Attentional bias in post-traumatic stress disorder diminishes after symptom amelioration

Background

Avoidance and hypervigilance to reminders of a traumatic event are among the main characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Attentional bias toward aversive cues in PTSD has been hypothesized as being part of the dysfunction causing etiology and maintenance of PTSD. The aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive strategy underlying attentional bias in PTSD and whether normal cognitive processing is restored after a treatment suppressing core PTSD symptoms.

Methods

Nineteen healthy controls were matched for age, sex and education to 19 PTSD patients. We used the emotional stroop and detection of target tasks, before and after an average of 4.1 sessions of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.

Results

We found that on both tasks, patients were slower than controls in responding in the presence of emotionally negative words compared to neutral ones. After symptoms removal, patients no longer had attentional bias, and responded similarly to controls.

Conclusion

These results support the existence of an attentional bias in PTSD patients due to a disengagement difficulty. There was also preliminary evidence that the disengagement was linked to PTSD symptomatology. It should be further explored whether attentional bias and PTSD involve common brain mechanisms.     

Mimicry and propagation of prosocial behavior in a natural setting

This study tested, in a natural setting, the effect of mimicry on people's disposition toward helping others and the extent to which this helping behavior is extended to people not directly involved in the mimicry situation. In the main street of a busy town, men (n = 101) and women (n = 109) passersby were encountered and asked for directions. These passersby were subjected to mimicry by na?ve confederates who mimicked either verbal behavior alone or verbal and nonverbal behaviors together, including arm, hand, and head movements. In the control condition, passersby were not mimicked. Following this first encounter, each subject was then met further down the street by a second confederate who asked for money. The results show that people who had been mimicked complied more often with a request for money and gave significantly more, suggesting they were more helpful and more generous toward other people, even complete strangers.     

Designs for studying the effectiveness of long-term psychoanalytic treatments: balancing level of evidence and acceptability to patients

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Treatments (LTPT) include both long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (LTPP) and psychoanalysis (PsAn). Current opinion seems to be that there is some evidence for the effectiveness of LTPP, but none for that of PsAn. This may be due in part to researchers not balancing the level of evidence of randomized controlled studies (RCTs), cohort studies, and pre-post studies with patients' acceptance of these various research designs used in studying the effectiveness of LTPT. After a review of the merits of eight possible control conditions for LTPT in RCTs and cohort studies, and a consideration of the limitations and merits of pre-post studies, it was found that RCTs pair high levels of evidence with limited degrees of patient acceptance, especially where PsAn is concerned. Cohort studies appear to provide at most a moderate level of evidence. Their acceptability is hardly better than that of RCTs, as it depends on the acceptability of control conditions similar to those of RCTs. The acceptability of pre-post studies is much better, but they can provide, at most, a moderate level of evidence. Apart from randomization, they can meet all methodological criteria for high-quality research (often they do not, but there are ways to correct this). In summary, in the long-term treatment of complex mental disorders with LTPT, RCTs often pair a high level of evidence with limited patient acceptance of the method. Compared to RCTs, cohort studies show a lower level of evidence without much gain in acceptability. Pre-post studies pair the highest level of acceptability with the lowest level of evidence of the three designs. Limited acceptability is not to be confused with no acceptability, nor moderate level of evidence with none.     

Hand preference and its flexibility according to the position of the object: a study in cercopithecines examining spontaneous behaviour and an experimental task (the Bishop QHP task)

The extant literature on manual laterality in non-human primates is inconclusive, plagued by inconsistent or contradictory findings and by disturbing methodological issues (e.g. uncontrolled influential factors, comparability issues). The present study examined hand preference and its flexibility in 15 red-capped mangabeys (C. t. torquatus) and 13 Campbell's monkeys (C. c. campbelli), two species that differ in their degree of arboreality. We investigated the influence of the spatial position of the object on hand preference for reaching. We considered spontaneous behaviour (reaching for food during daily feeding) and an experimental task: the QHP task. The QHP is a task that is used in humans. This is a simple reaching task that involves high spatial constraints on hand use. In our study, the subject had to reach for items that were placed on a semi-circle in front of it on five positions, including in the centre position, in the ipsilateral space and in the contralateral space. We assessed hand preference for reaching in front (baseline condition), and we examined how this preference changed when reaching in lateral positions. For reaching in front, about half of the subjects were lateralized and no group-level bias occurred, for both spontaneous and experimental conditions. When considering reaching in the lateral positions, we observed that the position of the object influenced hand use: individuals used the hand that was closest to the object. The results are discussed in relation to previous findings in humans and in non-human primates and regarding theories on handedness and flexibility of hand preference.