Emotion recognition and expression in young obese participants: preliminary study

This study of the presence of alexithymic characteristics in obese adolescents and preadolescents tested the hypothesis of whether they showed impaired recognition and expression of emotion. The sample included 30 obese young participants and a control group of 30 participants of normal weight for their ages. Stimuli, 42 faces representing seven emotional expressions, were shown to participants who identified the emotion expressed in the face. The Level of Emotional Awareness Scale was adapted for children to evaluate their ability to describe their emotions. Young obese participants had significantly lower scores than control participants, but no differences were found in recognition of emotion. The lack of words to describe emotions might suggest a greater prevalence of alexithymic characteristics in the obese participants, but the hypothesis of a general deficit in the processing of emotional experiences was not supported.     

Clinical Characterization and Risk Profile of Individuals Seeking Genetic Counseling for Hereditary Breast Cancer in Brazil

Hereditary breast cancer (HBC) accounts for 5–10% of breast cancer cases and it significantly increases the lifetime risk of cancer. Our objective was to evaluate the sociodemographic variables, family history of cancer, breast cancer (BC) screening practices and the risk profile of cancer affected or asymptomatic at-risk women that undergo genetic counseling for hereditary breast cancer in public Brazilian cancer genetics services. Estimated lifetime risk of BC was calculated for asymptomatic women using the Gail and Claus models. The majority of women showed a moderate lifetime risk of developing BC, with an average risk of 19.7% and 19.9% by the Gail and Claus models, respectively. The average prior probability of carrying a BRCA1/2 gene mutation was 16.7% and overall only 32% fulfilled criteria for a hereditary breast cancer syndrome as assessed by family history. We conclude that a significant number of individuals at high-risk for HBC syndromes may not have access to the benefits of cancer genetic counseling in these centers. Contributing factors may include insufficient training of healthcare professionals, disinformation of cancer patients; difficult access to genetic testing and/or resistance in seeking such services. The identification and understanding of these barriers is essential to develop specific strategies to effectively achieve cancer risk reduction in this and other countries were clinical cancer genetics is not yet fully established.     

Three obstructions: forms of causation,chronotopoids, and levels of reality

The thesis is defended that the theories of causation, time and space, and levels of reality are mutually interrelated in such a way that the difficulties internal to theories of causation and to theories of space and time can be understood better, and perhaps dealt with, in the categorial context furnished by the theory of the levels of reality. The structural condition for this development to be possible is that the first two theories be opportunely generalized.

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

Functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory have grown dramatically in recent years. These studies are important because they can investigate the neural correlates of processes that are difficult to study using laboratory stimuli, including: (i) complex constructive processes, (ii) recollective qualities of emotion and vividness, and (iii) remote memory retrieval. Constructing autobiographical memories involves search, monitoring and self-referential processes that are associated with activity in separable prefrontal regions. The contributions of emotion and vividness have been linked to the amygdala and visual cortex respectively. Finally, there is evidence that recent and remote autobiographical memories might activate the hippocampus equally, which has implications for memory-consolidation theories. The rapid development of innovative methods for eliciting personal memories in the scanner provides the opportunity to delve into the functional neuroanatomy of our personal past.     

Emotive concept nouns and motor responses: Attraction or repulsion?

We carried out three experiments aimed at testing whether hand posture affects the compatibility effect that Chen and Bargh (1999) found between a word’s emotional connotation and arm movement direction. In the present study, participants responded by pressing two buttons: one placed near their body, the other far away. In Experiment 1, in which they pressed the response button with their hand open, RTs were shorter when participants pressed the far button for positive words and the near button for negative words, as if they simulated reaching for something good and avoiding something bad. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, in which participants pressed the response button with a tennis ball in their hand, RTs were shorter when participants pressed the near button for positive words and the far button for negative words, as if they simulated drawing a good thing closer and pushing a bad thing away. Results are discussed within the framework of theories on concept grounding in emotion and action systems.     

Go no-go performance under psychosocial stress: beneficial effects of implementation intentions

Acute stress has been found to have negative and implementation intentions (IIs) to have positive effects on cognitive performance. This study was the first to examine the effects of IIs on executive action control under acute psychosocial stress. Forty-two male subjects aged 21-39 years were randomly assigned to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) versus a rest condition. In addition, the instruction to the executive task (a go no-go task) was manipulated (IIs versus standard instruction). After the stress test, a dual-task procedure including a go no-go task was conducted. The TSST resulted in increases in cortisol response, heart rate and state anxiety compared to the rest condition. Acute stress significantly impaired go no-go performance, but only in the group without IIs. We conclude that under acute stress conditions executive functioning is reduced, but the use of IIs can be an effective strategy to overcome this negative effect.     

Training and transfer effects of executive functions in preschool children

Executive functions, including working memory and inhibition, are of central importance to much of human behavior. Interventions intended to improve executive functions might therefore serve an important purpose. Previous studies show that working memory can be improved by training, but it is unknown if this also holds for inhibition, and whether it is possible to train executive functions in preschoolers. In the present study, preschool children received computerized training of either visuo‐spatial working memory or inhibition for 5 weeks. An active control group played commercially available computer games, and a passive control group took part in only pre‐ and posttesting. Children trained on working memory improved significantly on trained tasks; they showed training effects on non‐trained tests of spatial and verbal working memory, as well as transfer effects to attention. Children trained on inhibition showed a significant improvement over time on two out of three trained task paradigms, but no significant improvements relative to the control groups on tasks measuring working memory or attention. In neither of the two interventions were there effects on non‐trained inhibitory tasks. The results suggest that working memory training can have significant effects also among preschool children. The finding that inhibition could not be improved by either one of the two training programs might be due to the particular training program used in the present study or possibly indicate that executive functions differ in how easily they can be improved by training, which in turn might relate to differences in their underlying psychological and neural processes.     

Cueing the interpretation of a Necker Cube: a way to inspect fundamental cognitive processes

The term perceptual bistability refers to all those conditions in which an observer looks at an ambiguous stimulus that can have two or more distinct but equally reliable interpretations. In this work, we investigate perception of Necker Cube in which bistability consists of the possibility to interpret the cube depth in two different ways. We manipulated the cube ambiguity by darkening one of the cube faces (cue) to provide a clear cube interpretation due to the occlusion depth index. When the position of the cue is stationary the cube perceived perspective is steady and driven by the cue position. However, when we alternated in time the cue position (i.e. we changed the position of the darkened cube face) two different perceptual phenomena occurred: for low frequencies the cube perspective alternated in line with the position of the cue; however for high frequencies the cue was no longer able to bias the perception but it appears as a floating feature traveling across the solid with the cube whole perspective that returns to be bistable as in the conventional, bias-free, case.