Attentional Processing of Threat in Bipolar Disorder: Going Beyond Mood-Congruency

Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) entails a complex attentional pattern not merely restricted to happy or sad biases, but also directed towards threatening information. This study examined threat-related bias on attentional orienting when participants were not instructed about the presentation of emotional stimuli (i.e., implicit instructions). An emotional dot-probe task in which an emotional face (i.e., threat, sad, happy) is simultaneously displayed with a neutral face was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n?=?26), depression (n?=?24), and euthymia (n?=?28) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n?=?28). Symptomatic BD patients (i.e., in a manic or depressive episode) showed an attentional orienting bias toward threatening faces but not for happy or sad faces, while euthymic BD patients did not exhibit any attentional bias for emotional stimuli. A bias toward happy faces was found in the control group. Threat-related bias was not related to the severity of affective and anxiety symptoms in BD. When attention is not explicitly directed to emotional information, threat-related bias may characterize attentional orienting during mania and depression, but may be attenuated during euthymia.

     

Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness,encoding task and affective valence

Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.     

Directed forgetting in working memory: Age‐related differences

This study explored the effects of ageing on working memory by means of the directed forgetting procedure designed by Reed (1970). Memory for a letter trigram was compared in conditions where it was either presented alone (single‐item), or followed by a second trigram to be recalled (interference), or followed by a second trigram to be forgotten (directed forgetting). The results clearly indicated that elderly participants inhibited the no‐longer‐relevant information less efficiently (recall in the single‐item condition – recall in the directed forgetting condition), as predicted by the model of Hasher and Zacks (1988). However, the results also demonstrated that sensitivity to interference (recall in the single‐item condition – recall in the interference condition) increased in the condition in which no inhibition was directly required.     

Role Stress: Burnout Antecedent in Nursing Professionals

Abstract

Burnout syndrome has been described by different authors as a reaction to work stress. Hence both the role stress components–role ambiguity and role conflict–appear in the literature as burnout antecedent variables. The correlation between these variables is positive. On the other hand, the work social support (from supervisors and colleagues) is a variable with influence on both role stress and burnout, so the people who perceive higher work social support feel lower role stress and lower burnout than the people who perceive lower social support. In this study we present the results of a correlational study of role ambiguity, role conflict, burnout levels (tested with Maslach Burnout Inventory), and the work social support effects on the relations. The sample are 102 nursing professionals, 24 per cent males and 76 per cent females. The results present a positive correlation between both role ambiguity and role conflict, and the emotional exhaustion scale and depersonalization scale, and a negative correlation between both role conflict and role ambiguity, and reduced personal accomplishment and work social support influence on the relations.     

With infinite utility,more needn't be better

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivization duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers.     

Interactions Between Modality of Working Memory Load and Perceptual Load in Distractor Processing

The present study investigated interactions between working memory load and perceptual load. The load theory (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, &; Viding, 2004 Lavie, N., Hirst, A., de Fockert, J.W., &; Viding, E. (2004). Load theory of selective attention and cognitive control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 339–354.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) claims that perceptual load decreases distractor interference, whereas working memory load increases interference. However, recent studies showed that effects of working memory might depend on the relationship between modalities of working memory and task stimuli. Here, we examined whether the relationship between working memory load and perceptual load would remain the same across modalities. The results of Experiment 1 showed that verbal working memory load did not affect a compatibility effect for low perceptual load, whereas it increased the compatibility effect for high perceptual load. In Experiment 2, the compatibility effect remained the same regardless of visual working memory load. These results suggest that the effects of working memory load and perceptual load depend on the relationship between the modalities of working memory and stimuli.     

Testing the online reading effects of emotionality on relative clause attachment

Previous research has shown the impact of the emotional dimension of nouns (i.e., valence and arousal) on the completion of relative clauses (RC) that are preceded by a double antecedent [e.g.,: Someone shot the servant (the first noun phrase, NP1) of the actress (the second noun phrase, NP2) who was on the balcony] (Fraga et al. in Q J Exp Psychol 65:1740–1759, 2012). The present study explored for the first time the role of emotional valence, specifically emotional positive nouns, on RC disambiguation in a self-paced reading experiment. Two types of NP1–NP2 relationships were compared: emotional–neutral vs. neutral–emotional. Results showed NP1 preferences in the emotional–neutral condition, whereas no preferences were found in the neutral–emotional condition. We conclude that during reading, the emotional properties of nouns play a role in disambiguation preferences: RC attachment preferences can be neutralized when emotional factors are manipulated. The results are discussed within the framework of current models of sentence processing and with reference to the controversial differences between comprehension and production.     

Cardiovascular health in women: the role of anger and its expression

The relationships between anger expression (in, out, and control) and cardiovascular health (emotional distress, cardiovascular symptoms reported, and preventive health behaviors) were analyzed in 327 women (range 17-60 years). The same criteria (N= 218), as well as blood pressure (BP) registered in medical checkups (N= 90) were recorded one year later. Four groups according to anger-in and anger-control scores, going from the most hostile (high anger-in and low anger-control) to the least hostile (low anger-in and high anger-control) were considered. The results indicated that the most hostile group, with the least adaptive anger expression, presented worst cardiovascular health than the other three groups, at both temporal moments. Furthermore, the presence of women with pathological BP levels was higher in the groups of high anger-in. These data ratify the role of anger expression, especially its repression (anger-in) and the lack of adequate canalization or control in women's cardiovascular health from a prospective design. Appropriate management of anger feelings and the practice of preventive health behaviors can protect women from cardiovascular problems.     

Temporal preparation and inhibitory deficit in fibromyalgia syndrome

Cognitive deficits in fibromyalgia may be specifically related to controlled processes, such as those measured by working memory or executive function tasks. This hypothesis was tested here by measuring controlled temporal preparation (temporal orienting) during a response inhibition (go no-go) task. Temporal orienting effects (faster reaction times for targets appearing at temporally attended vs. unattended moments) and response inhibition were impaired in fibromyalgia compared to the control group. It is concluded that frontal networks underlying attentional control (temporal orienting and response inhibition) can be a dysfunctional neurocognitive mechanism in fibromyalgia.