Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people's tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.

The aim of this Hypothesis and Theory is to question the recently increasing use of the “race” concept in contemporary genetic, psychiatric, neuroscience as well as social studies. We discuss “race” and related terms used to assign individuals to distinct groups and caution that also concepts such as “ethnicity” or “culture” unduly neglect diversity. We suggest that one factor contributing to the dangerous nature of the “race” concept is that it is based on a mixture of traditional stereotypes about “physiognomy”, which are deeply imbued by colonial traditions. Furthermore, the social impact of “race classifications” will be critically reflected. We then examine current ways to apply the term “culture” and caution that while originally derived from a fundamentally different background, “culture” is all too often used as a proxy for “race”, particularly when referring to the population of a certain national state or wider region. When used in such contexts, suggesting that all inhabitants of a geographical or political unit belong to a certain “culture” tends to ignore diversity and to suggest a homogeneity, which consciously or unconsciously appears to extend into the realm of biological similarities and differences. Finally, we discuss alternative approaches and their respective relevance to biological and cultural studies.

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Theoretical models postulate an important role of attributional style (AS) in the formation and maintenance of persecutory delusions and other positive symptoms of schizophrenia. However, current research has gathered conflicting findings. In a cross-sectional design, patients with persistent positive symptoms of schizophrenia (n = 258) and healthy controls (n = 51) completed a revised version of the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ-R) and assessments of psychopathology. In comparison to controls, neither patients with schizophrenia in general nor patients with persecutory delusions (n = 142) in particular presented an externalizing and personalizing AS. Rather, both groups showed a "self-blaming" AS and attributed negative events more toward themselves. Persecutory delusions were independently predicted by a personalizing bias for negative events (beta = 0.197, P = .001) and by depression (beta = 0.152, P = .013), but only 5% of the variance in persecutory delusions could be explained. Cluster analysis of IPSAQ-R scores identified a "personalizing" (n = 70) and a "self-blaming" subgroup (n = 188), with the former showing slightly more pronounced persecutory delusions (P = .021). Results indicate that patients with schizophrenia and patients with persecutory delusions both mostly blamed themselves for negative events. Nevertheless, still a subgroup of patients could be identified who presented a more pronounced personalizing bias and more severe persecutory delusions. Thus, AS in patients with schizophrenia might be less stable but more determined by individual and situational characteristics that need further elucidation.Key words: schizophrenia/persecutory delusions/ positive symptoms/attributional style/depression/ negative emotions Attributional style (AS) is defined as the way of inferring a causal explanation for important life events, 1,2 either toward oneself (internal), toward other persons (personal), or toward circumstances or fate (situational). For example, if "a friend starts a fight with me," it is possible to attribute this event to internal factors ("I am a bad person"), to personal factors ("He is annoyed quite quickly"), or to situational factors ("We lived in different parts of the country").Analysis of AS in schizophrenia derived from the clinical insight that persecutory delusions can be viewed as an excessive tendency to attribute negative events toward other persons. Initial studies used the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), 3 an instrument originally developed for the assessment of AS in depression. These studies found that patients with persecutory delusions showed more internal attributions for positive events and less internal attributions for negative events, compared with controls. This AS has been termed self-serving bias or externalizing bias (EB). [4][5][6] Because the ASQ showed quite

An accurate and precise method for direct determination of chromium in wine using graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GFAAS) is described. The method was also applied to grape samples treated by previous acid mineralization. A total of 79 wine samples from different regions in France and 12 grape samples of different varieties were analyzed. Chromium levels ranged from 7.0 to 90.0 μg/L in red wines, from 6.6 to 43.9 μg/L in white wines, from 7.3 to 14.7 in rosé wines, and from 10.5 to 36.0 μg/L in champagne. Deficient conditions in wine storage could increase chromium content. In grape samples, chromium content varied from 2.5 to 20.9 μg/kg for white varieties and from 2.4 to 64.6 μg/kg for red varieties. The contribution of wine consumption to total Cr daily dietary intake for the French population was estimated to be 4.06 μg per resident. The daily contribution of chromium from wine does not exceed 10% of dietary intake. Keywords: Chromium; wine; dietary intake; GFAAS