Situation selection across adulthood: the role of arousal

In this study, we investigated age differences in situation selection to understand the role stimulus arousal plays in motivating age differences in this type of emotion regulation. Participants freely selected from a set of affective videos using information about the valence and arousal of each stimulus. There were age differences both in the valence and arousal of selected stimuli. Older adults selected more neutral and low-arousal stimuli while younger adults selected more negative and high-arousal stimuli. We consider these results in light of recent theoretical models and conclude that studies of age differences in emotion regulation must consider both valence and arousal.     

Effects of body mass index and education on verbal and nonverbal memory

We previously reported that higher education protects against executive dysfunction related to higher body mass index (BMI) in younger, but not older, adults. We now extend the previous analyses to verbal and nonverbal memory. Fifty-nine healthy, dementia-free community-dwelling adults ranging in age from 18 to 81 years completed the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test – Revised (HVLT-R) and the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test – Revised (BVMT-R). Self-reported years of education served as a proxy for cognitive reserve. We found that more highly educated individuals maintained their BVMT-R immediate recall performance across the range of BMI, but in less educated individuals, higher BMI was associated with worse performance. Our findings suggest that education may play a protective role against BMI-related nonverbal learning deficits, similar to previous reports for verbal memory and executive functioning. Results highlight the importance of considering educational background when determining the risk for BMI-related cognitive impairment in clinical settings.     

Serotonin enhances the impact of health information on food choice

Serotonin has been implicated in promoting self-control, regulation of hunger and physiological homeostasis, and regulation of caloric intake. However, it remains unclear whether the effects of serotonin on caloric intake reflect purely homeostatic mechanisms, or whether serotonin also modulates cognitive processes involved in dietary decision making. We investigated the effects of an acute dose of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor citalopram on choices between food items that differed along taste and health attributes, compared with placebo and the noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor atomoxetine. Twenty-seven participants attended three sessions and received single doses of atomoxetine, citalopram, and placebo in a double-blind randomised cross-over design. Relative to placebo, citalopram increased choices of more healthy foods over less healthy foods. Citalopram also increased the emphasis on health considerations in decisions. Atomoxetine did not affect decision making relative to placebo. The results support the hypothesis that serotonin may influence food choice by enhancing a focus on long-term goals. The findings are relevant for understanding decisions about food consumption and also for treating health conditions such as eating disorders and obesity.     

A threat in the computer: the race implicit association test as a stereotype threat experience

Three experiments test whether the threat of appearing racist leads White participants to perform worse on the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) and whether self-affirmation can protect from this threat. Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that White participants show a stereotype threat effect when completing the race IAT, leading to stronger pro-White scores when the test is believed to be diagnostic of racism. This effect increases for domain-identified (highly motivated to control prejudice) participants (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, self-affirmation inoculates participants against stereotype threat while taking the race IAT. These findings have methodological implications for use of the race IAT and theoretical implications concerning the malleability of automatic prejudice and the potential interpersonal effects of the fear of appearing racist.     

Inhibitory control in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The clinical features of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suggest that a fundamental deficit of inhibitory control is intrinsic to the disorder. In this preliminary study, we sought to examine cognitive disinhibition in OCD by using an established laboratory technique. The stop signal task was administered to a higher functioning, untreated group of individuals with OCD, and to healthy comparison participants. Surprisingly, the OCD participants exhibited more accurate performance, suggesting better inhibitory control on this task. This unexpected finding suggests that higher functioning individuals with OCD are capable of adequate inhibition in certain contexts. It was speculated, however, that emotional stimulation might negatively affect performance and that this might be studied in subsequent research.     

Understanding of emotional experience in autism: insights from the personal accounts of high-functioning children with autism

In this study, the authors investigate emotional understanding in autism through a discourse analytic framework to provide a window into children's strategies for interpreting emotional versus nonemotional encounters and consider the implications for the mechanisms underlying emotional understanding in typical development. Accounts were analyzed for thematic content and discourse structure. Whereas high-functioning children with autism were able to discuss contextually appropriate accounts of simple emotions, their strategies for interpreting all types of emotional (but not nonemotional) experiences differed from those used by typically developing children. High-functioning children with autism were less inclined to organize their emotional accounts in personalized causal-explanatory frameworks and displayed a tendency to describe visually salient elements of experiences seldom observed among comparison children. Findings suggest that children with autism possess less coherent representations of emotional experiences and use alternative strategies for interpreting emotionally evocative encounters. Discussion focuses on the significance of these findings for informing the nature of emotional dysfunction in autism as well as implications for theories of emotional understanding in typical development.     

Syntactic frame and verb bias in aphasia: plausibility judgments of undergoer-subject sentences

This study investigates three factors that have been argued to define "canonical form" in sentence comprehension: Syntactic structure, semantic role, and frequency of usage. We first examine the claim that sentences containing unaccusative verbs present difficulties analogous to those of passive sentences. Using a plausibility judgment task, we show that a mixed group of aphasics performed significantly better on unaccusatives than on passives. We then turn to the observation that passives are generally harder than actives for aphasics. We show that this effect is modulated by lexical bias, i.e., the likelihood that a verb appears in a given syntactic structure: Passives of passive-bias verbs were significantly easier than passives of active-bias verbs. More generally, sentences whose structure matches the lexical bias of the main verb are significantly easier than sentences in which structure and lexical bias do not match. These findings suggest that "canonical form" reflects frequency and lexical biases.     

Intrahippocampal muscimol shifts learning strategy in gonadally intact young adult female rats

Learning strategy preferences depend upon circulating estrogen levels, with enhanced hippocampus-sensitive place learning coinciding with elevated estrogen levels. The effects of estrogen on strategy may be mediated by fluctuations in GABAergic function, given that inhibitory tone in the hippocampus is low when estrogen is high. We investigated the effects on learning strategy of intrahippocampal injections of a GABA(A) agonist in gonadally intact female rats. On the day of training, rats received 0.3 microL intrahippocampal infusions of muscimol (0.26 nmol or 2.6 nmol) or saline 20 min prior to training on a T-maze in which place (hippocampus-sensitive) or response (striatum-sensitive) strategies offer effective solutions. Muscimol treatment increased the use of the response strategy in a dose-dependent manner without influencing learning speed, indicating that muscimol modulated strategy and not learning ability. Furthermore, the muscimol-related shift to response strategies varied across the estrous cycle. The results indicate that increasing inhibition in the hippocampus biases rats away from hippocampus-sensitive place learning strategies and toward hippocampus-insensitive response learning strategies without a learning deficit. Furthermore, rats at proestrus demonstrated the most dramatic shift in learning strategy following muscimol treatment compared with control conditions, while rats at estrus demonstrated the most complete bias toward response strategies. The enhanced use of hippocampus-sensitive strategies at proestrus likely results from reduced hippocampal inhibition.     

Incremental validity of the Ego Impairment Index: it's fine when it's there

The results published by W. Perry (2001) demonstrate that with a different criterion more incremental validity can be achieved with the Ego Impairment Index than R. M. Dawes (1999) found using the criterion available to him. Attempting to find statistical rationale for various Rorschach characteristics is, indeed, desirable, especially as a basis for the statistical use of the test. The degree of predictability indicated by most of these statistics, however, still presents a sizable gap between well established validity and much practice, particularly in legal settings. Further, both W. Perry (2001) and D. J. Viglione and M. J. Hilsonroth (2001) raise the issue of evaluating incremental validity in a context where there is some degree of multicolinearity and nesting. The logical equivalence of a nested with a non-nested analysis is established algebraically, and it is noted that the standard concerns about multicolinearity involve the estimations of the coefficients of predictive models--not the degree of predictability per se.