A specific role for the human amygdala in olfactory memory

The medial temporal lobe is known to play a role in the processing of olfaction and memory. The specific contribution of the human amygdala to memory for odors has not been addressed, however. The role of this region in memory for odors was assessed in patients with unilateral amygdala damage due to temporal lobectomy (n = 20; 11 left, 9 right), one patient with selective bilateral amygdala damage, and in 20 age-matched normal controls. Fifteen odors were presented, followed 1 h later by an odor-name matching test and an odor-odor recognition test. Signal detection analyses showed that both unilateral groups were impaired in their memory for matching odors with names, these patients were not significantly impaired on odor-odor recognition. Bilateral amygdala damage resulted in severe impairment in both odor-name matching as well as in odor-odor recognition memory. Importantly, none of the patients were impaired on an auditory verbal learning task, suggesting that these findings reflect a specific impairment in olfactory memory, and not merely a more general memory deficit. Taken together, the data provide neuropsychological evidence that the human amygdala is essential for olfactory memory.     

Evidence for preserved emotional memory in normal older persons

Emotion has been shown to have a modulatory effect on declarative memory. Normal aging is associated with a decline in declarative memory, but whether aging might affect the influence of emotion on memory has not been established. To investigate this, we administered a task that provides a detailed assessment of emotional memory to 80 neurologically normal adults ranging in age from 35 to 85 years. Across ages, memory performance was found to be modulated by the emotional significance of stimuli in a comparable manner (improved memory for gist, compromised memory for visual detail), despite an overall decline in memory performance with increasing age. The results raise the interesting possibility that aging has a differential effect on hippocampal versus amygdala function.     

Implicit learning of first-, second-, and third-order transition probabilities

Most sequence-learning studies have confounded different types of information, making it difficult to know precisely what is learned. Addressing many of the confounds, the current study shows that people can learn 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-order transition probabilities. Measures directly assessing awareness of the probabilities show that the knowledge is implicit early in training and becomes explicit with extended training.     

How do I appear to others? Social anxiety and processing of the observable self

Two information processing biases that could maintain social anxiety were investigated. High and low socially anxious individuals encoded positive and negative trait words in one of three ways: public self-referent, private self-referent, and other-referent. Half were then told they would soon have to give a speech. As predicted, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals recalled less positive public self-referent words, but only when both groups were anticipating giving a speech. No memory biases were observed for private self-referent or other-referent words. Next all participants gave a speech. Correlational analyses suggested that high socially anxious individuals may use the somatic concomitants of anxiety to overestimate how anxious they appear and underestimate how well they come across.     

An experimental investigation of the role of safety-seeking behaviours in the maintenance of panic disorder with agoraphobia.

This study evaluates the hypothesis that safety-seeking behaviours play an important role in maintaining anxiety because they prevent patients from benefiting from disconfirmatory experience. Patients suffering from panic disorder with agoraphobia carried out a behaviour test, closely followed by an experimental session, which included a brief (15 min) period of exposure during which participants either stopped or maintained within-situation safety-seeking behaviours. When the behaviour test was repeated within two days, patients who had stopped their safety-seeking behaviours during the experimental session showed a significantly greater decrease in catastrophic beliefs and anxiety than those who had maintained safety-seeking behaviour. This difference was also reflected in questionnaires measuring clinical anxiety. These results are consistent with the cognitive hypothesis.     

Further Support for a Hierarchical Model of Affect: Reply to Green and Salovey

Green and Salovey agree with us that happiness and sadness are strongly bipolar, and that Positive and Negative Activation are not. However, Green and Salovey subscribe to the two-dimensional circumplex, a model we find wanting. Actually, the problems they discuss arise from the limitations of the circumplex rather than from issues fundamental to affective structure. And they do not consider the evidence, reported in our target article, that supports an alternative to the circumplex: a three-level hierarchical model. In this reply, we take a closer look at the empirical findings supporting this model, and we emphasize its heuristic promise.     

Dissociation between the effects of damage to perirhinal cortex and area TE

Perirhinal cortex and area TE are immediately adjacent to each other in the temporal lobe and reciprocally interconnected. These areas are thought to lie at the interface between visual perception and visual memory, but it has been unclear what their separate contributions might be. In three experiments, monkeys with bilateral lesions of the perirhinal cortex exhibited a different pattern of impairment than monkeys with bilateral lesions of area TE. In experiment 1, lesions of the perirhinal cortex produced a multimodal deficit in recognition memory (delayed nonmatching to sample), whereas lesions of area TE impaired performance only in the visual modality. In experiment 2, on a test of visual recognition memory (the visual paired comparison task) lesions of the perirhinal cortex impaired performance at long delays but spared performance at a very short delay. In contrast, lesions of area TE impaired performance even at the short delay. In experiment 3, lesions of the perirhinal cortex and lesions of area TE produced an opposite pattern of impairment on two visual discrimination tasks, simple object discrimination learning (impaired only by perirhinal lesions), and concurrent discrimination learning (impaired only by TE lesions). Taken together, the findings suggest that the perirhinal cortex, like other medial temporal lobe structures, is important for the formation of memory, whereas area TE is important for visual perceptual processing.     

Racism as a stressor for African Americans. A biopsychosocial model.

Various authors have noted that interethnic group and intraethnic group racism are significant stressors for many African Americans. As such, intergroup and intragroup racism may play a role in the high rates of morbidity and mortality in this population. Yet, although scientific examinations of the effects of stress have proliferated, few researchers have explored the psychological, social, and physiological effects of perceived racism among African Americans. The purpose of this article was to outline a biopsychosocial model for perceived racism as a guide for future research. The first section of this article provides a brief overview of how racism has been conceptualized in the scientific literature. The second section reviews research exploring the existence of intergroup and intragroup racism. A contextual model for systematic studies of the biopsychosocial effects of perceived racism is then presented, along with recommendations for future research.     

Moral Incapacity and Deliberation

Was Luther avowing a genuine moral incapacity when he claimed that he could do no other? Bernard Williams has distinguished moral from psychological incapacity in terms of deliberation. There are three particular difficulties for the notion: in addition to (1) scepticism about whether the agent is genuinely incapable, there are (2) the possibility of conflicting moral incapacities, and (3) apparent cases where there is no actual or possible deliberation. If (1) can be countered, (2) can be met by ceteris paribus clauses, and it is shown that these do not remove the element of necessity. And (3) can be met by showing how possible deliberation is involved in putative counter-examples. Williams' account needs to be augmented to deal with cases of the morally unthinkable, and refined to allow for incipient attempts to do the morally impossible     

The Iowa Personality Disorder Screen: development and preliminary validation of a brief screening interview

The length and expense of comprehensive personality disorder interviews makes them unwieldy for routine use. A brief but sensitive screen could eliminate administration of longer instruments in many instances. We describe the development of the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen (IPDS)--a mini-structured interview which can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Retrospective analyses using 1,203 SIDP-R interviews suggested that the IPDS items should provide good sensitivity and specificity. We present results from a prospective validation study, using a mixed group of 52 nonpsychotic inpatients and outpatients who were diagnosed using the SIDP-IV. Blind administration of the IPDS yielded excellent sensitivity (92%) and good specificity (79%), using a subset of five screening items. Addition of two more items leads to an estimated sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 86%. The IPDS shows promise as a quick personality disorder screen for use in research settings or standard clinical interviews.