DNA microarray technologies make it possible to simultaneously monitor thousands of genes expression levels. A topic of great interest is to study the different expression profiles between microarray samples from cancer patients and normal subjects, by classifying them at gene expression level. Currently, various clustering methods have been proposed in the literature to classify cancer and nor...

Retzius cells are large neurons in the ganglia of the leech (Lent, 1977), releasing 5-HT (Leake, 1986) and orchestrating the animal behavior (Carretta, 1988). The leech nervous system is relatively simple and its exploration allows correlating, in a quantitative manner, the chemical and electrical activity, at cellular level, with the animal behavior (Mazzoni et al., 2007). The recent work of F...

Many people believe that today’s young people are narcissistic and self-involved (e.g., Twenge, 2006), but research has suggested that emerging adults are engaging in explorations of positive behaviors as well. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between identity development, self-regulation, and prosocial behavior in emerging adulthood. Data from 182 undergraduate student...

Effortful control (EC) and executive function (EF) are 2 constructs related to children’s self-regulation that have historically been the subject of research in separate fields, with EC primarily the focus of temperament research and EF the focus of cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. This article selectively reviews and compares the EC and EF literature. The review indicates consid...

Background Weight-loss interventions have had disappointing outcomes, partly because of a minimal understanding of associated psychological factors. Theory-based treatments often seek to build self-regulation for controlling eating – a strong predictor of weight loss. Mood changes associated with treatment may, however, affect self-regulatory changes in obese women. Self-regulatory changes may,...

Although everyday life is often demanding, it remains unclear how demanding conditions impact self-regulation. Some theories suggest that demanding conditions impair self-regulation, by undermining autonomy, interfering with skilled performance and working memory, and depleting energy resources. Other theories, however, suggest that demanding conditions improve self-regulation by mobilizing sup...

Peer-to-Peer systems have often been advertised to as being “self-organizing”. This has become a somewhat elusive property with meaning and significance being far from clear. Answers sought in this research therefore focused on questions like: How well is self-organization understood in terms of peer-to-peer systems? How much self-organization is there really? How can, if at all, mechanisms of ...

750-1000 words) Based on the assumption that learning is a generative process involving human cognitive, metacognitive and motivational processes (Wittrock, 1990), the focus of learning is not only on the final outcome (i.e. performance outcome) but also the process of learning (Mayer, 1999). The interactive nature of computer-based learning environments impose challenges to learners by leaving...

Parents influence the development of child eating patterns through the genes they transmit and the home environments they provide (1). Both are important and, as a general rule, neither should be discounted when striving to understand individual differences in how children eat. This holds true for eating in the absence of hunger (2), satiety responsiveness and food cue responsiveness (3), 24-h ...

The results of a structural equation model showed that a tendency to procrastinate assessed early in college students’ first term was positively related to concerns over social exclusion, but was negatively related to academic task values and grade goal-setting. In addition, the tendency to procrastinate had a direct negative relationship with self-regulatory self-efficacy and perceived school ...