Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

Abstract— As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.     

Memory for emotionally arousing stimuli: a comparison of younger and older adults

The authors compared emotional memory in younger (aged 18-32 years) and older (aged 59-84 years) adults. Previous researchers who investigated the emotionmemory relationship in younger adults consistently showed that emotional arousal enhances memory for central detail. The present authors' goal was to determine whether a similar effect could be found with older adults. Younger and older adults viewed a series of 12 slides, accompanied by a taped narrative, that showed emotionally arousing or neutral scenes in the middle phase (Slides 5-8). Participants then completed recognition tests that were scored for central detail, peripheral detail, and gist. The results indicated that, although younger adults showed higher performance than older adults did, both groups showed increased memory for central detail. In contrast, the authors found no such enhancement for peripheral detail or gist in either group. These results indicated that the arousal manipulation produced a similar effect on memory in younger and older adults. Furthermore, these results were consistent with the notion of poststimulus elaboration, which is the continued processing of central detail after the termination of an arousing event.     

The relationship between personality pathology and dysfunctional cognitions in previously depressed adults

Multivariate and univariate regression models were used to examine the relationship between Axis II personality pathology and dysfunctional cognitions in a follow-up study of 40 formerly depressed inpatients. A dimensionalized measure of overall Axis II pathology was significantly and positively related to dysfunctional attitudes (Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale [DAS]) and maladaptive negative event attributions (Attributional Style Questionnaire-Negative Composite [ASQ-N]); the Axis II measure accounted for approximately 29% of the variance in DAS and 14% of the variance in ASQ-N, after controlling statistically for subsyndromal depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory [BDI]). Axis II pathology was not significantly associated with positive event attributions, and no significant Axis II x BDI interaction effects were observed. A secondary canonical analysis of Axis II clusters was largely consistent with a hypothesized general personality pathology factor associated with dysfunctional cognitions, though a more specific association between Axis II Cluster C pathology and dysfunctional attitudes was also observed.     

Taboo,emotionally valenced,and emotionally neutral word norms

Although taboo words are used to study emotional memory and attention, no easily accessible normative data are available that compare taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral words on the same scales. Frequency, inappropriateness, valence, arousal, and imageability ratings for taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral words were made by 78 native-English-speaking college students from a large metropolitan university. The valenced set comprised both positive and negative words, and the emotionally neutral set comprised category-related and category-unrelated words. To account for influences of demand characteristics and personality factors on the ratings, frequency and inappropriateness measures were decomposed into raters’ personal reactions to the words versus raters’ perceptions of societal reactions to the words (personal use vs. familiarity and offensiveness vs. tabooness, respectively). Although all word sets were rated higher in familiarity and tabooness than in personal use and offensiveness, these differences were most pronounced for the taboo set. In terms of valence, the taboo set was most similar to the negative set, although it yielded higher arousal ratings than did either valenced set. Imageability for the taboo set was comparable to that of both valenced sets. The ratings of each word are presented for all participants as well as for single-sex groups. The inadequacies of the application of normative data to research that uses emotional words and the conceptualization of taboo words as a coherent category are discussed. Materials associated with this article may be accessed at the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Fathers and fetuses

Harris postulates that in certain instances it would be morally impermissible for a woman to have an abortion because it would be a wrongful harm to the father and a violation of his autonomy. He constructs and analyzes five cases chosen to elucidate the moral issues involved and concludes that, for a man to lay claim to the fetus being his in a sense that the mother is obligated to respect, the fetus must be the result of his having pursued a legitimate interest in procreation in a morally legitimate way. When a man has satisfied the requirements of autonomy both for himself and for his sexual partner in regard to the interest in procreation, the woman has a prima facie obligation to him not to harm the fetus. Therefore, unless there is some contravening moral consideration that overrides this obligation, the abortion of the fetus is morally impermissible.     

Heroes as Fathers

ABSTRACT: While there are many cases of suicide among children of the famous and powerful, this present study is limited to the family lives of Thomas Mann, Karl Marx and Theodor Herzl. Details of the family-child and father-child relationships are described and an attempt is made to find some common ground for the suicides of children of the famous fathers.     

Self-image of emotionally disturbed adolescents

This study examined the ways in which normal, depressed, and conduct-disordered adolescents differ with regard to self-image. Normal and psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents completed the Offer Self Image Questionnaire for Adolescents (OSIQ). Patients were grouped on the basis of their DSM-III diagnoses, and their OSIQ scores were compared. Major depressive disorder, particularly the first episode, was associated with poor self-evaluation in multiple areas, while conduct disorder was associated with almost no specific self-image deficits. For younger (12- to 15-year-old) adolescents, a repeated episode of depression was associated with a poorer selfimage than was a diagnosis of dysthymic disorder or a typical depression, but a better self-image than a single episode of depression, suggesting that at this age, repeated episodes are met with internal adaptation rather than continued self-devaluation. Adolescents who received a diagnosis of both conduct disorder and major depression reported an overall level of self-image disturbance between those with either of these disorders alone, suggesting that acting-out behaviors may attenuate the self-devaluing experience of depression. Results are discussed in terms of current issues in adolescent development and developmental psychopathology.Portions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, 1986, and the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Chicago, 1986. The author wishes to express her appreciation to Kenneth I. Howard for his continued guidance throughout this project; to Lauren B. Alloy, Richard R. Bootzin, G. Daniel Lassiter, William Revelle, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft; to Daniel Offer and Eric Ostrov for allowing use of their normative data; and to the staff of Charter Barclay and Riveredge Hospitals for their assistance in the data collection.     

Transfer of training emotionally biased interpretations

Non‐anxious college students first performed a semantic‐judgement task that was designed to train either threat‐related or threat‐unrelated interpretations of threat‐ambiguous homographs (e.g. mug). Next they performed an ostensibly separate transfer task of constructing personal mental images for single words, in a series that included new, threat‐ambiguous homographs. In two experiments, the number of threat‐related interpretations in the transfer task significantly increased following threat‐related experience during the training phase, compared to other training conditions. We conclude that interpretive biases typically shown by anxious people can be established in non‐anxious students in ways that generalize to novel tasks and materials. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of Mothers and Fathers

The development of personality characteristics appears to differ by sex of child and role of parent, with interpersonal concerns tending to characterize mothers and instrumental concerns describing fathers. Using a semi-structured interview protocol and paper-and-pencil questionnaires, we examined the effects of parenting, as reported by middle-class high school senior boys and girls, on the development of two aspects of personality. Ego development and self-esteem both have demonstrated sex differences, with girls displaying more advanced ego development and boys displaying higher self-esteem. We expected that mothers, because of their greater interpersonal orientation, would influence the development of ego development more than would fathers, and that, based on past findings, the opposite-sex parent would exert the primary influence on self-esteem. While ego development was found to relate to more encouraging, warmer mothering in boys, it related weakly to mothering in girls. Boys and girls who perceived their cross-sex parent to be warm and supportive were found to have higher self-esteem.     

The Psychology of Fathers and Daughters

No abstract available for this article.