Paying attention to emotion: an fMRI investigation of cognitive and emotional stroop tasks

In this research, we investigated the degree to which brain systems involved in ignoring emotionally salient information differ from those involved in ignoring nonemotional information. The design allowed examination of regional brain activity, using fMRI during color-word and emotional Stroop tasks. Twelve participants indicated the color of words while ignoring word meaning in conditions in which neutral words were contrasted to emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and incongruent color words. Dorsolateral frontal lobe activity was increased by both negative and incongruent color words, indicating a common system for maintaining an attentional set in the presence of salient distractors. In posterior regions of the brain, activity depended on the nature of the information to be ignored. Ignoring color-incongruent words increased left parietal activity and decreased parahippocampal gyrus activity, whereas ignoring negative emotional words increased bilateral occipito-temporal activity and decreased amygdala activity. The results indicate that emotion and attention are intimately related via a network of regions that monitor for salient information, maintain attention on the task, suppress irrelevant information, and select appropriate responses.     

Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N?=?301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N?=?125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.     

Hampstead Buddhist Vihāra1

The author offers a brief history of the Hampstead Buddhist Vihāra, a residence and Dhamma centre purchased by the English Sangha Trust (EST) as part of a strategy to establish an indigenous British bhikkhu Sangha. Drawing on official publications of the EST, other contemporary documents and personal reminiscence, the narrative runs from the initial founding through to the sale of the properties accrued, leading to the establishment of rural monastic residences and retreat centres including Chithurst Forest Monastery and Amaravati. The activities of the HBV, including ordinations and publications, are also reviewed, the whole offered as documentation of details of one of the early attempts to establish the Sangha in the West.     

Development of a Response Inconsistency Scale for the Personality Inventory for DSM–5

The advent of a dimensional model of personality disorder included in DSM–5 has necessitated the development of a new measurement scheme, specifically a self-report questionnaire termed the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, &; Skodol, 2012 Krueger, R. F., Derringer, J., Markon, K. E., Watson, D., &; Skodol, A. E. (2012). Initial construction of a maladaptive personality trait model and inventory for DSM–5. Psychological Medicine, 42, 1879–1890. doi:10.1017/S0033291711002674[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, there are many threats to the validity of a self-report measure, including response inconsistency. This study outlines the development of an inconsistency scale for the PID–5. Across both college student and clinical samples, the inconsistency scale was able to reliably differentiate real from random responding. Random responses led to increased scores on the PID–5 facets, indicating the importance of detecting inconsistent responding prior to test interpretation. Thus, this inconsistency scale could be of use to researchers and clinicians in detecting inconsistent responses to this new personality disorder measure.     

Gender differences in salivary alpha-amylase and attentional bias towards negative facial expressions following acute stress induction

This study investigated gender differences in two key processes involved in anxiety, arousal and attentional bias towards threat. Arousal was assessed using salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), a biomarker of noradrenergic arousal and attention bias using a dot-probe task. Twenty-nine women and 27 men completed the dot-probe task and provided saliva samples before and after a stress induction [cold pressor stress (CPS) test]. Women displayed a significant increase in arousal (sAA) following the stressor compared to men, who displayed a significant reduction in arousal. Reaction time data revealed a significant avoidance of threat in women at baseline, but a significant change to an attention bias towards threat following the stressor. Men did not significantly respond to the stressor in terms of attentional bias. These findings suggest that women are more reactive to a stressor than men, and display an initial avoidance response to threat, but an attentional bias towards threat following stress.     

Leading God’s People: Perceptions of Influence Among African–American Pastors

Journal of Religion and Health - Religious leaders, particularly African–American pastors, are believed to play a key role in addressing health disparities. Despite the role...