Childhood maltreatment is associated with increased neural response to ambiguous threatening facial expressions in adulthood: Evidence from the late positive potential

Childhood maltreatment increases lifetime vulnerability for psychopathology. One proposed mechanism for this association is that early maltreatment increases vigilance for and attention to subtle threat cues, persisting outside of the environment in which maltreatment occurs. To test this possibility, the present study examined neural responses to ambiguous and nonambiguous threatening facial expressions in a sample of 25 adults reporting a history of low-to-moderate levels of abuse in childhood and 46 reporting no or low levels of childhood maltreatment. The measure of neural response used was the late positive potential (LPP), a neural marker of sustained attention to motivationally salient information that is sensitive to subtle variation in emotional content. Participants passively viewed angry–neutral and fearful–neutral face blends and rated emotional intensity for each face. In the maltreated group, as fearful faces increased in emotional intensity, the LPP similarly increased, suggesting increased sensitivity to subtle variation in threatening content. Moreover, the LPP at each level of emotional intensity was not related to current symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, contrary to our hypotheses, adults with a history of abuse did not rate angry or fearful faces as more threatening, nor did they exhibit a larger LPP to angry faces, compared to controls. These findings suggest that childhood maltreatment may be associated with increased sensitivity to ambiguous threatening information in adulthood.     

Coping with condom embarrassment

This study assesses the embarrassment associated with purchasing, carrying, storing, using and disposing of condoms. It incorporates coping theory into the investigation of embarrassment by analysing the strategies individuals use to cope with embarrassment during condom purchase. The results of a survey show that individuals are embarrassed at various stages related to condom use. Purchasing condoms elicits the most embarrassment, followed by carrying and disposing, while using and storing are the least embarrassing. To cope with their embarrassment while purchasing condoms, people use multiple cognitive and behavioural coping strategies, with embarrassed people using more strategies. Both embarrassment and the number of strategies used decrease with age and experience. It appears that embarrassment associated with condoms remains a barrier to condom acquisition and consistent condom use, particularly among young adult populations. Coping strategies help individuals to bridge the gap between embarrassment and use.     

A proposed variation of the matching technique

A matching procedure is proposed by which a judge may use the same items in different matches. TheK items in one group most likely to include the correct match with each item in the other are selected. Inclusion of the correct match among theK items chosen is defined as a success. The distribution of the number of successes is discussed. Tables are presented showing the number of successes needed for significance for various values ofK and ofN, the number of items in each group.     

Parameters in the theory of sentence processing: Minimal Commitment theory goes east

This paper introduces the Minimal Commitment theory. This theory is a subspecies of deterministic parsers. The theory builds representations where immediate dominance and precedence relations are unspecified. Justification that this approach is psycholinguistically justified comes from its ability to provide a cross-linguistically valid theory of Garden path sentences in English and Japanese.I would lide to thank audiences at CUNY (1990) and (1991) for valuable comments and the chance to present this work. Parts of this paper were also presented at the Duke Symposium on Natural Language Processing, and at the Workshop on Japanese Sentence Processing held at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. I thank these audiences for valuable comments as well. Robert Berwick, Janet Fodor, Ted Gibson, Paul Gorrell, Norbert Hornstein, David Lightfoot, and Juan Uriagereka along with the University of Maryland NLP working group provided valuable assistance on this and earlier drafts.This work was supported by BNS902154-02 from the NSF.