Decisions Under Temporal AND Emotional Pressure: The Hidden Relationships Between the Unconscious,Personality, and Cognitive Styles

The existence of an unaware psychic space that influences the way we think, perceive, and decide has been known for over a century. This space, defined by Freud as the “unconscious,” contains in itself unaware psychic contents. Its sophisticated adaptive functions, implicit and unaware, allow individuals to transform an enormous amount of information into explicit behaviors, influencing their behaviors. In this article, we advance the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between the unconscious, personality styles, and decisions under conditions of temporal and emotional pressure. The fact that an increase in the quality of a performance follows an increase in excitation, at least up to a certain threshold, clarifies the concept. Beyond this level of activation, not only are the benefits starting to diminish, but we also notice the onset of dysfunctional conditions that consist of anxiety, inner tension, difficulty in concentration, and inability to decide.     

Individual capacity differences predict working memory performance and prefrontal activity following dopamine receptor stimulation

Dopamine receptors are abundant in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a critical region involved in working memory. This pharmacological fMRI study tested the relationships between dopamine, PFC function, and individual differences in working memory capacity. Subjects performed a verbal delayed-recognition task after taking either the dopamine receptor agonist bromocriptine or a placebo. Behavioral effects of bromocriptine treatment depended on subjects’ working memory spans, with the greatest behavioral benefit for lower span subjects. After bromocriptine, PFC activity was positively correlated with a measure of cognitive efficiency (RT slope) during the probe period of the task. Less efficient subjects with slower memory retrieval rates had greater PFC activity, whereas more efficient subjects had less activity. After placebo, these measures were uncorrelated. These results support the role of dopamine in verbal working memory and suggest that dopamine may modulate the efficiency of retrieval of items from the contents of working memory. Individual differences in PFC dopamine receptor concentration may thus underlie the behavioral effects of dopamine stimulation on working memory function.     

Sequence learning in pianists and nonpianists: An fMRI study of motor expertise

Previous studies of motor learning have proposed a distinction between fast and slow learning, but these mechanisms have rarely been examined simultaneously. We examined the influence of longterm motor expertise (slow learning) while pianists and nonpianists performed alternating epochs of sequenced and random keypresses in response to visual cues (fast learning) during functional neuroimaging. All of the participants demonstrated learning of the sequence as demonstrated by decreasing reaction times (RTs) on sequence trials relative to random trials throughout the session. Pianists also demonstrated faster RTs and superior sequence acquisition in comparison with nonpianists. Withinsession decreases in bilateral sensorimotor and parietal activation were observed for both groups. Additionally, there was more extensive activation throughout the session for pianists in comparison with nonpianists across a network of primarily right-lateralized prefrontal, sensorimotor, and parietal regions. These findings provide evidence that different neural systems subserve slow and fast phases of learning.     

Spatial working memory activity of the caudate nucleus is sensitive to frame of reference

We used event-related fMRI to test the hypothesis that the caudate nucleus is preferentially recruited by a spatial working memory task employing egocentrically defined stimuli, which are amenable to transformation into a motor code, as contrasted with allocentrically defined stimuli, which are not. Our results revealed greater delay-epoch activity in egocentric than in allocentric trials in the caudate nucleus and trends in the same direction in the putamen and the lateral premotor cortex (PMC). Response-related activity was greater for egocentric trials in the lateral PMC. We propose that the neostriatum, possibly interacting with the PMC, may contribute to the sensory-motor transformation necessary to establish a prospective motor code (e.g., the representation of a saccade or a grasp). In addition, the PMC may participate in decision-making processes, prompted by the onset of the probe stimulus, that employ this prospective motor information. This model accounts for the empirical evidence that motor distraction disrupts spatial working memory performance.     

Modifiability of attention: Effects of dimensional salience and overtraining on discrimination shifts

Previous results have shown that there is an increased difference between intradimensional (ID) and extradimensional (ED) shifts when subjects shift to a nonpreferred dimension. Fisher and Zeaman (1973) have indicated that such findings can be explained not only by their attention-retention theory, which assumes that attention is completely modifiable, but also by models which assume that attention has a fixed, nonmodifiable component. The present experiment showed that the larger ID-ED difference with a nonsalient dimension is solely attributable to the improved performance of the ID shift condition, a results which is more consistent with the assumption of complete modifiability of attention.     

On the recognition of emotional vocal expressions: motivations for a holistic approach

Human beings seem to be able to recognize emotions from speech very well and information communication technology aims to implement machines and agents that can do the same. However, to be able to automatically recognize affective states from speech signals, it is necessary to solve two main technological problems. The former concerns the identification of effective and efficient processing algorithms capable of capturing emotional acoustic features from speech sentences. The latter focuses on finding computational models able to classify, with an approximation as good as human listeners, a given set of emotional states. This paper will survey these topics and provide some insights for a holistic approach to the automatic analysis, recognition and synthesis of affective states.     

Peer and school problems in the lives of urban adolescents: Frequency, difficulty, and relation to adjustment

This study examined the occurrence of problem situations in the peer and school domains and their relation to adjustment among urban adolescents. Students from three urban middle schools (N = 176) serving a predominantly African American population rated 61 problem situations identified in a previous qualitative study and completed measures of adjustment. Ratings of frequency and difficulty confirmed the relevance of these situations for this population. Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that covariation in the frequency and difficulty of problem situations could be represented by separate factors representing peer situations involving friends, other peer situations, and school situations. The number of different problem situations experienced was significantly correlated with physical and relational aggression, delinquency, depression, anxiety, and self-worth. Several of these relations were strongest for peer situations that did not involve friends. There were few gender differences in the strength of these relations.     

Can confidentiality of data pay off?

Ss were administered a self-report personality measure and a social desirability scale under conditions of Confidentiality, Anonymity or Nonanonymity alone. The tester's written assurance that the Ss' disclosures would be kept strictly confidential had a substantial moderating effect (when compared with Nonanonymity alone) on correlations between some subscales of the personality measure and the social desirability scale. In contrast to an earlier finding, there were no appreciable effects of Anonymity when compared with Nonanonymity alone. It appears that confidentiality of data can pay off in terms of increased predictive validity of some self-report personality measures by moderating the potential biasing effect of test response distortion due to socially desirable responding.     

Correlations of selected psychomotor and visuomotor tests with initial Dynavision performance

The current study investigated the relationship between Dynavision scores for 36 men and 52 women (M age = 20.5 yr.) and performance on six conventional psychomotor tests which presumably tap similar psychomotor abilities and visuomotor skills. Analysis indicated that initial Dynavision performance was significantly correlated with performance on these common psychomotor tests. These data extend findings that propose the effectiveness of the Dynavision apparatus to assess performance on basic visual-motor and visual-cognitive functions. Taken together with these new results, findings suggest that this apparatus might contribute to psychomotor assessment and may be potentially useful for effective selection and identification of individual differences in human behavioral performance.