Post-training unilateral amygdala lesions selectively impair contextual fear memories

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) are both structures with key roles in contextual fear conditioning. During fear conditioning, it is postulated that contextual representations of the environment are formed in the hippocampus, which are then associated with foot shock in the amygdala. However, it is not known to what extent a functional connection between these two structures is required. This study investigated the effect on contextual and cued fear conditioning of disconnecting the BLA and dHPC, using asymmetrically placed, excitotoxic unilateral lesions. Post-training lesions selectively impaired contextual, but not cued, fear, while pretraining lesions resulted in a similar but nonsignificant pattern of results. This effect was unexpectedly observed in both the contralateral disconnection group and the anticipated ipsilateral control, which prompted further examination of individual unilateral lesions of BLA and dHPC. Post-training unilateral dHPC lesions had no effect on contextual fear memories while bilateral dHPC lesions and unilateral BLA lesions resulted in a near total abolition of contextual fear but not cued conditioned fear. Again, pretraining unilateral BLA lesions resulted in a strong but nonsignificant trend to the impairment of contextual fear. Furthermore, an analysis of context test-induced Fos protein expression in the BLA contralateral to the lesion site revealed no differences between post-training SHAM and unilateral BLA lesioned animals. Therefore, post-training unilateral lesions of the BLA are sufficient to severely impair contextual, but not cued, fear memories.     

Working within an Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) framework: Consultant practice and athlete reflections on refining emotion regulation skills

Objective

To examine how working within Hanin’s (2000a) Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning theoretical model (IZOF) informs intervention development for enhancing athletes’ emotion regulation skills.

Design

A single case study design was adopted to examine the applied process of facilitating a female university cross-country runner’s emotion regulation skills.

Method

Consultant reflections followed Boud’s (2001) reflective learning model for immediate and delayed reflection that informed an action research narrative organized round Kellmann and Beckmann’s (2003) action research cycle. A social validation interview was conducted following program completion to examine the athlete’s responses to the emotion regulation intervention.

Results

Consultant’s professional practice decisions and action taken to support the intervention are highlighted. Specifically, the employment and extension of Hanin’s (2000c) IZOF profiling process to inform the development of athlete skills in emotion regulation are described. Moreover, how the content and intensity of performance related subjective emotion, physiological symptom, and cognitive zone profiles for optimal performance guided the identification and enhancement of techniques contributing to effective emotion regulation is illustrated. Athlete interview responses support the overall efficacy of the intervention program.

Conclusion

The present case study supports the efficacy of working within an IZOF framework from a consultant perspective. Furthermore, athlete reflections suggest enhanced skills in emotion regulation were perceived to result from the intervention.     

Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts

ABSTRACT

In this article, I theorize the interpretation of harmful canonical texts with special reference to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. As a result of the actions and rhetoric of some of its North American evangelical readers, the Institutes has come to function as an intellectual foundation for certain expressions of modern homophobia. In conversation with Jacques Derrida on inheritance and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on reparativity, I thus consider how queer evangelicals (especially those who wish to continue identifying themselves as such) ought to engage both Calvin’s text, particularly, as well as, more generally, those other canonical texts that are sources of trauma. In so doing, I proffer a capacious view of interpretation as not only what one says but also how one lives.     

Learned irrelevance: A contemporary overview

This article reviews the recent literature on the topic of learned irrelevance. It asks whether the retardation of subsequent conditioning produced by uncorrelated preexposure is indeed the result of the animal learning that a conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) are unrelated, or whether it is better explained either as a result of the context specificity of latent inhibition, or as some other artefact of the uncorrelated schedule employed. The conclusion is that there is as yet no good evidence to support the existence of a “genuine” learned irrelevance effect.     

A Survey of Hospital Services for Suicidal Persons

ABSTRACT: A person who threatens or attempts suicide, arriving for treatment at any 1 of 10 hospitals serving a suburban area in the Bay Area of California, will be met with a variety of responses by different kinds of personnel, depending on the hospital to which he comes. In half of the hospitals, he could be subsequently discharged without psychiatric consultation of any kind. Follow-through on any outpatient referral would usually be left up to him. Although a few hospitals attend to the problem of suicidal persons in many important respects, other hospitals pay little attention to these same aspects. Because of the important role of the hospital in the prevention of suicide, it is recommended that the hospital's function in dealing with suicidal patients be better defined, extended, and made more consistent.     

Developmental changes in application of the majority rule in group decisions

This study examined age-related changes in the child's application of the principle of majority rule in group decisions. Following a problem posed by Moessinger (1981), we enquired whether children routinely apply the majority rule when the majority consists of a shifting (variable) set of members across decisions, and alternate between majority and minority when the majority and minority is fixed, i.e. consists of the same individuals each time. In Geneva, Moessinger found that 8-year-olds failed to discriminate between fixed and shifting majorities, while most 13-year-olds (75 per cent) did so. An altered replication was conducted in Australia modifying Moessinger's procedure to control for extraneous variables such as ‘set’ and the need for variety in choice. It was found that on the task 7 per cent of 8-year-olds, 20 per cent of 10-year-olds, 32 per cent of 12-year-olds, and 39 per cent of 14-year-olds discriminated on a behavioural criterion between fixed and shifting majorities. Ten per cent of 8-year-olds, 40 per cent of 10-year-olds, 52 per cent of 12-year-olds, and 55 per cent of 14-year-olds made the discrimination on Moessinger's cognitive ‘reason’ criterion. The results show that development of the conceptual distinction between fixed and shifting majorities is gradual and continuous.