Interrelationships of personality and coping in a challenging extreme situation

The relationship between personality characteristics, daily stressors, and means of coping were studied in a 12-person Soviet-American expedition ateamconsisting of Caucasian and Eskimo men and women. The members scored relatively high on scales measuring well-being, achievement orientation, and traditionalism and scored relatively low on stress reactivity. The use of social support as a coping mechanism was positively related to high stress reactivity, control, and negative emotionality and negatively related to well-being. Negative emotionality was related to ratings of daily intrapersonal stressor. Discussion centered on the function of social support in an extreme, task-focused situation and the relationship of social support coping in this particular type of situation to maladaptive personality characteristics.     

Individual differences in harm-related moral values are associated with functional integration of large-scale brain networks of emotional regulation

Emotions affects moral judgements, and controlled cognitive processes regulate those emotional responses during moral decision making. However, the neurobiological basis of this interaction is unclear. We used a graph theory measurement called participation coefficient (‘PC’) to quantify the resting-state functional connectivity within and between four meta-analytic groupings (MAGs) associated with emotion generation and regulation, to test whether that measurement predicts individual differences in moral foundations-based values. We found that the PC of one of the MAGs (MAG2) was positively correlated with one of the five recognized moral foundations–the one based on harm avoidance. We also found that increased inter-module connectivity between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus with other nodes in the four MAGs was likewise associated with higher endorsement of the Harm foundation. These results suggest that individuals' sensitivity to harm is associated with functional integration of large-scale brain networks of emotional regulation. These findings add to our knowledge of how individual variations in our moral values could be reflected by intrinsic brain network organization and deepen our understanding of the relationship between emotion and cognition during evaluations of moral values.     

Innocent bystanders: Young children in war

Basic theoretical paradigms and constructs are identified within the extant literature that may usefully contribute to comprehending the effect of war upon young children as well as the nature of personal, situational, and familial moderating factors. These concerns are illustrated with empirical data regarding infants and toddlers and their response to the recent Gulf War. Potential applications of these heuristic models are explicated for the study of war as well as for the design of preventive and remedial programming.     

Object recognition with severe spatial deficits in Williams syndrome: sparing and breakdown

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder that results in severe visual-spatial cognitive deficits coupled with relative sparing in language, face recognition, and certain aspects of motion processing. Here, we look for evidence for sparing or impairment in another cognitive system-object recognition. Children with WS, normal mental-age (MA) and chronological age-matched (CA) children, and normal adults viewed pictures of a large range of objects briefly presented under various conditions of degradation, including canonical and unusual orientations, and clear or blurred contours. Objects were shown as either full-color views (Experiment 1) or line drawings (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, WS and MA children performed similarly in all conditions while CA children performed better than both WS group and MA groups with unusual views. This advantage, however, was eliminated when images were also blurred. The error types and relative difficulty of different objects were similar across all participant groups. The results indicate selective sparing of basic mechanisms of object recognition in WS, together with developmental delay or arrest in recognition of objects from unusual viewpoints. These findings are consistent with the growing literature on brain abnormalities in WS which points to selective impairment in the parietal areas of the brain. As a whole, the results lend further support to the growing literature on the functional separability of object recognition mechanisms from other spatial functions, and raise intriguing questions about the link between genetic deficits and cognition.     

Analgesic effects of posthypnotic suggestions and virtual reality distraction on thermal pain

The individual and combined effects of posthypnotic suggestion (PHS) and virtual reality distraction (VRD) on experimentally induced thermal pain were examined using a 2 x 2, between-groups design. After receiving baseline thermal pain, each participant received hypnosis or no hypnosis, followed by VRD or no VRD during another pain stimulus. Consistent with the hypothesis that hypnosis and VRD work via different mechanisms, results show that posthypnotic analgesia was moderated by hypnotizability but VRD analgesia was not. The impact of PHSs for analgesia was specific to high hypnotizables, whereas VRD was effective independent of hypnotizability. Results also show a nonsignificant but predicted pattern for high hypnotizables: Audio hypnosis combined with VRD reduced worst pain 22% more and pain unpleasantness 25% more than did VRD alone. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Forging difference out of similarity: the multiplicity of corrective experience

In the context of work with an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, the interplay of multiple forms of engagement contributing to therapeutic action is explored. The compulsion to repeat old patterns is seen to be gradually overcome by new corrective experience in which the whole of the patient's sense of the analyst as a person is greater than the sum of its parts. Interpretation of enactments--often involving patterns of dominance and submission--is complemented by a range of "helpful" actions that must be detoxified. That process entails the progressive differentiation of coercion and influence, on the one hand, and of compliance and responsiveness, on the other In the end, autonomy and creative responsiveness emerge as integral to each other rather than as mutually exclusive. This development requires that the patient gradually relinquish an "essentialist" view of self and other in favor of a "constructivist" view, in which the ambiguity of experience offers opportunities for new forms of relational engagement and understanding.     

When do ego threats lead to self-regulation failure? Negative consequences of defensive high self-esteem

High self-esteem (HSE) is increasingly recognized as heterogeneous. By measuring subtypes of HSE, the present research reevaluates the finding that HSE individuals show poor self-regulation following ego threat (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993). In Experiment 1, participants with HSE showed poor self-regulation after ego threat only if they also were defensive (high in self-presentation bias). In Experiment 2, two measures--self-presentation bias and implicit self-esteem--were used to subtype HSE individuals as defensive. Both operationalizations of defensive HSE predicted poor self-regulation after ego threat. The results indicate that (a) only defensive HSE individuals are prone to self-regulation failure following ego threat and (b) measures of self-presentation bias and implicit self-esteem can both be used to detect defensiveness.     

The Influence of Accessibility of Source Likability on Persuasion

Earlier research found that increasing the accessibility of a source's likability from memory results in greater agreement with a message attributed to that source. Three explanations were proposed for that earlier finding. Accessible liking toward the source of a message may result in increased likelihood of (a) biased central processing, (b) using a likability heuristic, or (c) motivated central processing. This experiment demonstrated that when the message is counterattitudinal and included weak arguments, participants were more likely to critically scrutinize the message as the accessibility of the source's likability increased from memory. As a consequence, attributing the message to a likable source reduced the persuasiveness of the message.     

Ecstasy and agony: activation of the human amygdala in positive and negative emotion

Considerable evidence indicates that the amygdala plays a critical role in negative, aversive human emotions. Although researchers have speculated that the amygdala plays a role in positive emotion, little relevant evidence exists. We examined the neural correlates of positive and negative emotion using positron emission tomography (PET), focusing on the amygdala. Participants viewed positive and negative photographs, as well as interesting and uninteresting neutral photographs, during PET scanning. The left amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex were activated during positive emotion, and bilateral amygdala activation occurred during negative emotion. High-interest, unusual photographs also elicited left-amygdala activation, a finding consistent with suggestions that the amygdala is involved in vigilance reactions to associatively ambiguous stimuli. The current results constitute the first neuroimaging evidence for a role of the amygdala in positive emotional reactions elicited by visual stimuli. Although the amygdala appears to play a more extensive role in negative emotion, it is involved in positive emotion as well.     

Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions

A modified Asch (1951) conformity paradigm was used to study the impact of social influence on reality-monitoring decisions about new items. Subjects studied pictures of some objects and imagined others. In a later test phase, they judged whether items had been perceived in the study phase, had been imagined, or were new. Critically, for some items, the subjects were informed of a confederate's response before rendering a judgment. Although the confederate was always correct when they responded to old items, for new items, the confederate responded perceived, imagined, or new, or did not respond (baseline). In two experiments, we show that memory for new items was influenced by an erroneous response of the confederate. Social conformity was reduced by undermining the credibility of the confederate (Experiments 1A and 1B), and the confederate's influence was evident even after there was only a 20-min delay between study and test (Experiment 2), when the subjects were 87% accurate on new baseline items. These experiments reveal the power of social influence on reality-monitoring accuracy and confidence.