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This study investigated the relations among appraisals, emotions and coping strategies when adolescents were confronted with a stressful event: the High School Diploma examination. Italian students (N = 610) completed a questionnaire three weeks before the beginning of the exam. Data were reduced by means of principal component analyses and then multiple regression analyses were conducted to assess the relations among appraisals, emotions and coping strategies. The results suggest that students who perceived their coping potential as high, and had an internal locus of control, felt more intense positive emotions such as happiness and challenge, and adopted coping strategies such as focusing on positive aspects of the experience and seeking social support. In contrast, students who perceived their coping potential as low, and had an external locus of control, experienced more intense emotions of helplessness and frustration and adopted avoidance and isolation strategies.

Subepithelial connective tissue grafts and guided tissue regeneration have been shown to be effective means to obtain root coverage. The purpose of this study is to compare statistically the results obtained with these techniques 1 year after the surgical procedures were performed. Thirty-six gingival recessions belonging to Class I and Class II of the Miller classification were treated: 18 cases with subepithelial connective tissue grafts (SCTG) and 18 cases with guided tissue regeneration (GTR). Each patient was randomly assigned to a group. At baseline, the group treated with subepithelial connective tissue grafts presented a mean recession of 4.88 mm, whereas the group treated with guided tissue regeneration presented a mean recession of 5.88 mm (P = .082). After 1 year, the mean root coverage was 77.08% in the SCTG group and 80.88% in the GTR group. The difference was not statistically significant (P.05). The mean root coverage was 3.83 mm for the SCTG group and 4.61 mm for the GTR group. The mean gain in probing attachment level was 3.05 mm for the SCTG group and 5.55 mm for the GTR group. The difference was statistically significant (P = .01). In conclusion, the mean root coverage obtained was similar for the two groups, whereas the clinical attachment gain was greater in the GTR group. Therefore, it appears that the GTR technique is preferable when severe mucogingival defects are present and gain of clinical attachment level is mandatory.

Our representation of peripersonal space does not always accurately reflect the physical world. An example of this is pseudoneglect, a phenomenon in which neurologically normal individuals bisect to the left of the veridical midpoint, reflecting an overrepresentation of the left portion of space compared with the right one. Consistent biases have also been observed in the vertical and radial planes. It is an open question whether these biases depend on normal visual experience for their occurrence. Here we systematically investigated this issue by testing blindfolded sighted and early blind individuals in a haptic line bisection task. Critically, we found a robust leftward bias in all participants. In the vertical and radial planes, sighted participants showed a consistent downward and proximal bias. Conversely, the directional bias in blind participants was dependent on the final movement direction; thus, there was no general bias in either direction. These findings are discussed in terms of different reference frames adopted by sighted and blind participants when encoding space. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en

Humans tend to represent numbers in the form of a mental number line. Here we show that the mental number line can modulate the representation of peripersonal haptic space in a crossmodal fashion and that this interaction is not visually mediated. Sighted and early-blind participants were asked to haptically explore rods of different lengths and to indicate midpoints of those rods. During each trial, either a small (2) or a large (8) number was presented in the auditory modality. When no numbers were presented, participants tended to bisect the rods to the left of the actual midpoint, consistent with the notion of pseudoneglect. In both groups, this bias was significantly increased by the presentation of a small number and was significantly reduced by the presentation of a large number. Hence, spatial shifts of attention induced by number processing are not limited to visual space or embodied responses but extend to haptic peripersonal space and occur crossmodally without requiring the activation of a visuospatial representation. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.