Brain and behavioral inhibitory control of kindergartners facing negative emotions

Inhibitory control (IC) – one of the most critical functions underlying a child's ability to self‐regulate – develops significantly throughout the kindergarten years. Experiencing negative emotions imposes challenges on executive functioning and may specifically affect IC. In this study, we examined kindergartners' IC and its related brain activity during a negative emotional situation: 58 children (aged 5.5–6.5 years) performed an emotion‐induction Go/NoGo task. During this task, we recorded children's performance and brain activity, focusing on the fronto‐central N2 component in the event‐related potential (ERP) and the power of its underlying theta frequency. Compared to Go trials, inhibition of NoGo trials was associated with larger N2 amplitudes and theta power. The negative emotional experience resulted in better IC performance and, at the brain level, in larger theta power. Source localization of this effect showed that the brain activity related to IC during the negative emotional experience was principally generated in the posterior frontal regions. Furthermore, the band power measure was found to be a more sensitive index for children's inhibitory processes than N2 amplitudes. This is the first study to focus on kindergartners' IC while manipulating their emotional experience to induce negative emotions. Our findings suggest that a kindergartner's experience of negative emotion can result in improved IC and increases in associated aspects of brain activity. Our results also suggest the utility of time‐frequency analyses in the study of brain processes associated with response inhibition in young children.     

Using strategic psychotherapy: A case study of chronic PTSD after a terrorist attack

This article describes a case of chronic post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The patient came to psychotherapy three years after he was injured in a terrorist attack. He was in a state of dysfunction. The article elaborates on theoretical issues, the choice of strategic model of psychotherapy, the various phases of the therapeutic process and the specific difficulties that such a case presents.     

A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years old, as well as adults, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb. Some utterances included only word order cues while others included direct object marker and subject-verb gender agreement cues. Even though Hebrew word order is relatively free, when subjects used word order as an interpretive cue they generally assigned sentence relations according to the dominant SVO order of modern Hebrew. This trend was less strong for the interpretations of NNV utterances than of NVN and VNN utterances. There was no evidence of a developmental sequence for word order strategies. In addition, there was no evidence that word order, for any age group, was necessarily a dominant cue for assigning sentence relations when other linguistic information was available.     

Sentence frame contexts and lexical decisions: Sentence-acceptability and word-relatedness effects

Many studies have explored the effects of single-word contexts on visual word recognition, and several models have been proposed to account for the results obtained. However, relatively little is known about the effects of sentence contexts. In the experiment reported, the contexts consisted of sentences with the final word deleted, and subjects made word-nonword (lexical) decisions on target strings of letters. Norms were collected to determine the most common completion for each sentence frame. The experiment yielded three main findings: (1) Lexical decisions were fastest for words that were the most common completions; (2) among words not given as completions in the norming procedure, decisions were faster for words related to the most common completions than for words unrelated to the most common completions; t3t also among words that were not produced as completions, decisions were faster for words that formed acceptable completions than for words that did not. These relatedness and sentence-acceptability effects were independent, so that the relatedness effect held even when the target words formed anomalous sentence completions. In order to account for these results, a model combining two types of processes is required. In the model described, schematic knowledge (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977) operates upon a semantic network to activate particular nodes, and this activation spreads to related concepts as in the Collins and Loftus (1975) model.     

Perceived benefits of using an Internet-based interactive career planning system

Making Better Career Decisions (MBCD) is an Internet-based interactive career planning system designed to help deliberating individuals. The present research examined the benefits of a dialogue with MBCD, by analyzing 712 users’ perceptions of its contribution to their career decision-making process, and locating variables associated with these perceptions. A pre-dialogue and a post-dialogue questionnaire were used to collect the users’ perceptions of its benefits and measure the change in the degree of decidedness. Perceived benefit was derived from participants’ ratings of the degree of progress they had made in their career decision-making process, whether they had learned about additional factors to be considered and their career-related preferences, as well as their ratings of the quality of the list of “promising” career alternatives presented to them during their dialogue with MBCD. This composite perceived benefit was found to be positively associated with the users’ decidedness at the completion of the dialogue with MBCD. Users’ satisfaction with the length and variety of their personal “promising alternatives” list was associated with a higher perceived benefit.     

Forgiving the September 11th terrorists: associations with coping, psychological distress, and religiosity

Two studies examined how non-interpersonal forgiveness (when there is no social relationship between the transgressor and forgiver) related to coping and involuntary responses to stress, psychological distress, and religiosity. Three to six weeks after September 11th, 2001, forgiveness had non-linear associations with other responses to the terrorist attacks. Among college students (N=488), those who were trying or had forgiven (pro-forgiveness) the terrorists reported less involuntary engagement, more primary and secondary control coping, and more meaning finding than those who were unsure about forgiveness (ambivalent) and those who did not believe the perpetrators should be forgiven (anti-forgiveness). Ambivalent students reported the most distress, even after controlling for religion. Anti-forgiveness students reported less religiosity than ambivalent and pro-forgiveness students. Most findings were consistent among middle schoolers (N=154), particularly regarding psychological distress and responses to stress. Also, forgiveness of strangers for acts against one's community functioned separately from religion.     

How arousal modulates memory: Disentangling the effects of attention and retention

Emotion may influence memory both by altering attention and perception during encoding and by affecting memory retention. To date, studies have focused on the enhancement of memory consolidation by arousal. However, they have failed to rule out a role for attention. To specifically link memory enhancement of arousing material to modulation of memory retention, we examined recognition of neutral and arousing words at two time points and under conditions that manipulate attention during encoding. Participants were briefly presented with an arousing or neutral word at the periphery, while fixating on a central word. Recognition of peripheral words was assessed either immediately or after 24 h. Whereas recognition of neutral words became worse over time, recognition of arousing words remained the same and was better than neutral word recognition at delay. The results indicate that arousal supports slower forgetting even when the difference in attentional resources allocated to stimuli is minimized.     

Enhancing attributional style as a resiliency factor in depressogenic stress generation

Abstract

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests depression and cognitive vulnerabilities to depression may lead individuals to generate stressful events. However, there has been no study to date that has directly examined factors that may lead individuals to be less likely to generate stressful events. The present study examines whether an enhancing attributional style, the tendency to make global and stable inferences following occurrence of a positive event, functions as a resiliency factor in stress generation. One hundred and sixty-seven female students completed measures of depression symptoms and attributional style at baseline and occurrence of life events since baseline at a four-week follow-up. Results indicated that an enhancing attributional style predicted decreased levels of stressful events over the following four weeks, even when controlling for depression symptoms. The findings of this study suggest that there may be resiliency factors that can help protect individuals from the generation of stressful events.     

Depression as a mediator of negative cognitive style and hopelessness in stress generation

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable interest in the role of cognitive factors in the stress generation process. Generally, these studies find that depressed individuals, or individuals at cognitive risk for depression, are more likely to experience stressful life events that are in part influenced by their own characteristics and behaviours (i.e., negative dependent events). However, there is still much to be learnt about the mediators of these effects. For example, does the development of depression symptoms explain why individuals at cognitive risk for depression experience increased negative dependent events? Or, is it that increases in cognitive risk explain why depressed individuals experience increased negative dependent events? To explore these questions, a short‐term prospective study was conducted with 209 college students who were given measures of depression, depressogenic risk factors (i.e., negative cognitive style and hopelessness), and negative dependent events at two time points 6 weeks apart. Support was found for three models: (1) depression symptoms mediated the relationship between negative cognitive style and negative dependent events; (2) depression symptoms mediated the relationship between hopelessness and negative dependent events; and (3) first hopelessness and then depression symptoms mediated the relationship between negative cognitive style and negative dependent events in a multiple‐step model. In contrast, the reverse models were not confirmed, suggesting specificity in the direction of the mediational sequence.