Editorial

 

The investigation on different aspects of cerebral functioning underlying behavioral and cognitive dimensions is a very topical issue in health sciences. Research on this area may serve to understand more cerebral functioning, either in normal or in pathological situations. Particularly, those paradigms from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and electrophysiology that use no invasive techniques in order to measure cerebral responses can help to understand the "brain-behavior" relationships and provide us with a more precise description of behavioral disorders.

An advanced knowledge of this type opens possibilities to obtain a more exact characterization of the preserved and impaired psychological aspects related with different pathologies, optimizing in this way the rehabilitation, so that, they offer a very useful tool in the field of health sciences.

The efficiency of these combined medical-psychological techniques has shown its advantage in different diseases and disorders among others epilepsy, Parkinson disease, learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and so on.

The papers presented in this number of the Journal of Behavioral Health Social Issues offer to deepen knowledge of this area in both normal and pathological behavior.

In this latest issue of the journal, regarding normal behavior, the authors Ortega-Leonard et al. report the influence of hormones in different phases of menstrual cycles on creative thinking. Using the methodology of cognitive psychology, Hernández Balderas et al. study the differences between boys and girls in working memory, highlighting the differences in the visual scratch-pad and central ejecutive relationships. Marosi et al. present the results of their electroencephalografic study on a valence judgment task during positive and negative affective picture presentations against neutral ones.

Related to pathological behavior, Medina & Rodríguez-Agudelo present a study on cognitive impairment in dementia, illness increasingly common in the senior population. The authors show the utility of the neuropsychological evaluation in order to reveal cognitive alterations of this disease. Prieto-Corona et al. describe those cognitive characteristics that distinguish between normal and the different subgroups of learning disabled, using normalized test scores for reading, writing and aritmethic measurements López Alanís et al. carry out an event related potential study on semantic processing of normal and learning disabled subjects, making clear the usefulness of this technique in distinguishing between the normal and learning disabled population. Rodríguez et al. report differences in the event-related potentials associated with phonological but not with semantic processing between normal and reading-disabled children during auditory comprehension of sentences. Finally, Elorriaga-Santiago et al. make evident the importance of phonological processing in semantic processing of written words related to Parkinson disease.

We hope that the readers of this journal could find these articles interesting and valuable.

 

Jorge Bernal-Hernández
Guadalupe Mares Cárdenas
Erzsébet Marosi-Holczberger