Prospective memory, emotional valence and ageing

Emotional factors have been found to be an important influence on memory. The current study investigated the influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory (PM); Virtual Week. Thirty young and 30 old adults completed Virtual Week, in which the emotional salience of the tasks at encoding was manipulated to be positive, negative or neutral in content. For event-based, but not time-based tasks, positivity enhancement in both age groups was seen, with a greater number of positive PM tasks being performed relative to neutral tasks. There was no negativity enhancement effect. Older adults showed generally poorer levels of PM, but they also demonstrated greater beneficial effects of positive valence compared to young. These effects of emotion on PM accuracy do not appear to reflect the retrospective component of the task as a different pattern of emotion effects was seen on the recall of PM content. Results indicate that older adults' difficulties in prospective remembering can be reduced where the tasks to be remembered are positive.     

Impairment in risk-sensitive decision-making in older suicide attempters with depression

Suicidal behavior is a potentially lethal complication of late-life depression. In younger adults, suicide has been linked to abnormal decision-making ability. Given that there are substantial age-related decreases in decision-making ability, and that older adults experience environmental stressors that require effective decision-making, we reasoned that impaired decision-making may be particularly relevant to suicidal behavior in the elderly. We thus compared performance on a probabilistic decision-making task that does not involve working memory ("Cambridge Gamble Task") in four groups of older adults: (1) individuals with major depression and a history of suicide attempt (n = 25), (2) individuals with major depression with active suicidal ideation but no suicide attempt (n = 13), (3) individuals with major depression without suicidality (n = 35), and (4) nondepressed control subjects (n = 22). There was a significant effect of group on quality of decision-making, whereby the suicide attempters exhibited poorer ability to choose the likely outcome, compared with the nonsuicidal depressed and nondepressed comparison subjects. There were no group differences in betting behavior. The suicide attempters differed in several aspects of social problem-solving on a self-report scale. Quality of decision-making was negatively correlated with the score on the impulsive/careless problem-solving subscale. These data suggest that older suicide attempters have a deficit in risk-sensitive decision-making, extending observations in younger adults. More specifically, older suicide attempters seem to neglect outcome probability and make poor choices. These impairments may precipitate and perpetuate suicidal crisis in depressed elders. Identification of decision-making impairment in suicidal elders may help with designing effective interventions.     

Predictors of outcome in patients consulting their general practitioners for headache: a prospective study

Headache is the most common neurological symptom presenting to general practitioners (GPs). Identifying factors predicting outcome in patients consulting their GPs for headache may help GPs with prognosis and choose management strategies which would improve patient care. We followed up a cohort of patients receiving standard medical care, recruited from 18 general practices in the South Thames region of England, approximately 9 months after their initial participation in the study. Of the baseline sample (N=255), 134 provided both full baseline and follow-up data on measures of interest. We determined associations between patients' follow-up scores on the Headache Impact Test-6 and baseline characteristics (including headache impact and frequency scores, mood, attributions about psychological/medical causes of their headaches, satisfaction with GP care and illness perceptions). Greater impact and stronger beliefs about the negative consequences of headaches at baseline were the strongest predictors of poor outcome at follow-up.     

Don't be afraid of irrelevant words: the emotional Stroop effect is confined to attended words

The emotional Stroop effect denotes slower responses to the colour of negative words (e.g., death) compared to neutral words (e.g., mug). Popular explanations assume a general power of negative words to capture visual attention. However, in the typical task, the irrelevant word stimulus and the relevant colour stimulus are perceptually integrated. We compared interference from negative words, which were part of the relevant visual object, to interference from negative words that were part of an irrelevant object, or occurred in the background, respectively. Results showed that only negative words in the relevant object delayed colour-naming responses, compared to neutral words. Negative words outside the relevant object failed to affect performance. This finding is at odds with the claim that negative words could capture spatial or object-based mechanisms of visual attention. However, the finding is consistent with the idea that negative words interfere with the allocation of dimensional attention to different features of an attended object.     

The hierarchical order of processes underlying the direction illusion and the direction aftereffect

Motion perception involves the processing of velocity signals through several hierarchical stages of the visual cortex. To better understand this process, a number of studies have sought to localise the neural substrates of two misperceptions of motion direction, the direction illusion (DI) and the direction aftereffect (DAE). These studies have produced contradictory evidence as to the hierarchical order of the processing stages from which the respective phenomena arise. We have used a simple stimulus configuration to further investigate the sequential order of processes giving rise to the DI and DAE. To this end, we measured the two phenomena invoked in combination, and also manually parsed this combined effect into its two constituents by measuring the two phenomena individually in both possible sequential orders. Comparing the predictions made from each order to the outcome from the combined effect allowed us to test the tenability of two models: the DAE-first model and the DI-first model. Our results indicate that DAE-invoking activity does not occur earlier in the motion processing hierarchy than DI-invoking activity. Although the DI-first model is not inconsistent with our data, the possible involvement of non-sequential processing may be better able to reconcile these results with those of previous studies.     

What have you done for me lately? Friendship-selection in the shadow of the Dark Triad traits

The current studies examined how the Dark Triad personality traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) facilitate the strategic structuring of an individual's social environment in terms of same- and opposite-sex friends. In one study using normative questions (N = 267) and another using a budget-allocation task (N = 114), we found that the Dark Triad traits were associated with choosing friends for strategic purposes and to create a volatile environment. Narcissistic individuals reported relatively more reasons to form friendships, such as shared interests, makes me feel good, and intelligence. Women high in narcissism chose same-sex friends who were attractive and women high on Machiavellianism chose same-sex friends who have social status. Men high on psychopathy devalued traits associated with good social relationships in favor of friends who could facilitate their mating efforts and to offset risks incurred in their life history strategy. Results are discussed using the selection-manipulation-evocation framework for explaining how personality traits interact with social environments and integrated with findings from evolutionary biology.     

The longitudinal links between shame and increasing hostility during adolescence

Little research has examined changes in emotional experience in adolescents. We hypothesized that the experience of shame would lead adolescents to become increasingly hostile. We report a one-year longitudinal study involving 765 high school students (392 males and 373 females; mean age = 14.41 yrs) in Grade 9 at Time 1 and 670 students (335 males and 335 females) in Grade 10 at Time 2. Shame and hostility showed high levels of stability over one-year. Structural equation modelling showed that higher shame in Grade 9 was predictive of increases in hostility in Grade 10, whereas hostility was not predictive of increases in shame. These results are discussed with reference to the nature of shame and its potential to provoke antisocial behaviour.     

Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

A contour propagation approach to surface filling-in and volume formation

A new approach to surface and volume formation is introduced in response to the question, "Why do some silhouettes look 3 dimensional (3D) and others look 2D?" The central idea is that form information can propagate away from a "propagable segment" (PS) of occluding contour that could have projected onto the image from the visible portion of a cross-section of a surface. A key property of a PS is that it exhibits abrupt curvature changes where it meets the rest of the occluding contour. An algorithm is described for filling in curved surfaces from a PS: When copies of a PS are propagated into the interior, they act as cross-sectional surface contours that also exhibit abrupt curvature changes with the rest of the occluding contour. The result is a nonmetric coding of 3D-shape in terms of local ordinal surface curvature and orientation relationships that is scale, translation, and rotation invariant.