Incarcerated Violent Offenders' Ability to Avoid Revealing Their Potential for Violence on the Rorschach and the MMPI–2

Recently, Hartmann and Hartmann (2014) Hartmann, E., &; Hartmann, T. (2014): The impact of exposure to Internet-based information about the Rorschach and the MMPI–2 on psychiatric outpatients' ability to simulate mentally healthy test performance, Journal of Personality Assessment, 96, 432–444. doi:10.1080/00223891.2014.882342.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] found that psychiatric outpatients, both with and without access to Internet-based information about the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM; Weiner, 2003 Weiner, I. B. (2003). Principles of Rorschach interpretations (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]) and the MMPI–2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, &; Kaemmer, 1989 Butcher, J. N., Dahlstrom, W. G., Graham, J. R., Tellegen, A., &; Kaemmer, B. (1989). Manual for the Restandardized Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: MMPI–2. An administration and interpretive guide. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), were unable to imitate healthy test performance on these tests. We replicated the study by administering the RIM and the MMPI–2 to 63 incarcerated violent offenders using similar testing conditions. As in the previous study, comparisons were made not only among the 3 subgroups of incarcerated offenders, but also between these offender groups and the group of nonpatients examined in the previous study. On the RIM, Internet-coached and uncoached “faking good” offenders produced records with significantly higher F% and X–% and significantly lower M, m, SumC, X+%, P, AG, and COP than nonoffenders under standard instructions (effect sizes between d = 0.24 and d = 2.39). For AgC, AgPot, AgPast, and TCI% there were no significant differences between the faking offenders and the nonoffenders under standard instructions. On the MMPI–2 clinical scales, there were no significant differences between the faking good groups and the nonoffenders under standard instructions, except on Hs, Pd, and Sc. Both faking groups were identifiable by their high L scale scores. Although both faking groups managed to avoid giving responses with aggressive and generally psychopathological content on the RIM, they were unable to produce test profiles demonstrating healthy test performance on any of the tests; nevertheless, Internet-based test information might weaken test validity.     

Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Transient activation of the CA3 Kappa opioid system in the dorsal hippocampus modulates complex memory processing in mice

The hippocampus plays a central role in various forms of complex learning and memory. Opioid peptides and receptors are abundant in the hippocampus. These peptides are co-released with glutamate from mossy fiber- and lateral perforant path-synapses. In this study, we evaluated the functional relevance of the CA3 Kappa opioid receptors (KOR) by transient pharmacological activation or inactivation using single bilateral intrahippocampal microinjections of a selective agonist (U50,488H, 1 or 2.5 nmol), a selective antagonist (nor-binaltorphimine, norBNI 5 nmol) or a mixture of both. C57Bl/6J mice were tested in a fear conditioning paradigm (FC) or in a modified version of the water maze task thought to reveal how flexibly animals can learn and manipulate spatial information (WM). In FC, the agonist (2.5 nmol) decreased context-induced (but not tone-induced) freezing whereas norBNI had no effect. The impairment caused by the agonist U50,488H was blocked by the injection of norBNI, suggesting that overstimulation of CA3-KOR impairs the acquisition and consolidation of contextual fear-related memory. In the WM task, mice were trained repeatedly each day to find a hidden platform. After having reached this goal, the platform position was changed the next day for a new task. U50,488H injection before the last task abolished the previously acquired ability to find rapidly a new platform location, whereas adding norBNI reversed this impairment. Thus, in the mouse, even partial and topographically restricted activation of CA3-KOR entails impairments in two different hippocampus-dependent tasks, indicating functional relevance of the kappa opioid system.     

Asymmetric prefrontal cortex functions predict asymmetries in number space

Little is known about the neuropsychological factors that contribute to individual differences in the asymmetric orientation along the mental number line. The present study documents healthy subjects’ preference for small numbers over large numbers in a random number generation task. This preference, referred to as “small-number bias” (SNB), varied with prefrontal functional lateralization: it was larger in participants with over-proportionately better performance in design fluency compared to letter fluency than in participants with over-proportionately better performance in letter fluency when compared to design fluency. Asymmetries in learning and memory tasks (verbal vs. non-verbal) were not related to direction or size of the SNB. We conclude that hemispheric asymmetries of specifically prefrontal executive functions are predictive of an individual’s lateral orientation bias along the mental number line. Therefore, the focus on parietal contributions to spatial-numerical associations may not be justified. Random number generation may be a helpful method to further explore these associations uncontaminated by the asymmetric involvement of response effectors.     

An investigation of brain processes supporting meditation

Meditation is an ancient spiritual practice, which aims to still the fluctuations of the mind. We investigated meditation with fMRI in order to identify and characterise both the “neural switch” mechanism used in the voluntary shift from normal consciousness to meditation and the “threshold regulation mechanism” sustaining the meditative state. Thirty-one individuals with 1.5–25 years experience in meditation were scanned using a blocked on–off design with 45 s alternating epochs during the onset of respectively meditation and normal relaxation. Additionally, 21 subjects were scanned during 14.5 min of sustained meditation. The data were analysed with SPM and ICA. During the onset of meditation, activations were found bilaterally in the putamen and the supplementary motor cortex, while deactivations were found predominately in the right hemisphere, the precuneus, the posterior cingulum and the parieto–temporal area. During sustained meditation, SPM analysis revealed activation in the head of nucleus caudatus. Extensive deactivations were observed in white matter in the right hemisphere, i.e. mainly in the posterior occipito–parieto–temporal area and in the frontal lobes. ICA identified 38 components including known baseline-resting state components, one of which not only overlaps with the activated area revealed in the SPM analysis but extends further into frontal, temporal, parietal and limbic areas, and might presumably constitute a combination of frontoparietal and cinguloopercular task control systems. The identified component processes display varying degrees of correlation. We hypothesise that a proper characterisation of brain processes during meditation will require an operational definition of brain dynamics matching a stable state of mind.