Pleasures of the brain

How does the brain cause positive affective reactions to sensory pleasure? An answer to pleasure causation requires knowing not only which brain systems are activated by pleasant stimuli, but also which systems actually cause their positive affective properties. This paper focuses on brain causation of behavioral positive affective reactions to pleasant sensations, such as sweet tastes. Its goal is to understand how brain systems generate 'liking,' the core process that underlies sensory pleasure and causes positive affective reactions. Evidence suggests activity in a subcortical network involving portions of the nucleus accumbens shell, ventral pallidum, and brainstem causes 'liking' and positive affective reactions to sweet tastes. Lesions of ventral pallidum also impair normal sensory pleasure. Recent findings regarding this subcortical network's causation of core 'liking' reactions help clarify how the essence of a pleasure gloss gets added to mere sensation. The same subcortical 'liking' network, via connection to brain systems involved in explicit cognitive representations, may also in turn cause conscious experiences of sensory pleasure.     

The Role of Creativity in Marriage and Family Therapy Practice: A National Online Study

The purpose of this study, using an online methodology, was to investigate therapists' perceptions of the role of creativity in couples' and family therapy. Along with completing a quantitative measure assessing creativity in their work, participants responded to four open-ended questions which addressed the meaning of creativity, characteristics of a creative family therapist, some creative interventions they have used with couples and families, and barriers to their own creativity as a family therapist. A total of 142 marriage and family therapists in 36 states in the United States participated. The findings shed light on the unique importance of creativity in couples and family treatment.     

Political Dimensions of Pastoral Care in Community Disaster Responses

All caregiving takes place in multiple political contexts and assumes or actually furthers various political agendas, whether acknowledged or not. When strategically incorporated into pastoral and spiritual care, politically responsive actions may enhance the practice of care. When disaster strikes a community, ritual engagement of the larger public context provides a significant opportunity for pastoral caregivers to function as public pastoral theologians and to influence the corporate response to communal challenges. In these circumstances of community vulnerability, pastoral caregivers and communities of faith are positioned to provide spiritual care that combines solace and safety for the victims with guidance and shaping influence on the ritual practices and rhetorical interpretations called upon to assist the community to endure, respond, and heal. This article examines some central political aspects of the pastoral caregiver’s repertoire that might further a stricken community’s ritual and rhetorical resources necessary to sustain life, share loss, reclaim goodness, and rebuild for a strong future. Drawing upon a view of lamentation as a tri-partite process of sharing anguish, interrogating causes, and reinvesting in hope, I suggest how the spiritual and pastoral caregiver may collaboratively participate in a “disaster-response matrix” that organizes corporate responses to catastrophic disaster. This article pays particular attention to macro-, meso-, and micro-level political negotiations necessary to ensure respect for diversity and shared responsibility in creating rituals, memorials, and public narratives at the onset of disaster and in its aftermath over the generations. Illustrations from the experience of religious caregivers at Columbine, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Aurora, Newtown, and Boston are presented to guide pastoral engagement of civil society in disruptive times.     

Psychopathic traits associated with abnormal hemodynamic activity in salience and default mode networks during auditory oddball task

Psychopathy is a personality disorder accompanied by abnormalities in emotional processing and attention. Recent theoretical applications of network-based models of cognition have been used to explain the diverse range of abnormalities apparent in psychopathy. Still, the physiological basis for these abnormalities is not well understood. A significant body of work has examined psychopathy-related abnormalities in simple attention-based tasks, but these studies have largely been performed using electrocortical measures, such as event-related potentials (ERPs), and they often have been carried out among individuals with low levels of psychopathic traits. In this study, we examined neural activity during an auditory oddball task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a simple auditory target detection (oddball) task among 168 incarcerated adult males, with psychopathic traits assessed via the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Event-related contrasts demonstrated that the largest psychopathy-related effects were apparent between the frequent standard stimulus condition and a task-off, implicit baseline. Negative correlations with interpersonal-affective dimensions (Factor 1) of the PCL-R were apparent in regions comprising default mode and salience networks. These findings support models of psychopathy describing impaired integration across functional networks. They additionally corroborate reports which have implicated failures of efficient transition between default mode and task-positive networks. Finally, they demonstrate a neurophysiological basis for abnormal mobilization of attention and reduced engagement with stimuli that have little motivational significance among those with high psychopathic traits.     

Differences in the Valuing of Power Among Team Members: a Contingency Approach Toward Examining the Effects of Power Values Diversity and Relationship Conflict

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the conditional effects of power values diversity and relationship conflict.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We utilized a time-lagged survey design and multilevel modeling to investigate 60 teams working on a project task over the course of 4 months.

Findings

When participative safety climate was high, the presence of high power values diversity was particularly helpful for reducing relationship conflict. In turn, decreased relationship conflict tended to increase team performance. Additionally, when workload sharing was low, high relationship conflict was especially harmful to team performance.

Implications

Results support the consideration of team participative safety climate to better understand the conditions under which power values diversity is likely to lessen relationship conflict and subsequently increase team performance. Findings also highlight the importance of avoiding low workload sharing, in the presence of prominent relationship conflict, to increase team performance.

Originality/Value

By examining relationship conflict as a mediator and participative safety climate as a moderator of power values diversity’s effects, we make a novel contribution to extant literature by helping to elucidate both how and under what conditions differences in power values, among team members, can influence team performance. Relatedly, we answer the call for more research that adopts a contingency approach toward examining the effects of values diversity and relationship conflict. In doing so, we help to identify the conditions under which power values diversity and relationship conflict are likely to differentially influence important team outcomes.

     

The time course of perception and retrieval in matching and recognition

A four-part experiment was carried out to study the relationship between the time course of object-feature perception and the time course of retrieval of object information from memory. The experiment consisted of 2 perceptual matching tasks, and 2 perceptual recognition tasks. In all 4 tasks, participants provided speeded judgments of the identity of 2 objects. A stochastic feature-sampling model was used to estimate the time needed for feature perception and the time needed for retrieval of feature information. No evidence was found for a systematic relationship between perception times and retrieval times for individual features. Indeed, the model applications indicated that retrieval times were constant for different features, whereas perception rates varied across the features.     

Immediate Movement History Influences Reach-to-Grasp Action Selection in Children and Adults

The authors review studies of mentally simulated movements. In automatic or cyclical movements, actual and motor imagery (MI) durations are similar. When athletes simulate only dynamic phases of movement or perform MI just before competing, however, environmental and time constraints lead to an underestimation of actual duration. Conversely, complex attention-demanding movements take longer to image. Finally, participants can modify the speed of MI voluntarily when they receive specific instructions. To complete the available data, the authors compared imagined and actual durations in tennis and gymnastics. Results showed systematic and disproportionate overestimation of actual duration. The authors found a relationship between complex motor skills and MI duration. They discuss the factors leading to over- and underestimation and the hypotheses that could be tested.