Focusing on fear: Attentional disengagement from emotional faces

Evidence suggests that anxiety is associated with a shift of visual attention toward threatening stimuli in the environment, such as facial expressions (Mogg & Bradley, 1999). More recent evidence, however, indicates that anxiety may be better characterized by a failure to rapidly disengage the visual attention system away from threat-related facial expressions (Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001). The present study further investigates this delayed disengagement hypothesis. Results show that high trait-anxious individuals, in contrast to low trait-anxious individuals, take longer to classify peripheral target letters when fearful facial expressions were presented at fixation relative to sad, happy, or neutral expressions. These findings demonstrate a specific tendency to dwell on fear-relevant stimuli, as opposed to negative information in general. These findings are considered from an evolutionary perspective and the possible role of delayed disengagement from threat in the maintenance of anxiety states is also discussed.     

Racial/ethnic bullying: Exploring links between bullying and racism in the US workplace

This study examined relations between the incidence of workplace bullying and the everyday experiences of members of ethnic and racial minorities in the American workplace. Particular attention was paid to expressions of bullying that overtly or specifically refer to race or ethnicity, in the form of more or less subtle acts of discrimination and hostile treatment, introducing the term `racial/ethnic bullying.' Participants belonging to four racial/ethnic groups (Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and whites) responded to a written survey of general and racial/ethnic bullying experiences, responses, and preferred modes and methods of internal organizational redress and dispute resolution. Very different profiles emerged between bullying perpetrated by supervisors/superiors versus co-workers/peers in the organization.     

A comparison of students' and jury panelists' decision-making in split recovery cases

This study was designed to assess jury decision-making for 289 participants reading a medical malpractice vignette as a function of participant type (undergraduate students or jury panelists), punitive damage award apportionment (none, half, or all to the plaintiff), and compensation previously assigned to the plaintiff (low, medium, or high). We found several sample differences. Overall, jury panelists awarded more money for punitive damages. Jury panelists were also more affected by compensatory-relevant information when making punitive decisions, including assigning punitive damages and rating the fairness of the traditional apportionment scheme, where the plaintiff receives all of the money. Compared with students, more jury panelists were in favor of the plaintiff receiving the entire punitive award. Most students endorsed split recovery. The authors suggest that psycholegal research conducted solely with student samples, rather than community members, may misestimate the likely behavior of actual juries. The implications of the study for split recovery policy are also discussed.     

Gender specific requirement of GluR1 receptors in contextual conditioning but not spatial learning

The GluR1 subunit of the AMPA receptor is required for hippocampal-dependent memory formation, emotional learning and synaptic plasticity. Recent work has shown that GluR1-independent synaptic plasticity is mediated by nitric oxide. Nitric oxide activity is influenced by estrogen. It is unknown whether this gender-dependent effect conveys a gender dimorphic requirement of GluR1 for learning. This hypothesis was tested in two behavioral paradigms. In Experiment 1, the retention of contextual fear conditioning was impaired in male but not female GluR1 knockout mice. In Experiment 2, GluR1 knockout mice made significantly more arm entry errors during acquisition of a radial-arm watermaze task. This deficit was independent of gender. These results indicate that some forms of learning are gender dimorphic in GluR1 knockout mice. The results are discussed with reference to task and gender-specific interactions between GluR1 receptor intracellular signalling pathways.     

One-month-old human infants learn about the social world while they sleep

Although infants display preferences for social stimuli early in their lives, we know relatively little about the mechanisms of infant learning about the social world. In the current set of studies, 1-month-old infants underwent an adapted eyeblink conditioning paradigm to examine learning to both 'social' and non-social cues. While infants were asleep, they were presented with either a 'social' stimulus (a female voice) or one of two non-social stimuli (tone or backward voice) followed by an airpuff presented to the eyelid. Infants in the experimental groups displayed increased learning across trials, regardless of stimulus type. However, infants conditioned to the 'social' stimulus showed increased learning compared to infants conditioned to either of the non-social stimuli. These results suggest a mechanism by which learning about the social world occurs early in life and the power of ecologically valid cues in facilitating that learning.     

Mind the gap: bridging economic and naturalistic risk-taking with cognitive neuroscience

Economists define risk in terms of the variability of possible outcomes, whereas clinicians and laypeople generally view risk as exposure to possible loss or harm. Neuroeconomic studies using relatively simple behavioral tasks have identified a network of brain regions that respond to economic risk, but these studies have had limited success predicting naturalistic risk-taking. By contrast, more complex behavioral tasks developed by clinicians (e.g. Balloon Analogue Risk Task and Iowa Gambling Task) correlate with naturalistic risk-taking but resist decomposition into distinct cognitive constructs. We propose here that to bridge this gap and better understand neural substrates of naturalistic risk-taking, new tasks are needed that: are decomposable into basic cognitive and/or economic constructs; predict naturalistic risk-taking; and engender dynamic, affective engagement.     

Longitudinal stability of temperamental exuberance and social-emotional outcomes in early childhood

The goals of the current study were to investigate the stability of temperamental exuberance across infancy and toddlerhood and to examine the associations between exuberance and social-emotional outcomes in early childhood. The sample consisted of 291 4-month-olds followed at 9, 24, and 36 months and again at 5 years of age. Behavioral measures of exuberance were collected at 9, 24, and 36 months. At 36 months, frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry was assessed. At 5 years, maternal reports of temperament and behavior problems were collected, as were observational measures of social behavior during an interaction with an unfamiliar peer in the laboratory. Latent profile analysis revealed a high, stable exuberance profile that was associated with greater ratings of 5-year externalizing behavior and surgency, as well as observed disruptive behavior and social competence with unfamiliar peers. These associations were particularly true for children who displayed left frontal EEG asymmetry. Multiple factors supported an approach bias for exuberant temperament but did not differentiate between adaptive and maladaptive social-emotional outcomes at 5 years of age.     

Nonword repetition in children and adults: effects on movement coordination

Hearing and repeating novel phonetic sequences, or novel nonwords, is a task that taps many levels of processing, including auditory decoding, phonological processing, working memory, speech motor planning and execution. Investigations of nonword repetition abilities have been framed within models of psycholinguistic processing, while the motor aspects, which also are critical for task performance, have been largely ignored. We focused our investigation on both the behavioral and speech motor performance characteristics of this task as performed in a learning paradigm by 9‐ and 10‐year‐old children and young adults. Behavioral (percent correct productions) and kinematic (movement duration, lip aperture variability – an index of the consistency of inter‐articulator coordination on repeated trials) measures were obtained in order to investigate the short‐term (Day 1, first five vs. next five trials) and longer‐term (Day 1 vs. Day 2, first five vs. next five trials) changes associated with practice within and between sessions. Overall, as expected, young adults showed higher levels of behavioral accuracy and greater levels of coordinative consistency than the children. Both groups, however, showed a learning effect, such that in general, later Day 1 trials and Day 2 trials were shorter in duration and more consistent in coordination patterns than Day 1 early trials. Phonemic complexity of the nonwords had a profound effect on both the behavioral and speech motor aspects of performance. The children showed marked learning effects on all nonwords that they could produce accurately, while adults’ performance improved only when challenged by the more complex nonword stimuli in the set. The findings point to a critical role for speech motor processes within models of nonword repetition and suggest that young adults, similar to children, show short‐ and longer‐term improvements in coordinative consistency with repeated production of complex nonwords. There is also a clear developmental change in nonword production performance, such that less complex novel sequences elicit changes in speech motor performance in children, but not in adults.     

Features enhance the encoding of geometry

Successful navigation within an environment requires that the traveler establish the correct heading—a process referred to as orienting. Many studies have now shown that humans and non-human animals can use the geometric properties of an enclosure to orient. In the present study, two groups of Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) were trained, in a reference memory task, to find food hidden in one of four containers arranged to form a rectangular array. One group had unique objects placed next to each of the containers, whereas the second group had identical objects placed next to each of the containers. Here, I show for the first time that for the Clark’s nutcracker, the distinctive properties of these objects enhanced the encoding of the array’s geometry compared to the learning of geometric properties from an array of identical objects, which remained at chance after substantial amounts of training. Subsequent transformation tests showed that an object not associated with reward, but sharing the same geometric properties as the correct object, may have had inhibitory qualities. Furthermore, by systematically removing objects from the array, I show that although nutcrackers encoded the geometry of the array, they did not encode a complete featural representation of the objects within the array.