Heightened sensitivity to emotional expressions in generalised anxiety disorder,compared to social anxiety disorder,and controls

Few studies have examined potential differences between social anxiety disorder (SAD) and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) in the sensitivity to detect emotional expressions. The present study aims to compare the detection of emotional expressions in SAD and GAD. Participants with a primary diagnosis of GAD (n?=?46), SAD (n?=?70), and controls (n?=?118) completed a morph movies task. The task presented faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expressions. Participants used a slide bar to view the movie frames from left to right, and to stop at the first frame where they perceived an emotion. The frame selected thus indicated the intensity of emotion required to identify the facial expression. Participants with GAD detected the onset of facial emotions at lower intensity of emotion than participants with SAD (p?=?0.002) and controls (p?=?0.039). In a multiple regression analysis controlling for age, race, and depressive symptom severity, lower frame at which the emotion was detected was independently associated and GAD diagnosis (B?=?–5.73, SE?=?1.74, p?相似文献   

The two sides of adversity: the effect of distant versus recent adversity on updating emotional content in working memory

Previous research suggests that adversity can have both adaptive and maladaptive effects, yet the emotional and working memory processes that contribute to more or less adaptive outcomes are unclear. The present study sought to investigate how updating emotional content differs in adolescents who have experienced past, recent, or no adversity. Participants who had experienced distant adversity (N?=?53), no adversity (N?=?58), or recent adversity only (N?=?20) performed an emotion n-back task with emotional facial expressions. Results revealed that the distant adversity group exhibited significantly faster reaction times (RTs) than the no adversity and recent adversity only groups. In contrast, the recent adversity only group exhibited significantly slower RTs and more errors than the distant adversity and no adversity groups. These results suggest an emotion and executive control pathway by which both the benefits and negative effects of adversity may be conferred. Results also highlight the importance of time in assessing the impact of adversity.     

Familiarity,Priming, and Perception in Similarity Judgments

We present a novel way of accounting for similarity judgments. Our approach posits that similarity stems from three main sources—familiarity, priming, and inherent perceptual likeness. Here, we explore each of these constructs and demonstrate their individual and combined effectiveness in explaining similarity judgments. Using these three measures, our account of similarity explains ratings of simple, color‐based perceptual stimuli that display asymmetry effects, as well as more complicated perceptual stimuli with structural properties; more traditional approaches to similarity solve one or the other and have difficulty accounting for both. Overall, our work demonstrates the importance of each of these components of similarity in explaining similarity judgments, both individually and together, and suggests important implications for other similarity approaches.     

Distinguishing between attributional and mnemonic sources of familiarity: The case of positive emotion bias

Does familiarity arise from direct access to memory representations (a mnemonic account) or from inferences and diagnostic cues (an attributional account)? These theoretically distinct explanations can be difficult to distinguish in practice, as is shown by thepositivity effect, the increase in feelings of familiarity that accompanies positive emotion. Experiment 1 manipulated mnemonic and attributional sources of positivity via word valence and physical expressions of emotion, respectively. Both sources influenced the tendency to call itemsold, but receiver-operating characteristic analysis revealed a change in accuracy only with the mnemonic source. To further contrast the mnemonic and attributional accounts, Experiment 2 varied the ratio of positive to neutral words. A higher proportion of positive words exaggerated the pattern of increasedold judgments and decreased accuracy for positive words, relative to neutral ones, consistent with the mnemonic account but inconsistent with the attributional account.     

When affordances climb into your mind: Advantages of motor simulation in a memory task performed by novice and expert rock climbers

Does the sight of multiple climbing holds laid along a path activate a motor simulation of climbing that path? One way of testing whether multiple affordances and their displacement influence the formation of a motor simulation is to study acquired motor skills. We used a behavioral task in which expert and novice rock climbers were shown three routes: an easy route, a route impossible to climb but perceptually salient, and a difficult route. After a distraction task, they were then given a recall test in which they had to write down the sequence of holds composing each route. We found no difference between experts and novices on the easy and impossible routes, whereas on the difficult route, the performance of experts was better than that of novices. This suggests that seeing a climbing wall activates a motor, embodied simulation, which relies not on perceptual salience, but on motor competence. More importantly, our results show that the capability to form this simulation is modulated by individuals’ motor repertoire and expertise, and that this strongly impacts recall.