Opposing amygdala and ventral striatum connectivity during emotion identification

Lesion and electrophysiological studies in animals provide evidence of opposing functions for subcortical nuclei such as the amygdala and ventral striatum, but the implications of these findings for emotion identification in humans remain poorly described. Here we report a high-resolution fMRI study in a sample of 39 healthy subjects who performed a well-characterized emotion identification task. As expected, the amygdala responded to THREAT (angry or fearful) faces more than NON-THREAT (sad or happy) faces. A functional connectivity analysis of the time series from an anatomically defined amygdala seed revealed a strong anticorrelation between the amygdala and the ventral striatum/ventral pallidum, consistent with an opposing role for these regions in during emotion identification. A second functional connectivity analysis (psychophysiological interaction) investigating relative connectivity on THREAT vs. NON-THREAT trials demonstrated that the amygdala had increased connectivity with the orbitofrontal cortex during THREAT trials, whereas the ventral striatum demonstrated increased connectivity with the posterior hippocampus on NON-THREAT trials. These results indicate that activity in the amygdala and ventral striatum may be inversely related, and that both regions may provide opposing affective bias signals during emotion identification.     

Research in Counseling: A 10‐Year Review to Inform Practice

This study reviewed 4,457 articles from 1998 to 2007 in American Counseling Association division‐affiliated journals to identify research articles published in counseling; 1,139 articles (25.6%) were quantitatively research based. The authors provide details related to quantitative research publications, including individual journal contribution to the research base, focus areas for research, and independent and dependent variables highlighted by researchers. One summary finding was that only 6% of counseling research articles explored effectiveness of counseling interventions.     

Hope as a Mediator and Moderator of Multidimensional Perfectionism and Depression in Middle School Students

The authors examined the relationship of perfectionism, hope, and depression in a sample of 153 middle school students. Adaptive perfectionists differed significantly from both maladaptive perfectionists and nonperfectionists on their levels of hope and depression. Hope mediated the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression and supported an indirect effects model for hope and the relationship between adaptive perfectionism and depression. No evidence was found for hope as a moderator in the relationship between perfectionism and depression.     

Observed Ward Behavior Strongly Associated with Independent Living Skills: An Analysis of Convergent and Criterion-Related Validity of the NOSIE and the ILSI

Ratings of ward behavior and skill acquisition are important criteria for monitoring an individual’s recovery trajectory during inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation. This study compared data from the Nurses’ Observational Scale for Inpatient Evaluation (NOSIE) and the Independent Living Skills Inventory (ILSI) to identify relationships between ward behaviors and independent living skills and to support the convergent validity of these instruments. The criterion-related validity of the instruments in their relationships with time in program (TIP) and number of previous hospitalizations (#HOSP) was also investigated. NOSIE “positive” subscales were more strongly related to living skills than NOSIE “negative” subscales. The NOSIE and the ILSI predicted TIP and postdicted #HOSP equally well. Implications for assessment and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

A second type of magnitude effect: Reinforcer magnitude differentiates delay discounting between substance users and controls

Basic research on delay discounting, examining preference for smaller–sooner or larger–later reinforcers, has demonstrated a variety of findings of considerable generality. One of these, the magnitude effect, is the observation that individuals tend to exhibit greater preference for the immediate with smaller magnitude reinforcers. Delay discounting has also proved to be a useful marker of addiction, as demonstrated by the highly replicated finding of greater discounting rates in substance users compared to controls. However, some research on delay discounting rates in substance users, particularly research examining discounting of small‐magnitude reinforcers, has not found significant differences compared to controls. Here, we hypothesize that the magnitude effect could produce ceiling effects at small magnitudes, thus obscuring differences in delay discounting between groups. We examined differences in discounting between high‐risk substance users and controls over a broad range of magnitudes of monetary amounts ($0.10, $1.00, $10.00, $100.00, and $1000.00) in 116 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. We found no significant differences in discounting rates between users and controls at the smallest reinforcer magnitudes ($0.10 and $1.00) and further found that differences became more pronounced as magnitudes increased. These results provide an understanding of a second form of the magnitude effect: That is, differences in discounting between populations can become more evident as a function of reinforcer magnitude.     

Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary‐Coalitional Theory of Liberal‐Conservative Differences

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains liberal‐conservative differences as arising from different moral intuitions, with liberals endorsing “individualizing” foundations (Harm and Fairness) and conservatives also endorsing “binding” foundations (Authority, Respect, and Purity). We argue these labels misconstrue ideological differences and propose Evolutionary‐Coalitional Theory (ECT) as an alternative, explaining how competitive dynamics in the ancestral social environment could produce the observed ideological differences. We test ECT against MFT across three studies. Study 1 shows the so‐called “binding” orientation entails the threat‐sensitivity and outgroup antagonism predicted by ECT; that is, an authoritarian motive. Similarly, Study 2 shows the so‐called “individualizing” orientation is better described as a universalizing motive, one reflecting a broader set of moral commitments (e.g., to nature) and a broader sociality than the egocentrism implied by MFT. Study 3 provides a factor analysis reducing “binding” to authoritarianism and “individualizing” to universalism, with the latter loading against social dominance orientation (SDO). A hierarchical regression then provides additional evidence for ECT, showing this dominating motive (SDO) accounts for variance in conservatism that MFT leaves unexplained. Collectively, these three studies suggest that ECT offers a more accurate and precise explanation of the key psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.     

Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes.     

The role of animacy in spatial transformations

We present evidence that different mental spatial transformations are used to reason about three different types of items representing a spectrum of animacy: human bodies, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects. Participants made two different judgments about rotated figures: handedness judgments (“Is this the left or right side?”) and matching judgments (“Are these figures the same?”). Perspective-taking strategies were most prevalent when participants made handedness judgments about human bodies and animals. In contrast, participants generally did not imagine changes in perspective to perform matching judgments. Such results suggest that high-level information about semantic categories, including information about a thing’s animacy, can influence how spatial representations are transformed when performing online problem solving. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.