Personality,motivational, and social cognition predictors of leisure-time physical activity

ObjectiveThe purpose of the present study was to investigate associations between personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism, autonomous motivation, and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) constructs and leisure-time physical activity. The study examined whether autonomous motivation and the TPB constructs mediate the association between personality traits and physical activity, and whether personality traits moderate the relationship of autonomous motivation and the TPB constructs with physical activity.MethodsMiddle-aged women (N = 441) completed self-report measures of personality traits, autonomous motivation, attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control (PBC) and intention. Moderate-to-vigorous leisure-time physical activity (MVPA) was measured using accelerometers approximately seven weeks later. Participants’ past accelerometer-based MVPA was available from four years earlier.ResultsOnly autonomous motivation and past MVPA directly predicted MVPA. Neuroticism and past MVPA were indirectly related with MVPA through autonomous motivation. No support for a moderator role of personality traits was found.ConclusionsCurrent data suggest that autonomous motivation and past experience are prominent determinants of accelerometer-based leisure-time MVPA, but not beliefs and intentions.     

Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain

Profound environmental, hormonal, and neurobiological changes mark the transition to motherhood as a major biosocial life event. Despite the ubiquity of motherhood, the enduring impact of caregiving on cognition and the brain across the lifespan is not well characterized and represents a unique window of opportunity to investigate human neural and cognitive development. By integrating insights from the human and animal maternal brain literatures with theories of cognitive ageing, we outline a framework for understanding maternal neural and cognitive changes across the lifespan. We suggest that the increased cognitive load of motherhood provides an initial challenge during the peripartum period, requiring continuous adaptation; yet when these demands are sustained across the lifespan, they result in increased late-life cognitive reserve.     

The influence of sad mood on cognition

Neuroimaging has identified an overlapping network of brain regions whose activity is modulated by mood and cognition. Studies of depressed individuals have shown changes in perception, attention, memory, and executive functions. This suggests that mood has a pervasive effect on cognition. Direct evidence of the effect of sad mood on cognition is surprisingly limited, however. Published studies have generally addressed a single cognitive ability per study because the fleeting nature of laboratory-induced mood precludes extended testing, and robust findings are limited to mood effects on memory for emotional stimuli. In this study, sad mood was induced and prolonged, enabling the effects of mood to be assessed for an array of abilities, including those that share neural substrates with sad mood and those affected by depression. Sad mood affected memory for emotional words and facial emotion recognition, but not the other processes measured, with a significant nonuniformity of effect over tasks. These results are consistent with circumscribed effects of sad mood on certain emotion-related cognitive processes, but not on cognition more generally.     

The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition

In this review, we report on studies that have assessed the effects of exogenous and endogenous increases in stress hormones on human cognitive performance. We first describe the history of the studies on the effects of using exogenous stress hormones such as glucocorticoids as anti-inflammatory medications on human cognition and mental health. Here, we summarize the cases that led to the diagnosis of glucocorticoid-induced 'steroid psychosis' in human populations and which demonstrated that these stress hormones could thus cross the blood-brain barrier and access the brain where they could influence cognition and mental health. We then summarize studies that assessed the effects of the exogenous administration of glucocorticoids on cognitive performance supported by the hippocampus, the frontal lobes and amygdala. In the second section of the paper, we summarize the effects of the endogenous release of glucocorticoids induced by exposure to a stressful situation on human cognition and we further dissociate the effects of emotion from those of stress on human learning and memory. Finally, in the last section of the paper, we discuss the potential impact that the environmental context to which we expose participants when assessing their memory could have on their reactivity to stress and subsequent cognitive performance. In order to make our point, we discuss the field of memory and aging and we suggest that some of the 'age-related memory impairments' observed in the literature could be partly due to increased stress reactivity in older adults to the environmental context of testing. We also discuss the inverse negative correlations reported between hippocampal volume and memory for young and older adults and suggest that these inverse correlations could be partly due to the effects of contextual stress in young and older adults, as a function of age-related differences in hippocampal volume.     

Dreaming,cognition, and physical illness: Part II

Part II of this two-part article on the effect of dreaming on physical illness presents clinical research and case study data of the relation of REM sleep on physiologic change. Content analysis and the “symbolism” of dreams is explored for their cognitive significance in terms of their diagnostic functions. The medico-ethical implication of the findings are discussed, along with areas of future research.     

Dreaming,cognition, and physical illness: Part I

Part I of a two part article on the effect upon dreaming on physical illness briefly explores the historical medico-philosophical antecedents of the notion that dreams can be diagnostic of bodily disease. Modern sleep research findings relating REM sleep to physiologic changes are also explored. The controversy of whether dreams are merely the consequence of random brain activity or whether they are a valid psychological phenomenon is discussed. Six contemporary views of the function of REM sleep are outlined. A seventh view of dreaming, that of a “cognitive monitoring system” is suggested. Like earlier historical notions, it is suggested that dreaming is a cognitive activity that processes bodily cues indicating illness or disease. Part II. presents a clinical compendium of dreams relating to Part I.     

Disturbed prefrontal and temporal brain function during emotion and cognition interaction in criminal psychopathy

Impaired emotional responsiveness has been revealed as a hallmark of psychopathy. In spite of an increasing database on emotion processing, studies on cognitive function and in particular on the impact of emotion on cognition in psychopathy are rare. We used pictures from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS) and a Simon Paradigm to address emotion-cognition interaction while functional and structural imaging data were obtained in 12 healthy controls and 10 psychopaths. We found an impaired emotion-cognition interaction in psychopaths that correlated with a changed prefrontal and temporal brain activation. With regard to the temporal cortex, it is shown that structure and function of the right superior temporal gyrus is disturbed in psychopathy, supporting a neurobiological approach to psychopathy, in which structure and function of the right STG may be important.     

Timing of human cortical functions during cognition: role of MEG

Understanding of sensory and cognitive brain processes requires information about activation timing within and between different brain sites. Such data can be obtained by magnetoencephalography (MEG) that tracks cortical activation sequences with a millisecond temporal accuracy. MEG is gaining a well-established role in human neuroscience, complementing with its excellent temporal resolution the spatially more focused brain imaging methods. As examples of MEG's role in cognitive neuroscience, we discuss time windows related to cortical processing of sensory and multisensory stimuli, effects of the subject's own voice on the activity of their auditory cortex, timing of brain activation in reading, and cortical dynamics of the human mirror-neuron system activated when the subject views another person's movements.     

Reuniting physical and social cognition in development

Book discussed in this article: Cintia Rodríguez, The magic number three: when infants do not yet speak     

A reinterpretation of hemispherectomy data without functional plasticity of the brain: I. Intellectual function

A comprehensive reanalysis of post-hemispherectomy IQ, language, and other intellectual findings in patients whose brain damage occurred in infancy, childhood, or adulthood reveals no recovery advantages attributable to superior interhemispheric transfer of properties in the immature brain. Instead, recovery heterogeneity in each age group is considerable, while both individual differences within the groups and minor intergroup differences are parsimoniously explained by etiological, recovery-period, and experiential variables. The findings fail to support the presuppositions of the plasticity model: that the immature brain lacks functional asymmetry, that language acquisition must occur early in life, and that recovery from brain damage is facilitated by the brain's functional equivocality during an early, critical period.     

Rehabilitation of brain damage: brain plasticity and principles of guided recovery.

Rehabilitation of the damaged brain can foster reconnection of damaged neural circuits; Hebbian learning mechanisms play an important part in this. The authors propose a triage of post-lesion states, depending on the loss of connectivity in particular circuits. A small loss of connectivity will tend to lead to autonomous recovery, whereas a major loss of connectivity will lead to permanent loss of function; for such individuals, a compensatory approach to recovery is required. The third group have potentially rescuable lesioned circuits, but guided recovery depends on providing precisely targeted bottom-up and top-down inputs, maintaining adequate levels of arousal, and avoiding activation of competitor circuits that may suppress activity in target circuits. Empirical data are implemented in a neural network model, and clinical recommendations for the practice of rehabilitation following brain damage are made.     

体育锻炼促进认知功能的脑机制

不同类型的体育锻炼对各种群体的多种认知功能均具有促进作用, 而相关的生理机制也在不同水平得到研究。在微观水平, 体育锻炼有利于脑细胞的营养供给和能量代谢, 并且能促进神经元的存活和突触生成。在宏观水平, 体育锻炼不仅能够提升海马和小脑等脑结构的体积, 还影响脑区激活水平和脑区间功能连接。值得注意的是, 体育锻炼对认知的促进效应受到诸多因素的影响, 比如个体差异、时间, 以及体育锻炼和认知刺激的相互作用等, 这些影响因素也为在两个水平上系统地阐明体育锻炼促进认知的脑机制提供了新的视角。     

Capitalizing on brand personalities in advertising: The influence of implicit self‐theories on ad appeal effectiveness

How can firms use brand personalities to develop the most persuasive advertising appeals? In this article, we examine advertising appeals that capitalize on the signaling opportunities that using these brands can provide (signaling ad appeal) versus the self-improvement opportunities that using these brands can offer (self-improvement ad appeal). In two studies, we find that the effectiveness of these appeals depends on consumers' implicit self-theories. Specifically, signaling ad appeals are more effective for consumers who believe their personal qualities are fixed and cannot be developed through their own efforts (entity theorists), whereas self-improvement ad appeals are more effective for consumers who believe their personal qualities are malleable and can be developed (incremental theorists). Implications for brand personality research and advertising are discussed.     

Effects of cognition on the psychophysical function

Previous investigation of the deterministic-sensory and the probability-sensory-learning models of psychophysical relationships have featured the manipulation of a single cognitive cue. The present study sought to expand these findings through the manipulation of multiple cognitive cues. Subjects made magnitude estimations of skin-area contact for each of two sets which varied identically in surface area but differed in that one set also varied in accelerative force. Within sets, three treatments featured systematic variation in the presentation of cognitive cues. Power functions were obtained for all treatments and the results supported the deterministic-sensory model. It was suggested, however, that resolution of the perception versus cognition issue must await the identification of innate and conditioned correlates of the subjective response to specific sensory stimuli.     

Social cognition and the human brain

Humans are exceedingly social animals, but the neural underpinnings of social cognition and behavior are not well understood. Studies in humans and other primates have pointed to several structures that play a key role in guiding social behaviors: the amygdala, ventromedial frontal cortices, and right somatosensory-related cortex, among others. These structures appear to mediate between perceptual representations of socially relevant stimuli, such as the sight of conspecifics, and retrieval of knowledge (or elicitation of behaviors) that such stimuli can trigger. Current debates concern the extent to which social cognition draws upon processing specialized for social information, and the relative contributions made to social cognition by innate and acquired knowledge.     

Culture and education: new frontiers in brain plasticity

Cognitive neuroscience has started to probe cross-cultural differences in the neuronal mechanisms underlying cognitive, perceptual and social domains. Moreover, brain imaging has revealed how education changes the brain. Such research opens up a new frontier in brain plasticity research, breaking down the boundaries between neuroscience and other traditionally non-biological disciplines, resulting in many conceptual and practical implications.