Virtual reality goes to war: a brief review of the future of military behavioral healthcare

Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning OEF/OIF military personnel is creating a significant healthcare challenge. These findings have served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD. Virtual Reality delivered exposure therapy for PTSD has been previously used with reports of positive outcomes. This article details how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify and treat combat-related PTSD in OIF/OEF Service Members and Veterans. The summarized projects in these areas have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center, and this paper will detail efforts to use virtual reality to deliver exposure therapy, assess PTSD and cognitive function and provide stress resilience training prior to deployment.     

Working memory load reduces the late positive potential and this effect is attenuated with increasing anxiety

Emotion regulation decreases the processing of arousing stimuli, as indexed by the late positive potential (LPP), an electrocortical component that varies in amplitude with emotional arousal. Emotion regulation increases activity in the prefrontal areas associated with cognitive control, including the dosolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The present study manipulated working memory load, known to activate the DLPFC, and recorded the LPP elicited by aversive and neutral IAPS pictures presented during the retention interval. The LPP was larger on low-load compared to high-load trials, and on trials with aversive compared to neutral pictures. These LPP data suggest that emotional content and working memory load have opposing effects on attention to distracting stimuli. State anxiety was associated with reduced modulation of the LPP by working memory load. Results are discussed in terms of competition for attention between emotion and cognition and suggest a relationship between DLPFC activation and the allocation of attentional resources to distracting visual stimuli–a relationship that may be disrupted with increasing anxiety.     

Semantic involvement in reading aloud: evidence from a nonword training study

The current research uses a novel methodology to examine the role of semantics in reading aloud. Participants were trained to read aloud 2 sets of novel words (i.e., nonwords such as bink): some with meanings (semantic) and some without (nonsemantic). A comparison of reading aloud performance between these 2 sets of novel words was used to provide an indicator of the importance of semantic information in reading aloud. In Experiment 1, in contrast to expectations, reading aloud performance was not better for novel words in the semantic condition. In Experiment 2, the training of novel words was modified to reflect more realistic steps of lexical acquisition: Reading aloud performance became faster and more accurate for novel words in the semantic condition, but only for novel words with inconsistent pronunciations. This semantic advantage for inconsistent novel words was again observed when a subset of participants from Experiment 2 was retested 6-12 months later (in Experiment 3). These findings provide support for a limited but significant role for semantics in the reading aloud process.     

The impact of visual illusions on perception, action planning, and motor performance

The present study extended recent research revealing that illusions can influence performance in golf putting (Witt, Linkenauger, & Proffitt Psychological Science, 23, 397–399, 2012), by exploring the potential mediating roles of attention and action planning. Glover and Dixon’s (Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 27, 560–572, 2001) planning–control model suggests that both perceptual and movement-planning processes are prone to illusion-based bias. We therefore predicted that both the perception of target size and a measure of attentional control related to movement planning in golf putting (the quiet eye) would be influenced by the illusion. Moreover, as performance could not be corrected using online control (once the ball was struck), we predicted that these biases would also influence performance. We therefore proposed a three-stage process by which illusory context biases perceptual processes, which in turn bias subsequent attentional control related to movement planning, which in turn biases motor performance. Forty novice golfers completed an Ebbinghaus illusion putting task that was designed to manipulate their perceptions of target size, while quiet eye duration and performance (mean radial error) were measured. The results indicated that the illusion was effective in facilitating differences in perceived target size, with perceptually bigger holes promoting longer quiet eye durations and more accurate putting. Follow-up mediation analyses revealed that illusion-based differences in size perception partially mediated illusion-based differences in both quiet eye duration and performance. Moreover, the relationship between illusion-based differences in quiet eye duration and performance was also significant. Future research should further test this three-stage process of bias in other far-aiming tasks in which online control cannot be used.     

Facing Down the Representation of An Impossibility: Indigenous Responses to a ‘Universal’ Problem in the Repatriation Context

This paper explores the ways Native Americans and Native Hawiians have responded to what Ernesto Laclau has called ‘the representation of an impossibility’—the discursive crisis faced by non-dominant groups who seek to advance rights claims in ways that are culturally rooted but universally audible to ideologically dominant audiences. Taking the NAGPRA law of 1990 as its case study, this paper asserts the need for a re-theorisation of indigenous religious discourse in order to illuminate the ways native peoples build rather than concede agency through self-representations in the current political moment. Pursuing this argument, the paper charts an analytical course specifying the relationship of rights claims to discourse, hegemony, articulation, tradition, and religion. The paper then focuses upon specific examples of religious claims in the context of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to demonstrate the ways Native Americans have faced down an ‘impossibility’.     

Parental Opioid Abuse: A Review of Child Outcomes,Parenting, and Parenting Interventions

Opioid abuse is now considered an epidemic, and many of the adults using this substance are parents. The purpose of the current paper is twofold: (1) to review rigorously conducted studies (e.g., included a comparison group; utilized inferential statistics) examining the association of opioid abuse with parenting and child outcomes, and (2) to review parenting intervention programs with these caregivers. Findings indicate that there are very few rigorously conducted studies examining children and parenting when parents abuse opioids. Furthermore, only four intervention programs have been conducted using randomized control trials and inferential statistics. We conclude that there is limited research that can be labeled as a rigorous science currently addressing this aspect of the opioid epidemic. Recommendations for further research are delineated.     

Between-object binding and visual attention

Many previous studies have found that we can attend pairs of visual features (e.g., colour, orientation) more efficiently when they belong to the same “object” compared to when they belong to separate, neighbouring objects (e.g., Behrmann, Zemel, & Mozer, 1998; Egly, Rafal, & Driver, 1994). This advantage for attending features from the same object may reflect stronger binding between these features than arises for pairs of features belonging to separate objects. However, recent findings described by Davis, Welch, Holmes, and Shepherd (in press) suggest that under specific conditions this same-object advantage can be reversed, such that attention now spreads more readily between features belonging to separate neighbouring objects than between features of the same object. In such cases it would appear that features belonging to separate visual objects are more strongly bound than features of the same object. Here I review these findings and present the results of a new study. Together these data suggest that magnocellular processes in the human visual system bind together features from separate objects, whereas parvocellular processes bind together features from the same object.     

Abnormal Neural Sensitivity to Monetary Gains Versus Losses Among Adolescents at Risk for Depression

Major depressive disorder aggregates within families, although the mechanisms of transfer across generations are not well understood. In light of converging biological and behavioral evidence that depressive symptoms are associated with impaired reward processing, we examined whether adolescent girls with a parental history of depression would also exhibit abnormal reward sensitivity. We performed a negative mood induction and then recorded the feedback negativity, a neural index of reward processing, while individuals completed a gambling task. High-risk adolescents reported greater sadness following the mood induction compared to low-risk adolescents. Among the high-risk group, sadness was strongly associated with a blunted feedback negativity, even after controlling for baseline mood and trait neuroticism. This suggests that high-risk adolescents are more reactive to negative stimuli, which significantly alter neural sensitivity to monetary gains and losses. The feedback negativity might be used to identify information processing abnormalities in high-risk populations prior to the onset of a major depressive episode.