Affective processing within 1/10th of a second: High arousal is necessary for early facilitative processing of negative but not positive words

Lexical decisions to high- and low-arousal negative words and to low-arousal neutral and positive words were examined in an event-related potentials (ERP) study. Reaction times to positive and high-arousal negative words were shorter than those to neutral (low-arousal) words, whereas those to low-arousal negative words were longer. A similar pattern was observed in an early time window of the ERP response: Both positive and high-arousal negative words elicited greater negative potentials in a time frame of 80 to 120 msec after stimulus onset. This result suggests that arousal has a differential impact on early lexical processing of positive and negative words. Source localization in the relevant time frame revealed that the arousal effect in negative words is likely to be localized in a left occipito-temporal region including the middle temporal and fusiform gyri. The ERP arousal effect appears to result from early lexico-semantic processing in high-arousal negative words.     

The Proof is in the Pudding: Commentary on Papers Updating Anna Freud’s Diagnostic Profile

ABSTRACT

This fine collection of articles documents efforts to bring Anna Freud’s diagnostic profile (1965) up to date by integrating more recent theory and research in attachment theory, inter-subjective theory, and theories deriving from the work of Bion on the process of “containing” (Bion, 1988). While some of the articles present the theoretical context for this integrative effort, Melandri’s (this issue) thoughtful and comprehensive clinical case shows us how an updated diagnostic profile can be put to work in the consulting room.     

The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan

With the Developmental Lexicon Project (DeveL), we present a large-scale study that was conducted to collect data on visual word recognition in German across the lifespan. A total of 800 children from Grades 1 to 6, as well as two groups of younger and older adults, participated in the study and completed a lexical decision and a naming task. We provide a database for 1,152 German words, comprising behavioral data from seven different stages of reading development, along with sublexical and lexical characteristics for all stimuli. The present article describes our motivation for this project, explains the methods we used to collect the data, and reports analyses on the reliability of our results. In addition, we explored developmental changes in three marker effects in psycholinguistic research: word length, word frequency, and orthographic similarity. The database is available online.     

Verification of nonwords: The baseword frequency effect in children’s pseudohomophone reading

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - In this study, we investigated the baseword frequency effect in children and its implications for models of visual word recognition. The baseword frequency...     

The effects of p-chloroamphetamine, a depletor of brain serotonin, on the performance of rats in two types of positively reinforced complex spatial discrimination tasks

Learning in male Sprague-Dawley rats was assessed in two types of positively reinforced complex spatial discrimination tasks (Stone 14-unit T-maze and eight-arm radial-arm maze) following cytotoxic lesions of central serotonergic terminal projection fields with p-chloroamphetamine (PCA). Learning, as expressed as mean number of errors per day and mean number of trails required to reach criterion, was significantly enhanced in the PCA-lesioned animals trained in the Stone maze. On the other hand, the performance of the PCA-lesioned animals trained in the eight-arm radial-arm maze was not found to differ significantly from that of saline-injected animals. The improved acquisition of the PCA-lesioned rats trained in the Stone maze was completely abolished following pretreatment with the selective serotonergic reuptake inhibitor norzimeldine. Neurochemical analyses of the brains of representative animals revealed that the levels of serotonin and its major metabolite, 5-hydroxy-3-indoleacetic acid, were both significantly reduced by PCA in all regions examined. While it is clear from these and other studies that the serotonergic nervous system plays an important role in the processes underlying learning and memory, these results further underscore the selective role of this neurotransmitter system in the way information is processed by the brain.     

The influence of serial retention and theme identification paradigms on encoding

Half the subjects attempted to remember the order of presentation of stimulus lists of words; the other half tried to determine the theme of the words. Encoding features were evaluated with surprise recognition tests. Greater auditory encoding was obtained for the stimulus words in the serial retention condition than for the same words in the theme identification condition. Semantic encoding was only obtained in the theme identification condition. These results were discussed in terms of the flexibility of encoding strategies.     

Utilization of context for word identification decisions in children

The use of context was investigated with subjects from fourth- and sixth-grade populations. A Word Boundary task was used that requires subjects to make word-identification decisions both with and without contextual information. Results indicated that context was utilized effectively by the sixth-grade students, while the fourth-grade students showed small context-use effects. These findings are consistent with performance models that emphasize the role of predictive behavior in language analysis.