Now you feel it, now you don't: frontal brain electrical asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eyeblink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.     

Disproportionate deficit in associative recognition relative to item recognition in global amnesia

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesic patients and, likewise, diencephalic (DNC) amnesic patients evidence a disproportionate deficit in memory for associations in comparison with memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we equated item recognition in amnesic and control participants and found that, under these conditions, associative recognition remained impaired both for MTL patients and for DNC patients. To rule out an alternative interpretation of the results of Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 we compared the performance of amnesic and control participants on a one-item recognition task and a two-item recognition task that required no memory for the association between members of word pairs. In the MTL group, when single-item recognition was equated to that of the controls, two-item nonassociative pair memory was equivalent as well. In the DNC group, nonassociative pair memory was impaired, but this impairment did not fully account for the impairment in associative memory. These findings indicate that memory for novel associations between items is disproportionately impaired in comparison with memory for single items in amnesia.     

The Humanizing Brain: An Introduction

The rediscovery of the sacred needs to take into account the neural underpinnings of faith and meaning and also draw on the insights of the emerging discipline of complexity studies, which explore a tendency toward adaptive self-organization that seemingly is inherent in the universe. Both neuroscience and complexity studies contribute to our understanding of the brain's activity as it transforms raw stimuli into recognizable patterns, and thus "humanizes" all our perceptions and understandings. The brain is our physical anchor in the natural environment— and its human capacities orbit us into the emerging world of culture (including religion), which provides a template for the brain's function of making sense of an ambiguous reality. The humanizing brain holds together scientific causality and religious meaning, working both bottom-up (linking the physical and the experiential) and top-down (beginning with the whole of things, or God). These processes we know as "mind" (experienced as intentionality, subjective consciousness, empathy, imagination, memory, adaptability). We maintain that such processes are not only subjective but built into "the way things really are." Thus, they carry the most privileged information about the nature of reality to which we human beings have access. For not only are we humans observers and logicians, but we are embedded in the larger reality; and as we strive to make sense of it all, we become both Homo sapiens and Homo religiosus .     

Posttraumatic stress disorder in a national sample of female and male Vietnam veterans: risk factors, war-zone stressors, and resilience-recovery variables

Relationships among pretrauma risk factors (e.g., family instability, childhood antisocial behavior), war-zone stressors (e.g., combat, perceived threat), posttrauma resilience-recovery variables (e.g., hardiness, social support), and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity were examined. Data from a national sample of 432 female and 1,200 male veterans were analyzed using structural equation modeling. For both genders, direct links to PTSD from pretrauma, war-zone, and posttrauma variable categories were found; several direct associations between pretrauma and posttrauma variables were documented. Although war-zone stressors appeared preeminent for PTSD in men, posttrauma resilience-recovery variables were more salient for women. Researchers, policymakers, and clinicians are urged to take a broad view on trauma and its sequelae, especially regarding possible multiple exposures over time and the depletion and availability of important resources.     

Relationship Between Family Dynamics of Caregivers, Depression, and the Likelihood of Institutionalization of Alzheimer's Patients

This study examined the relationship between family dynamics (as measured by the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale-FACES III), depression, feelings of burden and institutionalization in spouse caregivers (N = 197) of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients. All data was previously collected at the New York University Medical Center's Aging and Dementia Research Center between 1987 and 1991. Although no significant results were found between family dynamics and the likelihood of institutionalization, a post-hoc analyses found that AD spouse caregivers with higher scores on family cohesion experienced significantly less burden and depression than caregivers with lower cohesion scores. Implications for future research examining family cohesion, depression, and feelings of burden in AD spouse caregivers are discussed.     

Finding "meaning" in psychology: a lay theories approach to self-regulation, social perception, and social development

Much of psychology focuses on universal principles of thought and action. Although an extremely productive pursuit, this approach, by describing only the "average person," risks describing no one in particular. This article discusses an alternate approach that complements interests in universal principles with analyses of the unique psychological meaning that individuals find in their experiences and interactions. Rooted in research on social cognition, this approach examines how people's lay theories about the stability or malleability of human attributes alter the meaning they give to basic psychological processes such as self-regulation and social perception. Following a review of research on this lay theories perspective in the field of social psychology, the implications of analyzing psychological meaning for other fields such as developmental, cultural, and personality psychology are discussed.     

PERCEPTIONS OF POWER Female Executives' Descriptions of Power Usage by Best and Worst Bosses

This research examined the perceived use of power by women executive's best and worst bosses. Using a new methodology to measure French and Raven's (1959) and Raven's (1965) power bases, members of the National Association of Female Executives responded to a survey in which they evaluated the power bases of their best and worst bosses. Male bosses were more likely than female bosses to be identified as the worst boss, whereas females and males were equally likely to be identified as the best boss, although these women probably had far more male than female bosses.