FEMALE VIOLENCE AGAINST INTIMATE PARTNERS: AN INTRODUCTION

This special issue addresses some of the contradictions found in the research literature on intimate partner violence. Much of this work is concerned with the problems of severely battered women. However, other research indicates that women can be just as violent as their partners. Articles in this issue begin to explore some of the ways that women express intimate partner violence and argue that there is more than one type of partner violence. Motives and other correlates of violence are examined and future research directions are outlined.     

Role of the striatum and the cerebellum in motor skill acquisition

Motor skill acquisition was investigated in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) or cerebellar dysfunction using two sensory-guided tracking tasks. The subjects had to learn to track a visual target (a square) on a computer screen by moving a joystick under two different conditions. In the unreversed task, the horizontal target movements were semi-predictable and could be anticipated. In the reversed task, the horizontal movements of a pointer which had to be kept within the target square were mirror-reversed to the joystick movements. PD patients showed intact learning of the semi-predictable task and reduced learning of the mirror-reversed task; patients with cerebellar dysfunction showed the opposite pattern. These findings are discussed in relation to the differential contribution of the cerebellum and the striatum to motor skill acquisition: the cerebellum appears to participate in the implementation of anticipatory movements, whereas the striatum may be critically involved in types of motor learning which require a high degree of internal elaboration.     

Markedness and perspective in the interpretation of the active and passive voice

The subjects were presented with active and passive sentences. For each sentence, they had to choose between two alternative implications. The pattern of choices indicates that in the passive the logical subject was interpreted by the subjects as the focal point of the information asserted by the sentence and as the carrier of overall responsibility for the sentential proposition. In contrast to the passive, there was no clear pattern of preferences for the active. The difference between the two voices was attributed to their markedness asymmetry, the passive being marked and the active unmarked. It is concluded that the active offers a neutral structure for conveying information; a structure available for use when one does not want to superimpose on the information content any stylistic or connotational implications. The passive, on the other hand, suggests special connotations in addition to the basic message.     

Changing views of emotion regulation and neurobiological models of the mechanism of action of psychotherapy

Influential neurobiological models of the mechanism of action of psychotherapy attribute its success to increases of activity in prefrontal areas and decreases in limbic areas, interpreted as the successful and adaptive recruitment of controlled processes to achieve emotion regulation. In this article, we review the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in support of this model and its applicability to explain the mechanism of action of psychotherapy. Neuroimaging studies of explicit emotion regulation, evidence on the neurobiological substrates of implicit emotion regulation, and meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies of the effect of psychotherapy consistently suggest that areas implicated in coding semantic representations play an important role in emotion regulation not covered by existing models based on controlled processes. We discuss the findings that implicate these same areas in supporting working memory, in encoding preferences and the prospective outcome of actions taken in rewarding or aversive contingencies, and show how these functions may be integrated into process models of emotion regulation that depend on elaborate semantic representations for their effectiveness. These alternative models also appear to be more consistent with internal accounts in the psychotherapeutic literature of how psychotherapy works.     

Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

Parent–adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent–adolescent conflict (i.e., conflict discussion tasks) is hindered by task design. This limitation may stem from how conflict topics are assessed and selected for discussion. Within a sample of 47 adolescents (ages 14–17) and parents, we investigated whether a modified version of a conflict discussion task could elicit physiological (i.e., arousal) and behavioral (i.e., hostility) displays of adolescents’ conflict-related stress responses. We assessed parent–adolescent conflict via structured interview to identify topics for dyads to discuss during the task. We randomly assigned dyads to complete a 5-min task to discuss either a putatively benign topic (i.e., control condition) or a conflict topic while undergoing direct assessments of continuous arousal. Trained raters coded dyad members’ hostile behavior during the task. Adolescents in the conflict condition exhibited significantly greater levels of arousal than adolescents in the control condition. We observed an interaction between discussion condition and baseline conflict. Specifically, higher baseline conflict predicted greater hostile behavior for adolescents in the conflict condition, yet we observed the inverse relation for adolescents in the control condition. Our modified laboratory discussion task successfully elicited both physiological and behavioral displays of adolescent conflict-related stress. These findings have important implications for leveraging experimental paradigms to understand causal links between parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent psychopathology, and their underlying mechanisms.     

Study of behavioural and neural bases of visuo‐spatial working memory with an fMRI paradigm based on an n‐back task

The goal of this study was to propose a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm using a language‐free adaptation of a 2‐back working memory task to avoid cultural and educational bias. We additionally provide an index of the validity of the proposed paradigm and test whether the experimental task discriminates the behavioural performances of healthy participants from those of individuals with working memory deficits. Ten healthy participants and nine patients presenting working memory (WM) deficits due to acquired brain injury (ABI) performed the developed task. To inspect whether the paradigm activates brain areas typically involved in visual working memory (VWM), brain activation of the healthy participants was assessed with fMRIs. To examine the task's capacity to discriminate behavioural data, performances of the healthy participants in the task were compared with those of ABI patients. Data were analysed with GLM‐based random effects procedures and t‐tests. We found an increase of the BOLD signal in the specialized areas of VWM. Concerning behavioural performances, healthy participants showed the predicted pattern of more hits, less omissions and a tendency for fewer false alarms, more self‐corrected responses, and faster reaction times, when compared with subjects presenting WM impairments. The results suggest that this task activates brain areas involved in VWM and discriminates behavioural performances of clinical and non‐clinical groups. It can thus be used as a research methodology for behavioural and neuroimaging studies of VWM in block‐design paradigms.     

Let's Have Fun Tonight: The Role of Pleasure in Daily Recovery from Work

The present study aims to advance insight into the role of pleasure in the daily effort‐recovery cycle. Specifically, using a within‐individual study design, we examine the associations between the pleasure employees experience during the evening after work and their recovery state that evening and at various points in time during the next workday. We also investigate associations between employees' recovery state at the end of the workday and the pleasure they experience during the subsequent evening. Multilevel analyses show that on days when employees experience higher levels of pleasure during the evening after work, they have a more favorable recovery state during that evening. Importantly, the extent to which employees experience pleasure during the evening after work is also positively related to their recovery state during the next workday. Finally, our study shows that on days when employees are in a more unfavorable recovery state at the end of the workday, they experience lower levels of pleasure during the subsequent evening after work. This study increases our insight into the role of pleasure in recovering from work and underlines the importance of engaging in pleasant activities after work.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.