Chronic stress and sex differences on the recall of fear conditioning and extinction

Chronic stress effects and sex differences were examined on conditioned fear extinction. Male and female Sprague–Dawley rats were chronically stressed by restraint (6 h/d/21 d), conditioned to tone and footshock, followed by extinction after 1 h and 24 h delays. Chronic stress impaired the recall of fear extinction in males, as evidenced by high freezing to tone after the 24 h delay despite exposure to the previous 1 h delay extinction trials, and this effect was not due to ceiling effects from overtraining during conditioning. In contrast, chronic stress attenuated the recall of fear conditioning acquisition in females, regardless of exposure to the 1 h extinction exposure. Since freezing to tone was reinstated following unsignalled footshocks, the deficit in the stressed rats reflected impaired recall rather than impaired consolidation. Sex differences in fear conditioning and extinction were observed in nonstressed controls as well, with control females resisting extinction to tone. Analysis of contextual freezing showed that all groups (control, stress, male, female) increased freezing immediately after the first tone extinction trial, demonstrating contextual discrimination. These findings show that chronic stress and sex interact to influence fear conditioning, with chronic stress impairing the recall of delayed fear extinction in males to implicate the medial prefrontal cortex, disrupting the recall of the fear conditioning acquisition in females to implicate the amygdala, and nonstressed controls exhibiting sex differences in fear conditioning and extinction, which may involve the amygdala and/or corticosterone levels.     

The Psychotherapeutic Encounter: Sexual Acting Out As the Focus of Intervention

Clinical observation indicates that sexual acting out takes place during periods in which the integrity of the self is threatened by some disappointment, some frustration, or what is perceived as an unavoidable but unfair demand. Rather than confront the problem within the object relationship, the conflict is acted out. The sexual encounter reduces anxiety and facilitates the containment of depressive and aggressive feelings. Self-integration is attempted even at the risk of losing something, be it a wife, a husband, a girlfriend or the presidency. At the time it seems the only possible way to cope with painful or threatening stimuli.     

The Inner and the Outer: Kant's 'Refutation' Reconstructed

In Skeptical idealism says that possibly nothing exists outside my own conscious mental states. Purported refutations of skeptical idealism – whether Descartes's, Locke's, Reid's, Kant's, Moore's, Putnam's, or Burge's – are philosophically scandalous: they have convinced no one. I argue (1) that what is wrong with the failed refutations is that they have attempted to prove the wrong thing – i.e., that necessarily I have veridical perceptions of distal material objects in space, and (2) that a charitable reconstruction of Kant's 'Refutation of Idealism' in fact provides a sound refutation of skeptical idealism.     

Two Claims about Desert

Many philosophers claim that it is always intrinsically good when people get what they deserve and that there is always at least some reason to give people what they deserve. I highlight problems with this view and defend an alternative. I have two aims. First, I want to expose a gap in certain desert‐based justifications of punishment. Second, I want to show that those of us who have intuitions at odds with these justifications have an alternative account of desert at our disposal – one that may lend our intuitions more credibility.     

Family Communication about Donor Conception: A Qualitative Study with Lesbian Parents

In this qualitative study of 10 lesbian couples who built their families through anonymous donor conception, we explore how lesbian parents experience communication about the donor conception within the family. While for these families “disclosure” of donor conception is often seen as evident, the way parents and children discuss this subject and how this is experienced by the parents themselves has not received much research attention. To meet this gap in the literature, in‐depth interviews with lesbian couples were conducted. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis showed that this family communication process can be understood within the broader relational context of parent–child relationships. Even though parents handled this family communication in many different ways, these were all inspired by the same motives: acting in the child's best interest and—on a more implicit level—maintaining good relations within the family. Furthermore, parents left the initiative for talking about the DC mostly to the child. Overall, parents aimed at constructing a donor conception narrative that they considered acceptable for both the children and themselves. They used different strategies, such as gradual disclosure, limiting the meaning of the donor, and justifying the donor conception. Building an acceptable donor conception narrative was sometimes challenged by influences from the social environment. In the discussion, we relate this qualitative systemic study to the broader issues of selective disclosure and bidirectionality within families.     

Predictors of majority members' acculturation preferences: Experimental evidence

A study was conducted to test experimentally whether majority members' perceptions of which acculturation strategies minority members prefer would causally impact on majority members' own acculturation preferences, especially their preference for integration. Participants (N = 113) were exposed to videos in which actors who posed as Pakistani minority members voiced different acculturation preferences (integration, assimilation, separation or control condition). Their views were presented as representative of their ethnic group. The effect of this on white British majority participants' own acculturation preferences was measured. As expected, perceived acculturation preferences significantly impacted on own acculturation preferences. In line with predictions, participants' level of prejudice significantly moderated these effects.     

Neural systems for recognition of emotional prosody: a 3-D lesion study

Which brain regions are associated with recognition of emotional prosody? Are these distinct from those for recognition of facial expression? These issues were investigated by mapping the overlaps of co-registered lesions from 66 brain-damaged participants as a function of their performance in rating basic emotions. It was found that recognizing emotions from prosody draws on the right frontoparietal operculum, the bilateral frontal pole, and the left frontal operculum. Recognizing emotions from prosody and facial expressions draws on the right frontoparietal cortex, which may be important in reconstructing aspects of the emotion signaled by the stimulus. Furthermore, there were regions in the left and right temporal lobes that contributed disproportionately to recognition of emotion from faces or prosody, respectively.