Neural circuitry of emotion regulation: Effects of appraisal,attention, and cortisol administration

Psychosocial well-being requires effective regulation of emotional responding in context of threat or stress. Neuroimaging studies have focused on instructed, volitional regulation (e.g., reappraisal or distancing), largely ignoring implicit regulation that does not involve purposeful effort to alter emotional experience. These implicit processes may or may not involve the same neural pathways as explicit regulatory strategies. We examined the neurobiology of implicit emotional regulation processes and the impact of the stress hormone cortisol on these processes. Our study task employed composite pictures of faces and places to examine neural activity during implicit emotional processing (of emotional faces), while these responses were implicitly regulated by attention shift away from the emotionally evocative stimuli, and while subjects reflectively appraised their own emotional response to them. Subjects completed the task in an fMRI scanner after random assignment to receive placebo or hydrocortisone (HCT), an orally administered version of cortisol. Implicit emotional processing activated insula/IFG, dACC/dMPFC, midbrain and amygdala. With attention shifting, we saw diminished signal in emotion generating/response regions (e.g., amygdala) and increased activations in task specific attention regions like parahippocampus. With appraisal of emotions, we observed robust activations in medial prefrontal areas, where activation is also seen in instructed reappraisal studies. We observed no main effects of HCT administration on brain, but males and females showed opposing neural effects in prefrontal areas. The data suggest that different types of emotion regulation utilize overlapping circuits, but with some strategy specific activation. Further study of the dimorphic sex response to cortisol is needed.     

Setting things straight: A comparison of measures of saccade trajectory deviation

In eye movements, saccade trajectory deviation has often been used as a physiological operationalization of visual attention, distraction, or the visual system’s prioritization of different sources of information. However, there are many ways to measure saccade trajectories and to quantify their deviation. This may lead to noncomparable results and poses the problem of choosing a method that will maximize statistical power. Using data from existing studies and from our own experiments, we used principal components analysis to carry out a systematic quantification of the relationships among eight different measures of saccade trajectory deviation and their power to detect the effects of experimental manipulations, as measured by standardized effect size. We concluded that (1) the saccade deviation measure is a good default measure of saccade trajectory deviation, because it is somewhat correlated with all other measures and shows relatively high effect sizes for two well-known experimental effects; (2) more generally, measures made relative to the position of the saccade target are more powerful; and (3) measures of deviation based on the early part of the saccade are made more stable when they are based on data from an eyetracker with a high sampling rate. Our recommendations may be of use to future eye movement researchers seeking to optimize the designs of their studies.     

Racialized physical space as cultural product

We argue for incorporating physical space into the psychological study of race. Specifically, we review historical and sociological work explaining how physical space (e.g., houses, rivers, neighborhoods, and nations) has been used to construct race and racial hierarchy, leaving physical space structurally racialized. This structural racialization, we propose, has led people to think of physical space in racial terms, creating mental images of race that include physical space characteristics. We explain how these mental images may influence race‐related psychological processes (e.g., person perception and social identity threat). We also detail evidence that these mental images of racialized space shape how people perceive and interact with space, in ways that likely reinforce its structural racialization. We therefore frame physical space as a cultural product, situating it within the mutually constitutive nature of culture and psyche. This expanded approach to studying race can facilitate a fuller understanding of all the ways in which psychological processes contribute to racial inequality.     

Out of sight,out of mind: Matching bias underlies confirmatory visual search

Confirmation bias has recently been reported in visual search, where observers who were given a perceptual rule to test (e.g. “Is the p on a red circle?”) search stimuli that could confirm the rule stimuli preferentially (Rajsic, Wilson, & Pratt, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(5), 1353–1364, 2015). In this study, we compared the ability of concrete and abstract visual templates to guide attention using the visual confirmation bias. Experiment 1 showed that confirmatory search tendencies do not result from simple low-level priming, as they occurred when color templates were verbally communicated. Experiment 2 showed that confirmation bias did not occur when targets needed to be reported as possessing or not possessing the absence of a feature (i.e., reporting whether a target was on a nonred circle). Experiment 3 showed that confirmatory search also did not occur when search prompts referred to a set of visually heterogenous features (i.e., reporting whether a target on a colorful circle, regardless of the color). Together, these results show that the confirmation bias likely results from a matching heuristic, such that visual codes involved in representing the search goal prioritize stimuli possessing these features.     

Evaluation of Violence Prevention Approaches Among Early Adolescents: Moderating Effects of Disability Status and Gender

High prevalence rates of aggression during adolescence and associated adjustment difficulties for perpetrators and victims highlight the need for effective violence prevention programs. School-based prevention programs are advantageous as they occur in a key setting for youths' social and emotional development. The current study compared the efficacy of a combined universal violence prevention approach that included individual-level skill-building (i.e., lessons from Second Step) and school environment (i.e., Olweus Bullying Prevention Program; OBPP) interventions to OBPP alone. Participants were 231 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders (ages 11–15; M?=?12.6, SD?=?1.0) in middle school (48?% male, 67?% African American). A total of 14 classrooms were randomly assigned to the combined intervention (seven) or OBPP only comparison (seven) condition, split evenly across grades. Intervention effects were moderated by disability status and gender. Among students without disabilities those who received the combined intervention reported greater increases in anger regulation coping skills than those in the comparison condition. In contrast, among youth with disabilities greater increases in teacher-rated social skills were found for students in the combined intervention than students in the comparison condition at posttest. Gender-moderated effects included greater decreases in teacher ratings of externalizing problems and bullying behaviors for boys in the combined intervention versus the comparison condition at posttest. Study results inform school-based violence prevention programs and are discussed along with implications.     

Childhood Cancer and Brain Tumor Late Effects: Relationships with Family Burden and Survivor Psychological Outcomes

This study examines illness-specific family burden as a mediator of the association between late effects of childhood cancer and survivors’ emotional and behavioral outcomes. Childhood cancer survivors (n?=?65; ages 10–17) two or more years off-treatment completed measures assessing internalizing and PTSD symptoms. Parents reported on illness-specific family burden, late effects severity, and survivor internalizing/externalizing problems. Providers documented the number of late effects. Illness-specific family burden was correlated with provider-reported late effects (r?=?.29, p?<?.05) and parent report of severe late effects (r?=?.56, p?<?.01). Results supported an indirect effect of illness-specific family burden on number of late effects and parent-reported survivor internalizing problems, p?<?.05. Indirect effects were not found in models predicting PTSD and externalizing problems. Illness-specific family burden is an important intervention target for reducing internalizing problems in childhood cancer survivors with late effects.     

Sexual Coercion Among Students at the University of Cape Coast,Ghana

Sexual coercion refers to strategies that result in an individual engaging in sexual activity against his or her will. Ecological factors influence the way sexual interactions occur; however, the relationship between these factors and sexual coercion has not been explored among university students in Ghana. The purpose of this study was to examine sexual coercion among university students in Ghana by specifically examining individual-level factors (age, gender, sexual debut, age differential with first partner, being in an intimate relationship, history of abortion, and past experiences with transactional sex) and the experience of forced and coerced sex. Residential students at the University of Cape Coast were invited to participate and completed a survey on a tablet computer. Questions included demographics; sexual and reproductive health experiences and knowledge; and attitudes and experiences with abortion. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to examine individual-level factors associated with experiences of sexual coercion and forced sex. There were 480 females and 556 males that completed the survey; 26.3 and 16.4% reported having had intercourse either because they were forced or coerced, or when they were “very unwilling”. These students were more likely to be female (OR 3.5), to have had an abortion (OR 2.9), and to have engaged in transactional sex (OR 1.9). Many University of Cape Coast students are experiencing forced or coerced sex. Programs targeting both female and male students as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence in this population are sorely needed. Primary prevention of sexual violence is one promising field.     

Joint Influence of Visual and Auditory Words in the Stroop Task

We conducted four Stroop color–word experiments to examine how multiple stimuli influence interference. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that interference was strong when the word and color were integrated, and that visual and auditory words made independent contributions to interference when these words had different meanings. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed this pattern when the word information and color information were not integrated, and hence when overall interference was substantially less. Auditory and visual interference effects are comparable except when the visual distracter is integrated with the color, in which case interference is substantially enhanced. Overall, these results are interpreted as being most consistent with a joint influence account of interference as opposed to a capture account.     

Visuo-haptic integration in object identification using novel objects

Although some studies have shown that haptic and visual identification seem to rely on similar processes, few studies have directly compared the two. We investigated haptic and visual object identification by asking participants to learn to recognize (Experiments 1, and 3), or to match (Experiment 2) novel objects that varied only in shape. Participants explored objects haptically, visually, or bimodally, and were then asked to identify objects haptically and/or visually. We demonstrated that patterns of identification errors were similar across identification modality, independently of learning and testing condition, suggesting that the haptic and visual representations in memory were similar. We also demonstrated that identification performance depended on both learning and testing conditions: visual identification surpassed haptic identification only when participants explored the objects visually or bimodally. When participants explored the objects haptically, haptic and visual identification were equivalent. Interestingly, when participants were simultaneously presented with two objects (one was presented haptically, and one was presented visually), object similarity only influenced performance when participants were asked to indicate whether the two objects were the same, or when participants had learned about the objects visually—without any haptic input. The results suggest that haptic and visual object representations rely on similar processes, that they may be shared, and that visual processing may not always lead to the best performance.