Attentional bias in post-traumatic stress disorder diminishes after symptom amelioration

Background

Avoidance and hypervigilance to reminders of a traumatic event are among the main characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Attentional bias toward aversive cues in PTSD has been hypothesized as being part of the dysfunction causing etiology and maintenance of PTSD. The aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive strategy underlying attentional bias in PTSD and whether normal cognitive processing is restored after a treatment suppressing core PTSD symptoms.

Methods

Nineteen healthy controls were matched for age, sex and education to 19 PTSD patients. We used the emotional stroop and detection of target tasks, before and after an average of 4.1 sessions of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.

Results

We found that on both tasks, patients were slower than controls in responding in the presence of emotionally negative words compared to neutral ones. After symptoms removal, patients no longer had attentional bias, and responded similarly to controls.

Conclusion

These results support the existence of an attentional bias in PTSD patients due to a disengagement difficulty. There was also preliminary evidence that the disengagement was linked to PTSD symptomatology. It should be further explored whether attentional bias and PTSD involve common brain mechanisms.     

N-backer: an auditory n-back task with automatic scoring of spoken responses

The n-back task is commonly used to load working memory (WM) in dual-task and neuroimaging experiments. However, it typically involves visual presentation and buttonpress responses, making it unsuitable for combination with primary tasks that involve vision and action, such as sequential object use and other tasks of daily living. The N-backer software presented here will automatically present and score auditory–verbal n-back sequences utilising the standard speech synthesis and recognition facilities that come with Microsoft Windows. Data are presented from an experiment in which 12 student participants carried out three tasks from the Naturalistic Action Test (NAT) while their attention was divided between the primary task and a continuous auditory–verbal 2-back secondary task. The participants’ 2-back performance was scored in two ways: by hand, from video recordings, and automatically, using the software, allowing us to evaluate the accuracy of N-backer. There was an extremely high correlation between these scores (.933). The videos were also used to obtain a comprehensive error score for the NAT. Significantly more errors were made in the more complex NAT tasks when participants were 2-backing, as compared with when they were not, showing that the auditory–verbal n-back task can be used to disrupt sequential object use. This dual-task method may simulate the attentional deficits of patients with brain injury, providing insights into the difficulties they face in tasks of daily living.     

On reducing an empathy gap: the impact of self-construal and order of judgment

Empathy gaps, in which individuals exaggerate self-other similarities or differences, generate errors in social judgments. We investigated whether changing individuals' self-construal may reduce one specific empathy gap: the illusion of courage. Participants primed with independent or interdependent self-construal made judgments about their own and other people's willingness to dance in public. Participants in the interdependence condition showed a reduction of the empathy gap, but only when judging the other first. This finding highlights that simple contextual manipulations have the potential to reduce egocentric biases in social judgments.     

Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods

Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same) and only later on in development evolving into more complex ones (e.g., equity: distributions match contributions). Here, we report 2 experiments with 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 195) that contradict this constructivist account. Our results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old are able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions but that this ability may be hidden by a preference for equality.     

A new "fat face" illusion

We report a novel fat face illusion that when two identical images of the same face are aligned vertically, the face at the bottom appears 'fatter'. This illusion emerged when the faces were shown upright, but not inverted, with the size of the illusion being 4%. When the faces were presented upside down, the illusion did not emerge. Also, when upright clocks were shown in the same vertically aligned fashion, we did not observe the illusion, indicating that the fat illusion does not generalize to every category of canonically upright objects with similar geometric shape as a face.     

Mood effects on dominated choices: Positive mood induces departures from logical rules

In two studies, we investigated the role of mood states in dominated behavioral choices. Past research has shown that mood effects on judgment and decision‐making can be pervasive. Yet, the role of mood in dominated choices has so far been neglected. The present research represents a first empirical examination of mood effects on dominated choices. We measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2) mood states in participants who made a series of choices in a gambling game. In this choice task without trade‐offs, participants were provided with information about the outcomes and probabilities associated with each choice option. The strategy to maximize the expected mean outcome implied the application of a straightforward and logical rule: Always choose the dominant option with the highest expected value. It has been argued in the literature that mood should have little or no impact when preferences are clear or strong. Still, we expected that mood states would affect even these dominated choices, building on previous work that showed that positive mood states enhance flexibility, creativity, and explorative behavior. The results showed that decisions made in a happier mood were less often in accordance with the logical rule than decisions made in a sadder mood. To conclude, happier mood states are associated to a lesser extent with decisions in accordance with a rule‐based strategy that maximizes expected mean outcomes in dominated choices. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Positive emotional context eliminates the framing effect in decision-making

Dual-process theories have suggested that emotion plays a key role in the framing effect in decision-making. However, little is known about the potential impact of a specific positive or negative emotional context on this bias. We investigated this question with adult participants using an emotional priming paradigm. First, participants were presented with positive or negative affective pictures (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant photographs). Afterward, participants had to perform a financial decision-making task that was unrelated to the pictures previously presented. The results revealed that the presentation framed in terms of gain or loss no longer affected subjects' decision-making following specific exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, a positive emotional context did not globally influence risk-taking behavior but specifically decreased the risk propensity in the loss frame. This finding confirmed that a positive emotional context can reduce loss aversion, and it strongly reinforced the dual-process view that the framing effect stems from an affective heuristic belonging to intuitive System 1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Kaiho Seiryō on ‘What it is to be a Human Being’

Kaiho Seiryō (1755–1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiryō focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. His radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiryō showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts.     

Responding to allegations of scientific misconduct

Institutions in France are not yet well prepared to respond to allegations of scientific misconduct. Following a serious allegation in late 1997. INSERM,* the primary organization for medical and health-related research in France, began to reflect on this subject, aided by scientists and jurists. The conclusions have resulted in establishing a procedure to be followed in cases of alleged misconduct, and also in reinforcing the application of good laboratory practices within each laboratory. Guidelines for authorship practices and scientific assessment must also be considered. Even though each institution must remain responsible for responding to allegations of scientific misconduct within its doors, INSERM would like to see national, European, and international co-ordination about the methods of such response. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (eng. French National Medical Research Institute) is known as INSERM. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium, Scientific Misconduct: An International Perspective, organised by The Medical University of Warsaw, 16 November, 1998.     

A threat in the elder: the impact of task‐instructions,self‐efficacy and performance expectations on memory performance in the elderly

Widely used explicit memory tasks seem to overestimate age‐related differences in memory performance. Social and personal factors may buffer or undermine the effect of age on memory performance. In two studies, the performance of older adults was compared with the performance of younger adults. Tasks were presented either as memory tasks or non‐memory tasks. Older adults' performance on a memory task improved when the task‐instructions did not explicitly emphasize the memory component of the task. In the first study, results revealed that memory self‐efficacy beliefs play a moderator role on the impact of task‐instruction on memory performance, so that lower levels of memory self‐efficacy correlate with lower performance in the memory emphasizing task condition but not in the orientation emphasizing task condition. In a second study actual performance expectations were measured. For older participants only, expectations were sensitive to task‐instructions and mediated the relation between tasks‐instructions and performances. These findings suggest that observed age‐related differences in memory performance may be significantly exaggerated by the testing situation and by a low memory self‐efficacy and low memory performance expectancies prevalent among older adults. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.