Implicit and explicit memory for affective passages in temporal lobectomy patients

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content, respectively, as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times; this target passage was alternated with other previously unread passages, and all passages had the same number of words. The Explicit Affective and Neutral Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding passage content. Verbal priming effects in terms of improved reading speed with repetition for the target but not non-target passages were found for patients with both left and right temporal lobectomies. As in the Burton, Rabin et al. [Burton, L., Rabin, L., Vardy, S.B., Frohlich, J., Wyatt, G., Dimitri, D., Constante, S., Guterman, E. (2004). Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages. Brain and Cognition, 54(3), 218-224] normative study, there were no interactions between this priming effect and affective/neutral content. For the explicit tasks, items from the repeated passages were remembered better than the unrepeated passages, and there was a trend for information from the affective passages to be remembered better than the neutral passages, similar to the normative pattern. The RTL group did not show the normative pattern of slower reading speed for affective compared to neutral passages that the LTL group showed. Thus, the present findings support the idea that intact right medial temporal structures are important for affective content to influence some aspects of verbal processing.     

How does reward compete with goal-directed and stimulus-driven shifts of attention?

In order to behave adaptively, attention can be directed in space either voluntarily (i.e. endogenously) according to strategic goals, or involuntarily (i.e. exogenously) through reflexive capture by salient or novel events. The emotional or motivational values of stimuli can also influence attentional orienting. However, little is known about how reward-related effects compete or interact with endogenous and exogenous attention mechanisms. Here we designed a visual search paradigm in which goal-driven and stimulus-driven shifts of attention were manipulated by classic spatial cueing procedures, while an irrelevant, but previously rewarded stimulus also appeared as a distractor and hence competed with both types of spatial attention during search. Our results demonstrated that stimuli previously associated with a high monetary reward received higher attentional priority in the subsequent visual search task, even though these stimuli and reward were no longer task-relevant, mitigating the attentional orienting induced by both endogenous and exogenous cues.     

So finally, what is Christian about Christian bioethics?

The author criticizes the essays in this issue by Waters, Erickson, Trotter and Verhey for not placing an adequate Christology at the center of their definitions what is Christian bioethics.     

The General Factor of Personality in selection and assessment samples

In two large samples (N₁ = 44,971, N₂ = 7793) we tested the General Factor of Personality (GFP) in the Big Five, measured during selection and assessment. A GFP could clearly be identified in the data, explaining approximately 50% of the Big Five variance. We found indications for socially desirable response tendencies in a subgroup that was tested for selection purposes. Yet, this tendency did not affect the personality factor structure or the GFP characteristics. Moreover, in the selection sample, the GFP was moderately related to the Overall Assessment Rating. The findings confirm the GFP in an applied setting and support the idea that the GFP does not merely reflect methodological artifacts but is substantive.     

The Passive in 3- and 4-Year-Olds

This paper argues that analyzing the patterns of individual subject performance in tests of comprehension of passives might give insight into how little children interpret passives: 3 and 4 year-olds seem to go through a range of passive interpretation, that varies from actual comprehension to total non-comprehension. The fact that some small children understand long and short passives in Portuguese could be seen as evidence that the concept of universal delay for passives is too stringent. We also argue that below chance results and chance results may reflect a relevant difference in children’s behavior in interpreting the passive: below chance results seem to suggest that children interpret the passive as an active sentence.     

The General Factor of Personality (GFP) and Vocational Interests: a Test of Social Effectiveness at the Behavioral and Genetic Level

Journal of Business and Psychology - Previous studies have examined how personality models (e.g., Big Five, HEXACO) relate to vocational interests. We adopt a novel approach by testing the...     

Facing temptation: The neural correlates of gambling availability during sports picture exposure

Nowadays, sports betting has become increasingly available and easy to engage in. Here we examined the neural responses to stimuli that represent sporting events available for betting as compared to sporting events without a gambling opportunity. We used a cue exposure task in which football (soccer) fans (N = 42) viewed cues depicting scheduled football games that would occur shortly after the scanning session. In the “betting” condition, participants were instructed to choose, at the end of each block, the game (and the team) they wanted to bet on. In the “watching” condition, participants chose the game they would prefer to watch. After the scanning session, participants completed posttask rating questionnaires assessing, for each cue, their level of confidence about the team they believed would win and how much they would enjoy watching the game. We found that stimuli representing sport events available for betting elicited higher fronto-striatal activation, as well as higher insular cortex activity and functional connectivity, than sport events without a gambling opportunity. Moreover, games rated with more confidence towards the winning team resulted in greater brain activations within regions involved in affective decision-making (ventromedial prefrontal cortex), cognitive inhibitory control (medial and superior frontal gyri) and reward processing (ventral and dorsal striatum). Altogether, these novel findings offer a sensible simulation of how the high availability of sports betting in today’s environment impacts on the reward and cognitive control systems. Future studies are needed to extend the present findings to a sample of football fans that includes a samilar proportion of female and male participants.