Influences of menstrual cycle position and sex hormone levels on spontaneous intrusive recollections following emotional stimuli

Spontaneous intrusive recollections (SIRs) are known to follow emotional events in clinical and non-clinical populations. Previous work in our lab has found that women report more SIRs than men after exposure to emotional films, and that this effect is driven entirely by women in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. To replicate and extend this finding, participants viewed emotional films, provided saliva samples for sex hormone concentration analysis, and estimated SIR frequency following film viewing. Women in the luteal phase reported significantly more SIRs than did women in the follicular phase, and SIR frequency significantly correlated with salivary progesterone levels. The results are consistent with an emerging pattern in the literature suggesting that menstrual cycle position of female participants can potently influence findings in numerous cognitive domains. The potential implications of these results for disorders characterized by intrusions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, are also discussed.     

Emotion-cognition interaction in people at familial high risk for schizophrenia: the impact of sex differences

Cognitive deficits are fundamental to schizophrenia, and research suggests that negative emotion abnormally interferes with certain cognitive processes in those with the illness. To a lesser extent, cognitive impairment is found in persons at risk for schizophrenia, but there is limited research on the impact of emotion on cognitive processing in at-risk groups. It is unknown whether interference of negative emotion precedes illness and contributes to vulnerability for the disorder. We studied the extent to which negative emotional information interferes with working memory in 21 adolescent and young adult first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia and 22 community controls. Groups were comparable in age, sex, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Primary measures were n-back tasks varying in cognitive load (1-back, 2-back, 3-back) with emotional faces (neutral, happy, fearful) as stimuli. The control group's response times (RTs) and the women's RTs, regardless of group, differed depending on the emotion condition. In contrast, the RTs of the relatives and of the men, regardless of group, did not differ by emotion. This study is the first to examine emotion-cognition interactions in relatives of individuals with schizophrenia. Reduced efficiency in processing emotional information may contribute to a greater vulnerability for schizophrenia that may be heightened in men. Additional research with larger samples of men and women is needed to test these preliminary findings.     

Metacognitive judgments of repetition and variability effects in natural concept learning: evidence for variability neglect

In four experiments, we examined the effects of repetitions and variability on the learning of bird families and metacognitive awareness of such effects. Of particular interest was the accuracy of, and bases for, predictions regarding classification of novel bird species, referred to as category learning judgments (CLJs). Participants studied birds in high repetitions and high variability conditions. These conditions differed in the number of presentations of each bird (repetitions) and the number of unique species from each family (variability). After study, participants made CLJs for each family and were then tested. Results from a classification test revealed repetition benefits for studied species and variability benefits for novel species. In contrast with performance, CLJs did not reflect the benefits of variability. Results showed that CLJs were susceptible to accessibility-based metacognitive illusions produced by additional repetitions of studied items.     

Making Sense of Their World: Sensory Reactivity and Novelty Awareness as Aspects of Temperament and Correlates of Social Behaviours in Early Childhood

This study examines the early emergence of sensory reactivity and novelty awareness and their relations to children's behaviours with peers. A total of 260 parents (242 mothers, 18 fathers) and 10 teachers of 260 children (131 male, 129 female; M = 63 months; SD = 8.80; range = 39–81) participated. Structural equation models indicate that sensory reactive children appear to be less social (i.e. prosocial and friendly), more likely to engage in solitary‐active play behaviour, and more prone to utilize instrumental aggression in peer interactions. Children scoring high on novelty awareness tend to be more social (i.e. prosocial, friendly, and control impulses), better able to appropriately and punctually comply with tasks given by teacher, less likely to engage in a number of solitary play behaviours (i.e. solitary passive and solitary active), less likely to utilize instrumental or reactive aggressive strategies, and more likely to dodge negative peer interactions by avoiding bullies. Furthermore, the associations between sensory reactivity/novelty awareness and children's behaviours differ from those of other dimensions of temperament (i.e. activity level and emotionality). This suggests that novelty awareness and sensory reactivity uniquely contribute to our overall understanding of children's temperament and its correlates. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mistaking the recent past for the present: false seeing by older adults

Results of three experiments revealed that older, as compared to young, adults are more reliant on context when "seeing" a briefly flashed word that was preceded by a prime. In a congruent condition, the prime was the same word as flashed (e.g., DIRT dirt) whereas in an incongruent condition, the prime differed in a single letter from the word that was flashed (DART dirt). Following their attempt to identify the flashed word, participants were asked to report whether they had "seen" the flashed word or, instead, had responded on some other basis (knowing or guessing). Older adults showed dramatically higher false seeing by reporting the prime on incongruent trials and claiming to have seen it flashed. This was true even though a titration procedure was used to equate the performance of young and older adults on baseline trials which did not provide a biasing context. Results of Experiment 3 related age differences in false seeing to willingness to respond when given the option to withhold responses. Convergence of results with those showing higher false memory and false hearing are interpreted as evidence that older adults are less able to avoid misleading effects of context. That lessened ability may be associated with decline in frontal lobe functioning.     

Randomised trial of expressive writing for distressed metastatic breast cancer patients

Women with metastatic breast cancer and significant psychological distress (N?=?87) were assigned randomly to engage in four home-based sessions of expressive writing or neutral writing. Women in the expressive writing group wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings regarding their cancer, whereas women in the neutral writing group wrote about their daily activities in a factual manner. No statistically significant group differences in existential and psychological well-being, fatigue and sleep quality were found at 8-weeks post-writing. However, the expressive writing group reported significantly greater use of mental health services during the study than the neutral writing group (55% vs. 26%, respectively; p?相似文献   

Working memory, long-term memory, and medial temporal lobe function

Early studies of memory-impaired patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage led to the view that the hippocampus and related MTL structures are involved in the formation of long-term memory and that immediate memory and working memory are independent of these structures. This traditional idea has recently been revisited. Impaired performance in patients with MTL lesions on tasks with short retention intervals, or no retention interval, and neuroimaging findings with similar tasks have been interpreted to mean that the MTL is sometimes needed for working memory and possibly even for visual perception itself. We present a reappraisal of this interpretation. Our main conclusion is that, if the material to be learned exceeds working memory capacity, if the material is difficult to rehearse, or if attention is diverted, performance depends on long-term memory even when the retention interval is brief. This fundamental notion is better captured by the terms subspan memory and supraspan memory than by the terms short-term memory and long-term memory. We propose methods for determining when performance on short-delay tasks must depend on long-term (supraspan) memory and suggest that MTL lesions impair performance only when immediate memory and working memory are insufficient to support performance. In neuroimaging studies, MTL activity during encoding is influenced by the memory load and correlates positively with long-term retention of the material that was presented. The most parsimonious and consistent interpretation of all the data is that subspan memoranda are supported by immediate memory and working memory and are independent of the MTL.