Atypical brain oscillations: a biological basis for dyslexia?

Examining rhythms in the brain reveals a biological basis for dyslexia. A new study provides evidence of atypical oscillatory patterns and hemispheric specialization in dyslexic adults. These patterns inform phonological processing and verbal memory problems, known to be core deficits in dyslexia.     

Is panic a unique emotional experience?

The establishment of Panic Disorder (PD) as a distinct diagnostic category stems largely from the conceptualization of panic as a phenomenon qualitatively different from severe levels of anxiety. The current study utilized patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as comparison groups to examine the validity of this conceptualization. Seventeen PD, 29 OCD, and 12 GAD patients completed self-report inventories from which a panic factor was derived. Controlling for level of overall anxiety, the total panic factor was rated significantly higher by the PD group. A cluster of symptoms emerged which differentiated the PD group from the other two groups. The panic items and total score were correlated with total levels of state and trait anxiety but correlations were generally low, accounting for a limited amount of the total variance. Results were interpreted as providing only equivocal support for viewing panic as a separate dimension apart from high levels of general anxiety. A discussion of conceptual issues is presented.     

Memory reactivations during sleep: a neural basis of dream experiences?

Newly encoded memory traces are spontaneously reactivated during sleep. Since their discovery in the 1990s, these memory reactivations have been discussed as a potential neural basis for dream experiences. New results from animal and human research, as well as from the rapidly growing field of sleep and dream engineering, provide essential insights into this question, and reveal both strong parallels and disparities between the two phenomena. We suggest that, although memory reactivations may contribute to subjective experiences across different states of consciousness, they are not likely to be the primary neural basis of dreaming. We identify important limitations in current research paradigms and suggest novel strategies to address this question empirically.     

Are parental personality traits a basis for mate selection?

Both psychoanalytic views of attachment and evolutionary theories of imprinting suggest that mates may be preferentially chosen to resemble one’s parents. Using data from a large Dutch study of twins and their families, we tested these hypotheses with regard to personality traits from the Five-Factor Model. Little evidence of parent/spouse similarity was found, although women did tend to select a husband who resembled their parents with regard to Openness to Experience. This effect may be due to the influence of Openness on their social worlds, rather than to their experiences in early childhood.     

Risk for mania and positive emotional responding: too much of a good thing?

Although positive emotion research has begun to flourish, the extremes of positive emotion remain understudied. The present research used a multimethod approach to examine positive emotional disturbance by comparing participants at high and low risk for episodes of mania, which involves elevations in positive emotionality. Ninety participants were recruited into a high or low mania risk group according to responses on the Hypomanic Personality Scale. Participants' subjective, expressive, and physiological emotional responses were gathered while they watched two positive, two negative, and one neutral film clip. Results suggested that participants at high risk for mania reported elevated positive emotion and irritability and also exhibited elevated cardiac vagal tone across positive, negative, and neutral films. Discussion focuses on the implications these findings have for the diagnosis and prevention of bipolar disorder, as well as for the general study of positive emotion.     

Will moral outrage stand up?: Distinguishing among emotional reactions to a moral violation

Moral outrage—anger at violation of a moral standard—is claimed to be a prevalent and powerful moral emotion. However, evidence for moral outrage has been compromised by failure to distinguish it from personal anger—anger at harm to self—felt by victims of a moral violation. Although it does not seem possible to distinguish these two forms of anger by measurement, it is possible to do so by experimental manipulation of their distinct eliciting conditions. Extending previous research, the current study manipulated how a victim (self vs. stranger) was excluded (fairly vs. unfairly) from a favorable experience. Reported anger and behavioral retribution provided evidence of personal anger and revenge, not of moral outrage. These findings suggest that the prevalence and power of moral outrage has been exaggerated. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detecting emotional faces and features in a visual search paradigm: are faces special?

In 2 experiments, participants were presented schematic faces with emotional expressions (threatening, friendly) in a neutral-faces context or neutral expressions in an emotional-faces context. These conditions were compared with detection performance in displays containing key features of emotional faces not forming the perceptual gestalt of a face. Supporting the notion of a threat detection advantage, Experiment 1 found that threatening faces were faster detected than friendly faces, whereas no difference emerged between the corresponding feature conditions. Experiment 2 increased task difficulty with a backward masking procedure and found corresponding results. In neither of the studies was the threat detection advantage associated with reduced accuracy. However, features were, in general, detected faster than faces when task difficulty was high.     

Disgust: Sensory affect or primary emotional system?

We argue in this paper for the inclusion in the primary emotional systems enumerated by Panksepp of a neural system that organises disgust responses. The DISGUST system arose phylogenetically in response to danger to the internal milieu from pathogens and their toxic products. We suggest that the primitive emotive circuit, which originally provided defence by regulating consummatory behaviours, gave rise to a primary emotional system that facilitates evaluation of reinforcers. Unlike the sensory affect of distaste from which it is experimentally dissociable, disgust responses can involve flexible learned components triggered by several modalities. The anterior insula is implicated as playing a major role in the DISGUST system both in organising disgust responses in the individual and recognising disgust responses in others.     

Testing emotional memories: does negative emotional significance influence the benefit received from testing?

A large body of research shows that emotionally significant stimuli are better stored in memory. One question that has received much less attention is how emotional memories are influenced by factors that influence memories after the initial encoding of stimuli. Intriguingly, several recent studies suggest that post-encoding factors do not differ in their effects on emotional and neutral memories. However, to date, only detrimental factors have been addressed. In the present study, we examined whether emotionally negative memories are differentially influenced by a well-known beneficial factor: the testing of memories. We employed a standard cued recall testing-effect paradigm where participants studied cue-target pairs for negative and neutral target pictures. In a subsequent post-encoding phase, one third of the cue-target pairs were tested and one third restudied; the remaining third served as control pairs. After one week, memory for all cue-target pairs was tested. While replicating both the testing effect and the emotional enhancement effect, no differences between negative and neutral memories in the benefits received from testing and restudying were observed. Thus, it seems to be true that post-encoding factors do not influence emotional memories in any other way than neutral memories, even when they are beneficial.     

Visual search for a socially defined feature: what causes the search asymmetry favoring cross-race faces?

Levin (1996, 2000) reported that white subjects search for black targets more quickly than they search for white targets, suggesting that black faces are perceived as having a feature that is lacking in white faces. Here we test one of the implications of this asymmetry by having subjects search for same-race (SR) and cross-race (CR) faces that are distorted to look less like each other (producing caricatures that enhance race-specifying features), or are distorted to look more like each other (a prototypical distortion expected to reduce the salience of race-specifying features). Experiments 1 and 2 show that caricaturing the feature-positive CR distractors speeds search for the SR face and that prototypical distortion slows this search. The same distortions in SR faces did not affect the search slopes. However, these distortions also eliminated the overall advantage for CR faces. Experiment 3 shows that trial-to-trial variation in the specific distractors in each display can eliminate the asymmetry and suggests that this asymmetry depends on the subjects' ability to set a consistent a priori perceptual criterion when searching for a CR target, while the distortion effects emphasize the importance of distractor-rejection processes in determining the form of a serial search asymmetry.     

Intelligence and emotional disorders: Is the worrying and ruminating mind a more intelligent mind?

Previous research has shown that anxiety and depression symptoms are negatively associated with measures of intelligence. However, this research has often not taken state distress and test anxiety into account, and recent findings indicate possible positive relationships between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), worry, and intelligence. The present study examined the relationships between GAD, depression, and social anxiety symptoms, as well as their underlying cognitive processes of worry, rumination, and post-event processing, with verbal and non-verbal intelligence in an undergraduate sample (N = 126). While the results indicate that verbal intelligence has positive relationships with GAD and depression symptoms when test anxiety and state negative affect were taken into account, these relationships became non-significant when overlapping variance was controlled for. However, verbal intelligence was a unique positive predictor of worry and rumination severity. Non-verbal intelligence was a unique negative predictor of post-event processing. The possible connections between intelligence and the cognitive processes that underlie emotional disorders are discussed.     

Bulimics' responses to food cravings: is binge-eating a product of hunger or emotional state?

This study examined the roles of hunger, food craving and mood in the binge-eating episodes of bulimic patients, and identified the critical factors involved in the processes surrounding binge-eating episodes that follow cravings. This was a prospective study of the binge-eating behaviour of 15 women with bulimia nervosa. The participants used food intake diaries and Craving Records to self-monitor their nutritional behaviour, hunger levels and affective state. Cravings leading to a binge were associated with higher tension, lower mood and lower hunger than those cravings not leading to a binge. Levels of tension and hunger were the critical discriminating variables. The findings of the study support empirical evidence and models of emotional blocking in binge-eating behaviour and challenge the current cognitive starve-binge models of bulimia. The role of food cravings in the emotional blocking model is discussed in terms of a classically conditioned motivational state. Implications for treatment are addressed.     

Memory enhancement for emotional words: Are emotional words more vividly remembered than neutral words?

Individuals are more likely to remember negative information than neutral information. In the experiments reported here, we examined whether individuals were also more likely to remember details of the presentation of negative words, as compared with neutral words. In Experiment 1, the remember-know procedure was used to examine the effect of emotion on the vividness of an individual's memory, showing that remember responses were more frequently assigned to negative words than neutral words. In Experiment 2, a source memory paradigm was used, and again, evidence that individuals' memories were more detailed for negative than for neutral words was found. In Experiments 3-6, we examined the relative contribution of valence and arousal, finding that both dimensions increased the vividness of remembered information (i.e., items with valence only and those that elicited arousal were better remembered than neutral information) but that the effect was greater for words that evoked arousal than for those with valence only. The results support a qualitative, as well as a quantitative, memory benefit for emotional, as compared with neutral, words.     

Attention for emotional faces under restricted awareness revisited: do emotional faces automatically attract attention?

Theoretical models of attention for affective information have assigned a special status to the cognitive processing of emotional facial expressions. One specific claim in this regard is that emotional faces automatically attract visual attention. In three experiments, the authors investigated attentional cueing by angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions that were presented under conditions of limited awareness. In these experiments, facial expressions were presented in a masked (14 ms or 34 ms, masked by a neutral face) and unmasked fashion (34 ms or 100 ms). Compared with trials containing neutral cues, delayed responding was found on trials with emotional cues in the unmasked, 100-ms condition, suggesting stronger allocation of cognitive resources to emotional faces. However, in both masked and unmasked conditions, the hypothesized cueing of visual attention to the location of emotional facial expression was not found. In contrary, attentional cueing by emotional faces was less strong compared with neutral faces in the unmasked, 100-ms condition. These data suggest that briefly presented emotional faces influence cognitive processing but do not automatically capture visual attention.     

The personal-group discrepancy: Is there a common information basis for personal and group judgment?

In contrast to motivational accounts of the personal-group discrepancy, results from this article suggest that the discrepancy is explained by aggregating different sets of comparison outcomes for either personal or group ratings. Results from a longitudinal study with East German (the minority group) and West German (the majority group) samples confirm the personal-group discrepancy and support our approach. First, social comparisons influenced evaluations of economic situation at both group and personal levels. Second, ratings of group versus personal economic situation were based on different sets of comparisons. Third, the mean structure of both sets of comparison outcomes mirrored the personal-group discrepancy. Fourth, an interaction between personal-group discrepancy and group status supported the authors' suggestions-concerning the direction of the discrepancy.     

Mood-congruent memory in depression: emotional priming or elaboration?

We investigated whether mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in depression is a function of implicit or explicit memory. Implicit memory is taken as a measure of ease of activation, whereas explicit memory also taps elaboration. As expected, MCM bias was found in the explicit memory task but not in the implicit memory task. We believe this finding supports the involvement of elaborative mechanisms in MCM. In addition, memory bias was found with words related to depression but not with words denoting physical threat. Thus, the MCM bias in explicit memory was found to be specific to information that was congruent with depression rather than to all negative information.     

Manual asymmetry in weight discrimination: hand or spatial-field advantage?

Sixty subjects who were either left-handed or right-handed performed one-handed weight discrimination using their left and right hands in the left and right spatial fields. Differential thresholds, for the left and right hands of both left-handed and right-handed subjects, were found to be lower in the spatial field contralateral to the ear which proved superior in a dichotic listening test. It is concluded that manual asymmetry for weight discrimination results primarily from the mapping of sensorimotor events in the spatial fields onto contralateral cerebral cortex, with an advantage in the spatial field contralateral to the nonlanguage cerebral hemisphere.     

The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

A color-naming task was followed by incidental free recall to investigate how emotional words affect attention and memory. We compared taboo, nonthreatening negative-affect, and neutral words across three experiments. As compared with neutral words, taboo words led to longer color-naming times and better memory in both within- and between-subjects designs. Color naming of negative-emotion nontaboo words was slower than color naming of neutral words only during block presentation and at relatively short interstimulus intervals (ISIs). The nontaboo emotion words were remembered better than neutral words following blocked and random presentation and at both long and short ISIs, but only in mixed-list designs. Our results support multifactor theories of the effects of emotion on attention and memory. As compared with neutral words, threatening stimuli received increased attention, poststimulus elaboration, and benefit from item distinctiveness, whereas nonthreatening emotional stimuli benefited only from increased item distinctiveness.     

Reconsolidation from negative emotional pictures: Is successful retrieval required?

Finn and Roediger (Psychological Science 22:781-786, 2011) found that when a negative emotional picture was presented immediately after a successful retrieval, later test performance was enhanced as compared to when a neutral picture or a blank screen had been shown. This finding implicates the period immediately following retrieval as playing an important role in determining later retention via reconsolidation. In two new experiments, we investigated whether successful retrieval was required to show the enhancing effect of negative emotion on later recall. In both experiments, the participants studied Swahili-English vocabulary pairs, took an intervening cued-recall test, and were given a final cued-recall test on all items. In Experiment 1, we tested a distinctiveness explanation of the effect. The results showed that neither presentation of a negative picture just prior to successful retrieval nor presentation of a positive picture after successful retrieval produced the enhancing effect that was seen when negative pictures were presented after successful retrieval. In Experiment 2, we tested whether the enhancing effect would occur when a negative picture followed an unsuccessful retrieval attempt with feedback, and a larger enhancement effect occurred after errors of commission than after errors of omission. These results indicate that effort in retrieving is critical to the enhancing effect shown with negative pictures; whether the target is produced by the participant or given by an external source following a commission error does not matter. We interpret these results as support for semantic enrichment as a key element in producing the enhancing effect of negative pictures that are presented after a retrieval attempt.     

Does resting electroencephalograph asymmetry reflect a trait? an application of latent state-trait theory

Recent research on brain asymmetry and emotion treated measures of resting electroencephalograph (EEG) asymmetry as genuine trait variables, but inconsistency in reported findings and modest retest correlations of baseline asymmetry are not consistent with this practice. The present study examined the alternative hypothesis that resting EEG asymmetry represents a superimposition of a traitlike activation asymmetry with substantial state-dependent fluctuations. Resting EEG was collected from 59 participants on 4 occasions of measurement, and data were analyzed in terms of latent state-trait theory. For most scalp regions, about 60% of the variance of the asymmetry measure was due to individual differences on a temporally stable latent trait, and 40% of the variance was due to occasion-specific fluctuations, but measurement errors were negligible. Further analyses indicated that these fluctuations might be efficiently reduced by aggregation across several occasions.