Electrophysiological responses to evaluative priming: the LPP is sensitive to incongruity

Previous studies examining event-related potentials and evaluative priming have been mixed; some find evidence that evaluative priming influences the N400, whereas others find evidence that it affects the late positive potential (LPP). Three experiments were conducted using either affective pictures (Experiments 1 and 2) or words (Experiment 3) in a sequential evaluative priming paradigm. In line with previous behavioral findings, participants responded slower to targets that were evaluatively incongruent with the preceding prime (e.g., negative preceded by positive) compared to evaluatively congruent targets (e.g., negative preceded by negative). In all three studies, the LPP was larger to evaluatively incongruent targets compared to evaluatively congruent ones, and there was no evidence that evaluative incongruity influenced the N400 component. Thus, the present results provide additional support for the notion that evaluative priming influences the LPP and not the N400. We discuss possible reasons for the inconsistent findings in prior research and the theoretical implications of the findings for both evaluative and semantic priming.     

Spiritual well-being and spiritual practices in elderly depressed psychiatric inpatients

This study's aims were to describe the spirituality of depressed elderly psychiatric inpatients and to examine associations among spirituality, depression, and quality of life (QOL). Forty-five persons participated. Most reported frequent, stable spiritual practices and experiencing spiritual comfort and guidance. Some reported spiritual distress and changes in spirituality. During hospitalization, participants demonstrated increased spiritual well-being (SWB) and peacefulness, and reduced hopelessness, worthlessness, and guilt. Positive associations were found between SWB and QOL and negative associations between SWB and depression.     

Resilience: A Disability Studies and Community Psychology Approach

This paper contests traditional psychological understandings of resilience through reference to a research project exploring resilience in the lives of disabled people. The paper briefly historically locates individualistic accounts of resilience (which have often been unhelpful in the lives of disabled people) and then moves into more recent social constructionist theories of this phenomenon. This latter perspective necessarily locates resilience in a network of resources including material resources, relationships, identity, bodies and minds, power and control, community participation, community cohesion and social justice. We argue that the recognition of resilience as a relational product is important and in tune with attempts to make psychology less an individualistic encounter and more a community intervention. However, disabled people, their politics and the development of critical disability studies, contest and challenge normative ideas of what it means to live with a resilient network of resources. In this sense disability offers new and exciting ways of addressing resilience.     

Age and age of acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis

An important determinant of picture and word naming speed is the age at which the names were learned (age of acquisition). Two related interpretations of these effects are that they reflect differences between words in their cumulative frequency of use, or that they reflect differences in the amount of time early and lateacquired words have spent in lexical memory. Both theories predict that differences between early and late-acquired words will be less apparent in older than younger adults. Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults read words varying in age of acquisition or frequency, or named objects varying in age of acquisition. There was an observed effect of word frequency only for young adults' word naming. In contrast, strong age of acquisition effects were found for both the young and the old participants. The implications of these results for theories of how age of acquisition might affect lexical processing are discussed.     

Cognitive inhibition in selection and sequential retrieval

Inhibitory models of working memory efficiency (Engle, 1996; Zacks & Hasher, 1994) assert that individual differences in working memory reflect the efficiency of inhibitory processes that exclude irrelevant information and suppress no-longer-relevant information. The present study examined the implication that these two inhibitory processes operate at consistent levels of efficiency within individuals by examining the correlation between two cognitive inhibition effects, negative priming and negative error priming. Negative priming involves slower response to a probe-trial target that was used as a to-be-ignored distractor on the immediately preceding prime trial. Negative error priming is the phenomenon that errors in a sequence of simple arithmetic trials are unlikely to involve the correct answer to the preceding problem. Participants received distractor-target pairs of simple addition problems and were required to produce the target problem sum. Negative priming was observed for prime distractors, whereas negative error priming was observed in connection with previous targets but not distractors. Consistent with the assumptions of these working memory models, the magnitudes of the two effects were significantly correlated.     

A comparison of behavioral and emotional functioning in children and adolescents with Autistic Disorder and PDD-NOS.

Behavioral symptomatology was compared in 26 children and adolescents with Autistic Disorder ("autism") and 25 children and adolescents with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified ("PDD-NOS"). Relative to individuals with PDD-NOS, those with autism had more symptoms of depression, social withdrawal, atypical behavior, and immature social skills--and fewer family problems. These differences remained even when group differences in intellectual ability were statistically controlled. No group differences emerged in somatization, anxiety, or hyperactivity. Findings suggest that although both groups demonstrate considerable evidence of behavioral and emotional problems, those with autism are at particularly high risk for comorbid behavioral and emotional disabilities.     

Using perfusion fMRI to measure continuous changes in neural activity with learning

In this study, we examine the suitability of a relatively new imaging technique, arterial spin labeled perfusion imaging, for the study of continuous, gradual changes in neural activity. Unlike BOLD imaging, the perfusion signal is stable over long time-scales, allowing for accurate assessment of continuous performance. In addition, perfusion fMRI provides an absolute measure of blood flow so signal changes can be interpreted without reference to a baseline. The task we used was the serial response time task, a sequence learning task. Our results show reliable correlations between performance improvements and decreases in blood flow in premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobe, supporting the model that learning procedures that increase efficiency of processing will be reflected in lower metabolic needs in tissues that support such processes. More generally, our results show that perfusion fMRI may be applied to the study of mental operations that produce gradual changes in neural activity.     

Does aging influence people's metacomprehension? Effects of processing ease on judgments of text learning

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated whether age-related differences exist in metacomprehension by evaluating predictions based on the ease-of-processing (EOP) hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, judgments of how well a text has been learned are based on how easily each text was processed; easier processing results in higher judgments. Participants read either sentence pairs or longer texts and judged their learning of each immediately afterward. Although an age-related difference in the use of processing ease in judgments was observed with sentence pairs, for longer texts older and younger adults' judgments were similarly related to processing ease. In both experiments, age equivalence was also evident in the accuracy of the judgments at predicting performance on the criterion test. The overall pattern of results suggests that judging text learning remains largely intact with aging.     

Race, family interactions, and patient stabilization in schizophrenia

This study examined family interactions associated with a failure to stabilize in schizophrenia. Fifty-eight patient and parent dyads completed a problem-solving task soon after an acute episode. Stabilization was assessed over the following 6 months. African American patients' self-initiated discussions of substance use and increased anxiety during the interaction were associated with a failure to stabilize. Nonstabilization in White patients was associated with high levels of both the patients' odd thinking and the parents' criticism. White patients who were depressed during the interaction were also less likely to stabilize. Findings suggest that family relationships may play in important role in determining whether patients stabilize after an acute episode. Results also point to the importance of cultural factors in predicting patient stabilization.