Understanding anhedonia in schizophrenia through lexical analysis of natural speech

Anhedonia is a negative prognostic indicator in schizophrenia. However, the underlying nature of this emotional deficit is unclear. Laboratory studies examining patients’ emotional reactions under controlled circumstances have failed to find evidence for a diminished hedonic response, instead finding that patients’ reactions to laboratory stimuli are characterised by high levels of negative emotion. The present study employed lexical analysis of natural speech in 52 patients and 49 non-patient controls while they discussed separate neutral, pleasant and unpleasant autobiographical memories. Patients with clinically rated anhedonia, versus other patients and controls, showed a dramatic increase in negative emotion expression when discussing pleasurable memories, but they showed no corresponding decrease in positive emotion. These findings provide further evidence that “anhedonia” is more reflective of negative emotional states than the absence of positive ones. These findings also raise questions about how positive and negative emotions can be simultaneously co-activated in patients with schizophrenia.     

Influencing and adjusting in daily emotional situations: A comparison of European and Asian American action styles

Emotions are for action, but action styles in emotional episodes may vary across cultural contexts. Based on culturally different models of agency, we expected that those who engage in European-American contexts will use more influence in emotional situations, while those who engage in East-Asian contexts will use more adjustment. European-American (N=60) and Asian-American (N=44) college students reported their action style during emotional episodes four times a day during a week. Asian Americans adjusted more than European Americans, whereas both used influence to a similar extent. These cultural differences in action style varied across types of emotion experienced. Moreover, influencing was associated with life satisfaction for European Americans, but not for Asian Americans.     

The Confusion of Fear and Surprise: A Developmental Study of the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis Using Eye Movements

The goal of the present study was to test the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis in children and adults by manipulating the distinctiveness between expressions and recording eye movements. Children 3–5 and 9–11 years old as well as adults were presented pairs of expressions and required to identify a target emotion. Children 3–5 years old were less accurate than those 9–11 years old and adults. All children viewed pictures longer than adults but did not spend more time attending to the relevant cues. For all participants, accuracy for the recognition of fear was lower than for surprise when the distinctive cue was in the brow only. They also took longer and spent more time in both the mouth and brow zones than when a cue was in the mouth or both areas. Adults and children 9–11 years old made more comparisons between the expressions when fear comprised a single distinctive cue in the brow than when the distinctive cue was in the mouth only or when both cues were present. Children 3–5 years old made more comparisons for brow only than both. The results of the present study extend on the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis showing an importance of both decoder and stimuli, and an interaction between decoder and stimuli characteristics.     

Motivated message processing: How motivational activation influences resource allocation, encoding, and storage of TV messages

This paper investigates differences in overtime processing of television messages with three types of emotional trajectories—those which begin neutral and become negative, begin neutral and become positive and begin neutral and become equally positive and negative. The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing is used to predict how the type of emotional content influences real-time activation of the appetitive and aversive motivational systems which then alter concurrent and subsequent message processing. Results show that during the first time period, when motivational activation is low, more resources are allocated to coactive and positive compared to negative messages supporting the positivity offset hypothesis. In the middle time period, when activation is moderate, more resources are allocated to negative than to positive messages, supporting the negativity bias hypothesis. Further, the different patterns of motivational activation do result in different patterns of messages processing. During positive messages, encoding increases and storage decreases over time. During negative messages, encoding decreases and storage increases overtime. During coactive messages initial encoding and storage are high though both decrease slightly over time.     

Cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress and abuse history: the role of occurrence,frequency, and type of abuse

Background and objectives: Extreme cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress have been associated with traumatic life experiences. Previous studies have focused on the occurrence or frequency of abuse rather than type of abuse. We examined how occurrence, frequency, and the type of abuse history are related to cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) to acute psychological stress. Design: The study consisted of between group and continuous analyses to examine the association between occurrence, type, and frequency of abuse with cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress. Methods: Data from 64 participants were collected. Heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure were measured at baseline and during a standard mental arithmetic stress task. Results: Individuals who experienced abuse showed diminished CVR to acute psychological stress; this was driven specifically by the history of sexual abuse. Frequency of abuse did not relate to stress reactions. Conclusions: These findings accord with previous work suggesting a relationship between traumatic life experience and hypoarousal in physiological reactivity and extend previous findings by suggesting the relationship may be driven by sexual abuse.     

Prospective relations between maternal autonomy support and child executive functioning: investigating the mediating role of child language ability

Although emerging evidence suggests that parental behavior is related to the development of child executive functioning (EF), the mechanisms through which parenting affects child EF have yet to be investigated. The goal of this study was to examine the potential mediating role of child language in the prospective relation between maternal autonomy support and child EF. A total of 53 mother–infant dyads took part in three home visits at 15 months, 2 years, and 3 years, allowing for the assessment of maternal autonomy support (T1), child expressive vocabulary (T2), and child EF (T3). The results suggested that child language played a mediating role in the relation between maternal autonomy support and child performance on EF tasks entailing a strong impulse control component above and beyond child previous EF and family socioeconomic status (SES). In contrast, no such mediating role of language was found with EF tasks tapping mostly into working memory and set shifting. Thus, this study highlights one pathway through which parenting can affect child executive control.     

Behavioral and social cognitive processes in preschool children's social dominance

This longitudinal, naturalistic study addressed behavioral and social cognitive processes implicated in preschool children's social dominance. In the first objective, we examined the degree to which peer aggression, affiliation, and postaggression reconciliation predicted social dominance across a school year. Consistent with predictions, all three predicted dominance early in the year while only affiliation predicted dominance later in the year, suggesting that aggression, affiliation, and reconciliation were used to establish social dominance where affiliation was used to maintain it. In the second, exploratory, objective we tested the relative importance of social dominance and reconciliation (the Machiavellian and Vygotskian intelligence hypotheses, respectively) in predicting theory of mind/false belief. Results indicated that social dominance accounted for significant variance, beyond that related to reconciliation and affiliation, in predicting theory of mind/false belief status. Results are discussed in terms of specific behavioral and social cognitive processes employed in establishing and maintaining social dominance.     

Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes.