Upregulation of emotion areas through neurofeedback with a focus on positive mood

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging can be used to feed back signal changes from the brain to participants such that they can train to modulate activation levels in specific brain areas. Here we present the first study combining up-regulation of brain areas for positive emotions with psychometric measures to assess the effect of successful self-regulation on subsequent mood. We localized brain areas associated with positive emotions through presentation of standardized pictures with positive valence. Participants up-regulated activation levels in their target area during specific periods, alternating with rest. Participants attained reliable self-control of the target area by the last of three seven-minute runs. This training effect was supported by an extensive network outside the targeted brain region, including higher sensory areas, paralimbic and orbitofrontal cortex. Self-control of emotion areas was not accompanied by clear changes in self-reported emotions; trend-level improvements on depression scores were counteracted by increases on measures of fatigue, resulting in no overall mood improvement. It is possible that benefits of self-control of emotion networks may only appear in people who display abnormal emotional homeostasis. The use of only a single, short, training session, overlap between positive and negative emotion networks and aversive reactions to the scanning environment may have prevented the detection of subtle changes in mood.     

The Effects of Instructions on Mothers’ Ratings of Child Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms

We examined whether instructional materials describing how to rate child ADHD symptoms would improve the accuracy of mothers’ ratings of ADHD symptoms presented in standard child behavior stimuli, and whether instructions would be equally effective across a range of maternal depressive symptoms and family incomes. A community sample of 100 mothers with 5 to 12 year old sons were randomly assigned to either receive or not receive the instructions. All mothers watched standard video recordings of boys displaying nonproblem behavior, ADHD symptoms, ADHD plus oppositional behaviors, or ADHD plus anxious behaviors, and then rated the ADHD symptoms of the boys in the videos. These ratings were compared to ratings of the boys’ ADHD symptoms made by objective coders. Results indicated an interaction such that the instructional materials improved the agreement between mothers’ and coders’ ratings, but only for mothers at lower family income levels. The instructional materials improved all mothers’ open-ended responses regarding knowledge of ADHD. All mothers rated more ADHD symptoms in boys with comorbid oppositional or anxious behaviors, and this effect was not reduced by the instructional materials. The potential utility of these instructions to improve the accuracy of ratings of child ADHD symptoms is explored.     

Attentional limits in memory retrieval-revisited

Carrier and Pashler (1995) concluded-based on locus-of-slack dual-task methodology-that memory retrieval was subject to a central bottleneck. However, this conclusion conflicts with evidence from other lines of research suggesting that memory retrieval proceeds autonomously, in parallel with many other mental processes. In the present experiments we explored the possibility that Carrier and Pashler's conclusions were distorted by use of an experimental method unfavorable to parallel memory retrieval. New locus-of-slack experiments were performed that encouraged parallel memory retrieval strategies with instructions and feedback, along with the use of "preferred" stimulus-response modality mappings. Results from two psychological refractory period experiments showed that the effect of Task 2 recognition difficulty was consistently absorbed into cognitive slack, with both word and picture recognition. We conclude that the memory retrieval stage of recognition tasks can proceed in parallel with central operations of another task, at least under favorable conditions. Our new findings bring results from dual-task locus-of-slack methodology into agreement with other evidence that memory retrieval is not subject to severe, generic central resource limitations.     

John Dewey and the Role of Scientific Method in Aesthetic Experience

In this paper I examine a controversy ongoingwithin current Deweyan philosophy of educationscholarship regarding the proper role and scopeof science in Dewey's concept of inquiry. Theside I take is nuanced. It is one that issensitive to the importance that Dewey attachesto science as the best method of solvingproblems, while also sensitive to thosestatements in Dewey that counter a wholesalereductivism of inquiry to scientific method. Iutilize Dewey's statements regarding the placeaccorded to inquiry in aesthetic experiences ascharacteristic of his method, as bestconceived.     

Alterations of male sexual behavior by learned aversions to hamster vaginal secretion

Male hamsters poisoned after their first adult exposure to the vaginal secretion of female hamsters became hesitant to approach and ingest the secretion. The same aversion-training procedure also altered the responses of males to estrous females, changing the latency, frequency, and duration of a variety of behaviors that are commonly taken as indexes of sexual attraction or arousal and of copulatory performance. The effects suggest that the aversions to vaginal secretion alter the perceived meaning of the secretion for male hamsters, and analysis of the correlations between various measures of sexual arousal and performance support the hypothesis that separate mechanisms underlie the effects of the secretion on appetitive and consummatory sexual behavior.     

Visual factors in word perception

An experiment is reported confirming the existence of the “word-letter phenomenon” (WLP): At tachistoscopic exposure durations, each letter of a four-letter word is perceived more accurately than a single letter. Data obtained rule out several artifactual interpretations, including the possibility that perception of letters in a word is facilitated merely by the presence of adjacent contours. The WLP is shown to depend critically on what type of display is used as a preand postexposure field. While a masking field of high-contrast random contours produced a large and reliable WLP, a plain white field eliminated the phenomenon entirely. This pattern of results suggests several ways in which perception at the word level may differ from perception at the letter level.     

Recognising faces: effects of lighting direction, inversion, and brightness reversal.

When information about three-dimensional shape obtained from shading and shadows is ambiguous, the visual system favours an interpretation of surface geometry which is consistent with illumination from above. If pictures of top-lit faces are rotated the resulting stimulus is both figurally inverted and illuminated from below. In this study the question of whether the effects of figural inversion and lighting orientation on face recognition are independent or interactive is addressed. Although there was a clear inversion effect for faces illuminated from the front and above, the inversion effect was found to be reduced or eliminated for faces illuminated from below. A strong inversion effect for photographic negatives was also found but in this case the effect was not dependent on the direction of illumination. These findings are interpreted as evidence to suggest that lighting faces from below disrupts the formation of surface-based representations of facial shape.     

Suppression effects in rhyme judgement tasks

Orthographic and phonological similarity were orthogonally manipulated in a rhyme judgement task. The effects were assessed of paced versus very rapid articulatory suppression on subjects' ability to make rhyme judgements when pairs of words were presented either simultaneously or successively. It was found that there were consistent suppression effects on the accuracy of subjects' judgements to visually similar non-rhyming pairs (e.g. “pint-tint”), visually dissimilar rhyming pairs (e.g. “fare-wear”) and visually similar rhyming pairs (e.g. “fall-tall), regardless of mode of presentation or speed of suppression. The size of the suppression effect was greatest for the visually similar non-rhyming word pairs. It was argued that subjects need to carry out a recheck for phonological similarity when word pairs are visually but not phonologically similar, and that encoding the words in articulatory form is particularly beneficial for making accurate rhyme judgements to such pairs.