Alteration of affective Theory of Mind in amnestic mild cognitive impairment

The concept of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) concerns a population of older individuals at high risk of developing probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). Impairments of the cognitive component of Theory of Mind (ToM), that is the inference about other people's beliefs, have been well documented in AD; on the contrary, controversial findings have been reported on the affective component of ToM (inference about other's feelings), a process mainly based on medial portions of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at evaluating the affective component of ToM in aMCI subjects. Twenty aMCI subjects and 20 age‐matched healthy controls (HC) underwent a standard neuropsychological assessment and the assessment of affective ToM with the full 36‐item version of reading the mind in the eyes (RME). Although aMCI subjects had formal impaired performances only in memory tasks, HC outperformed aMCI subjects in several cognitive tasks, including also the RME (mean RME scores 21.7 ± 3.0 vs. 17.0 ± 3.8%; 60.3% of correct answers vs. 47.2%). The lower RME performance of aMCI patients provides the first empirical evidence that aMCI may be associated with difficulties in tasks of affective ToM, in accordance with recent findings of early difficulties of aMCI patients in other processes that are mainly dependent on the medial prefrontal cortex, such as reversal learning and decision making under ambiguity. Findings of the current study need further empirical confirmation in larger samples of aMCI patients and also the investigation of other MCI subtypes is needed.     

Spiritual Development Across the Adult Life Course: Findings from a Longitudinal Study

Longitudinal data spanning early (30s) and older (late 60s/mid-70s) adulthood were used to study spiritual development across the adult life course in a sample of men and women belonging to a younger (born 1928/29) and an older (born 1920/21) age cohort. All participants, irrespective of gender and cohort, increased significantly in spirituality between late middle (mid-50s/early 60s) and older adulthood. Members of the younger cohort increased in spirituality throughout the adult life cycle. In the second half of adulthood, women increased more rapidly in spirituality than men. Spiritual involvement in older age was predicted by religious involvement and personality characteristics in early adulthood and subsequent experiences of negative life events.     

Consumer misbehaviour: an exploratory study of shopliftin

Although customer theft is traditionally researched from a criminological or psychological perspective, this paper investigates shoplifting as consumer behaviour, demonstrating that well‐defined models of normal consumer behaviour can be applied to aberrant behaviour such as shop theft. Empirical research is used to show how adults and teenagers form belief systems that amount to rational intentions in the decision to shoplift. The theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) was used as the basis for two self‐report surveys which investigated the interaction between consumers' attitudes and beliefs about shoplifting and their perceptions of retail security. The first survey utilised a sample of shoppers from the South East Midlands; the second a sample of school students from the same area (861 respondents in total, 109 respondents admitting to shoplifting in the previous year). Both studies indicate that the decision to shoplift is influenced by pro‐shoplifting attitudes, social factors, opportunities for shoplifting and perceptions of low risks of apprehension. This implies that the deterrent messages we use must be reassessed. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Living in a Non‐Communist Versus in a Post‐Communist European Country Moderates the Relation Between Conservative Values and Political Orientation: A Multilevel Study

We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset (N = 41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country moderates the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz's theory of basic human values) and political orientation (assessed as self‐placement on the left–right axis and attitude towards economic redistribution). The results supported the moderating role of living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country in the case both of political self‐placement and of attitude towards economic redistribution, even controlling for the countries' degree of individualism, power distance and democracy. Specifically, conservative values were positively related to a rightist political self‐placement among participants living in countries without a communist past, and to a favourable attitude towards economic redistribution in countries with a communist past. The limitations, implications and future directions of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Altered Cortico-Limbic Functional Connectivity During an Empathy Task in Subjects with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Empathy is a multidimensional construct consisting of cognitive (inferring mental states) and emotional (empathic concern) components. Emotional empathy is severely impaired in individuals affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of such an emotional empathy dysfunction to shed light on the neural circuitry responsible for the social and emotional dysfunction in PTSD. We asked a group of PTSD and a group of healthy controls to solve a Multifaceted Empathy Test, measuring both cognitive and emotional empathy, and investigated the functional connectivity of the cortical areas involved in solving the test. The results revealed that, in healthy individuals, increased neural activity in the frontal cortex modulates activity in the insula while subjects perform the emotional empathy task; whereas, in individuals affected by PTSD, increased activity in limbic regions such the insula and the amygdala modulates activity in the frontal cortex while performing the emotional empathy task. These findings suggest that the lack of cortical top-down control of the frontal cortex on the limbic system in PTSD during empathic processing may explain the emotional and social difficulties experienced by individuals suffering from PTSD.     

The Undoing Effect of Positive Emotions

Positive emotions are hypothesized to undo the cardiovascular aftereffects of negative emotions. Study 1 tests this undoing effect. Participants (n = 170) experiencing anxiety-induced cardiovascular reactivity viewed a film that elicited (a) contentment, (b) amusement, (c) neutrality, or (d) sadness. Contentment-eliciting and amusing films produced faster cardiovascular recovery than neutral or sad films did. Participants in Study 2 (n = 185) viewed these same films following a neutral state. Results disconfirm the alternative explanation that the undoing effect reflects a simple replacement process. Findings are contextualized by Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (B. L. Fredrickson, 1998).