Anxiety attenuates awareness of emotional faces during rapid serial visual presentation

Anxiety limits normative perception and impacts the interaction between key neurophysiological systems, possibly by decreasing recruitment of goal-oriented processes and increasing recruitment of stimulus-driven processes. Previous studies examining the impact of anxiety on emotion processing commonly lack a sample with levels of anxiety comparable to a clinical population. Many also fail to control for co-occurring symptoms like depression. The current study used rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with two emotional targets, comparing healthy controls to a group of individuals with symptom levels comparable to anxiety disorder patients. The results showed a modulatory effect of anxiety; the high anxiety (HA) group showed an enhanced impairment in detecting the second of two emotional targets relative to the low anxiety (LA) control group. Though there were no group-specific effects on the attentional blink or repetition blindness, there was a significant interaction of group with first and second target valence. Notably, HA individuals showed deficits (where LA individuals showed benefits) when the same emotion was presented twice. Further, when the first target was neutral, second target detection was especially impaired in HA individuals. Correlational analyses confirmed perceptual limitations were related to anxiety, but not depression, positive affect, or negative affect. The current results, along with past findings, suggest that clinical anxiety leads to deficits in overall cognitive control, increased difficulty inhibiting attention to distractors, and impairments in rapid, intuitive emotion processing.     

Perceptual simulations can be as expressive as first-order logic

Theories asserting that human reasoning is based on perceptual simulations often suppose these simulations are of concrete individual objects and the specific relations that hold among them. However, much human knowledge involves assertions about which relations do not hold, generalities over large numbers of objects and conditional facts. Can simulation theories explain how the mind represents these forms of knowledge, or are they inferior in their expressive power to knowledge representation schemes based on logical formalisms designed specifically to deal with negative, conditional and quantificational knowledge? In this paper, we show how assertions about mental simulations can in fact straightforwardly express all the concepts that comprise first-order logic, including negation, conditionals and both universal and existential quantification. We also speculate on how to extend this approach to deal with probabilistic and more expressive logics.     

Spatial working memory for locations specified by vision and audition: Testing the amodality hypothesis

Spatial working memory can maintain representations from vision, hearing, and touch, representations referred to here as spatial images. The present experiment addressed whether spatial images from vision and hearing that are simultaneously present within working memory retain modality-specific tags or are amodal. Observers were presented with short sequences of targets varying in angular direction, with the targets in a given sequence being all auditory, all visual, or a sequential mixture of the two. On two thirds of the trials, one of the locations was repeated, and observers had to respond as quickly as possible when detecting this repetition. Ancillary detection and localization tasks confirmed that the visual and auditory targets were perceptually comparable. Response latencies in the working memory task showed small but reliable costs in performance on trials involving a sequential mixture of auditory and visual targets, as compared with trials of pure vision or pure audition. These deficits were statistically reliable only for trials on which the modalities of the matching location switched from the penultimate to the final target in the sequence, indicating a switching cost. The switching cost for the pair in immediate succession means that the spatial images representing the target locations retain features of the visual or auditory representations from which they were derived. However, there was no reliable evidence of a performance cost for mixed modalities in the matching pair when the second of the two did not immediately follow the first, suggesting that more enduring spatial images in working memory may be amodal.     

Catching a glimpse of working memory: top-down capture as a tool for measuring the content of the mind

This article outlines a methodology for probing working memory (WM) content in high-level cognitive tasks (e.g., decision making, problem solving, and memory retrieval) by capitalizing on attentional and oculomotor biases evidenced in top-down capture paradigms. This method would be of great use, as it could measure the information resident in WM at any point in a task and, hence, track information use over time as tasks dynamically evolve. Above and beyond providing a measure of information occupancy in WM, such a method would benefit from sensitivity to the specific activation levels of individual items in WM. This article additionally forwards a novel fusion of standard free recall and visual search paradigms in an effort to assess the sensitivity of eye movements in top-down capture, on which this new measurement technique relies, to item-specific memory activation (ISMA). The results demonstrate eye movement sensitivity to ISMA in some, but not all, cases.     

"I'm attached, and I'm a good guy/gal!": how character attachment influences pro- and anti-social motivations to play massively multiplayer online role-playing games

One's feelings of intimacy and connectedness with distal, fictional media characters are referred to as parasocial interactions. Video games have challenged this concept, as the distance between game players and characters is greatly reduced, if not completely removed, in virtual environments. Games encourage the internalization and psychological merging of a player's and a character's mind, a multidimensional concept known as character attachment (CA). Data from our study suggest that dimensions of CA are useful in understanding both pro- and anti-social gaming motivations. Pro-social gamers feel a greater sense of control over their characters, while anti-social gamers are more likely to suspend their disbelief of the game environment and not take responsibility for their virtual actions. Pro-social gaming was more prevalent in older gamers, and younger male game characters were motivated by anti-social reasons.     

Buddhist Teen Worldview: Some Normative Background for Health Professionals

Although there are dangers in essentializing religious practice, to be able to typify the worldviews of healthy Buddhists becomes advantageous when health professionals need to recognize atypical worldviews that are potentially pathological. The paper is an anthology of potentially ambiguous claims expressed by healthy Buddhist teenagers during UK research including outlook on karma, rebirth, meditation, mindfulness, contact with spirit presences, renunciation, spiritual teachers and superstition. The testimony helps clarify diagnosis of identity, well-being and conformity issues, social withdrawal, anxiety and psychotic disorders in Buddhist teens while offering advice on management of ADHD, OCD, substance abuse and depression. While offering normalized background against which health professionals can evaluate spiritual well-being of young Buddhists the paper offers advice for how treatment can be made more culturally sensitive for Buddhists.     

The association of mentoring with psychosocial development among male athletes at termination of college career

Parents display various positive and negative behaviors at youth sport competitions. This study examined early adolescent female athletes’ preferred parental behaviors at team sport competitions. Individual interviews were conducted with 36 female athletes (M age = 13.5 years) who frequently competed in team sports. Data analysis led to the identification of three categories of parental behavior across different phases of competition (before, during, after). Athletes indicated preferences related to preparation for competition, parental support and, encouragement during competition, and the provision of feedback after competition. The results suggest that parents should engage in different types of behaviors as the temporal context of competitions change.     

Talent Development in Elite Junior Tennis: Perceptions of Players,Parents, and Coaches

This study examined players,' parents,' and coaches' perceptions of talent development in elite junior tennis. Nine participants (three athletes aged 13–15 yrs, four parents, and two coaches) were engaged in semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed verbatim and subjected to an inductive-deductive analysis procedure. Results revealed six categories associated with adult influence on talent development in tennis (Emotional Support, Tangible Support, Informational Support, Sacrifices, Pressure, and Relationships with Coaches). Overall, the results highlighted that parents appeared to fulfill the most significant roles in terms of providing emotional and tangible support (with the mother being more involved than the father). Parents were perceived as a source of pressure when they became over-involved in competitive settings. The role of the coach was focused on providing technical advice. Findings also showed that parents and players were required to make sacrifices. The main applied implication of this study is that involvement in elite junior tennis is a team effort whereby players, parents, and coaches fulfill specific roles.