that it was natural for literature to engage in the society. Needless to say, such an idea triggered a series of controversy among which the key issue was what the relation between literature and reality was. Regarding this, the current article, starting from the intentionality of the phenomenology, will discuss Sartre¡¦s negativity and Emmanuel Levinas¡¦ shadow concepts in order. It attempts to describe the relation between literature and reality and to unfold such two concepts in parallel at the utmost. However, its purpose is not only to visualize a certain possible mode between literature and reality but to indicate that the difference between literary engagement controversy and others is that it seems to mark the overall symptoms prompted by defining literature with theories. Accordingly, perhaps it is closer to the problematics of literary engagement to find out, apart from repeatedly fixing literature, such a top in movement, to facilitate description, whether it is possible to shed light on the basic fact that literature always conceals itself to draw out reality based on the results that the confrontation between the above-mentioned two theories and literature always leads to, such as communication inability and their being driven away. We thus realize that it is not impossible for the models of Sartre¡¦s and Levinas¡¦ literary objects to converse with such a problematic.

Owning to the heterogeneity of services, service failures are inevitable to happen in service encounters. Therefore, recovery efforts play important roles in mataining the relationship with customer. Recovery paradox (RP) refers to the situation in which the customer who experiences a failure followed by a superior recovery rates a service as high as or even higher than s/he would rate a service involving no failure. By contrast, Double deviation (DD) refers to the situation in which inappropriate and/or inadequate recovery results in magnification of the negative evaluation. The RP and the DD are essentially symmetrical because both of them represent a phenomenon in which the recovery contributes to customer¡¦s evaluation more heavily than the initial failure dose. Although numerous studies devotes to the question whether the RP and DD exist, very few are trying to answer the question of why they exist. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to conceptually and empirically compare the RP and the DD in order to uncover the potential asymmetry, as well as to understand why recovery influences evaluation more greatly? Because the investigated conditions are not easy to be identified in the real world, a scenario-based quasi-experimental design is chosen. The data is collected from customers actually engaged in the target services. Customers are asked to answer questions about an organization they have recently patronized and then evaluate experimentally-generated scenarios in a restaurant setting to understand whether a negative discrepancy can really magnify the customer¡¦s evaluation toward an identical following event. The result reveals that after a negative-discrepant first event, a positive-discrepant second event is evaluated more positively than non-discrepant second event, but a negative-discrepant second event is evaluated less negatively than a non-discrepant one. That is to say the result supports RP, but doesn¡¦t support DD.

As consumer expectations of corporate values and ethics increase, more and more companies are engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. While CSR in general is believed to play a positive role in consumer behavior, the implications of CSR in diverse situations that involve firms has not been studied in great detail. Specifically, little is known about how CSR activities influence consumer judgments in corporate crisis settings such as product-harm and ethical-misdeeds. Thus, in this dissertation, a series of experimental studies uncover the potential role of previous CSR engagement when a company is faced with a corporate crisis, and examine its impact on a consumer’s evaluation of the company. For a systematic and comprehensive understanding of this issue, two types of negative attributes in corporate scandals are distinguished: incompetence versus immorality. The results of the first experimental study suggest that prior CSR initiatives can more effectively protect consumer evaluation of the company when the company is faced with a competence-related negative event than a morality-related negative event. In addition, when the cause of CSR is directly congruent with the issue of the negative event, consumer responses were more negative than when there is no issue congruence between CSR and the negative event. The most interesting aspect is that the issue congruence effects were more negative for an immoral event versus an incompetent event. In other words, when a firm’s moral crisis is associated with a cause in a previously involved CSR initiative, consumers perceive that the firm’s intention of CSR initiative involvement was the least sincere and altruistic. The second study of this dissertation examines how consumer-company identification can protect the company from a corporate crisis in the context of an incompetent versus an immoral crisis situation. The findings of this study reveal that consumers strongly identified with the company perceive the company’s negative information less seriously than weak identifiers with the company regardless of the negative type – incompetence or immorality. Finally, the detailed theoretical and managerial implications of the dissertation and the role of CSR initiatives in crises are discussed. / text

Jacques Derrida's lecture entitled "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials", given in Jerusalem in 1986, responds both to those who subsume his project within negative theology and to those that ignore their interrelation. The former fail to see that while negative theology is oriented towards ineffable union with the divine, deconstruction radically denies the possibility of this union. The latter, however, read negative theology solely in the context of this ineffable union, ignoring the possibility of a second apophatic language whose critique of language is itself so radical that it engages in a paradoxcical self-critique that denies, if not union itself, at least the possibility of speaking about union. This second, concurrent language has a distinct family resemblance to Derrida's own deconstructive project, for it embraces the radically negative denials of differance. This study will first present a critique of those who offer either an affirmative or negative answer to the question "Is deconstruction a form of negative theology?", arguing instead that Derrida denies all answers. Its final step will analyze the similarities between negative theology's escape from the silence of pure denial--prayer--and Derrida's own means of escaping the silence summoned when he asks: "How to avoid speaking?"