Production of spontaneous and posed facial expressions in patients with Huntington's disease: Impaired communication of disgust

Several studies have reported impairment in the recognition of facial expressions of disgust in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and preclinical carriers of the HD gene. The aim of this study was to establish whether impairment for disgust in HD patients extended to include the ability to express the emotion on their own faces. Eleven patients with HD, and 11 age and education matched healthy controls participated in three tasks concerned with the expression of emotions. One task assessed the spontaneous production of disgust-like facial expressions during the smelling of offensive odorants. A second assessed the production of posed facial expressions during deliberate attempts to communicate emotion. The third task evaluated HD patients’ ability to imitate the specific facial configurations associated with each emotion. Foul odours induced fewer disgust-like facial reactions in HD patients than in controls, and patients’ posed facial expressions of disgust were less accurate than the posed disgust expressions of controls. The effect was selective to disgust; patients had no difficulty posing expressions of other emotions. These impairments were not explained by compromised muscle control: HD patients had no difficulty imitating the facial movements required to display disgust. Viewed together with evidence of difficulty in other aspects of disgust in HD, the findings suggest that a common substrate might participate in both the processing and the expression of this emotion.     

The effects of attentional training on physiological stress recovery after induced social threat

Abstract

Social stress has been related to both physiological and psychological responses. The recovery of stress is influenced by the way environmental information is processed, i.e., what information is attended to and how it is interpreted. The present study investigated the effect of attention modification training on physiological stress recovery following induced stress. A group of applicants preparing for a job interview were randomly allocated to an attention training condition versus a control condition. Afterwards, they were asked to give an artificial job interview to a real life jury while being videotaped. Participants in both conditions showed decreased heart rate variability during the job interview, which indicates an overall physiological stress response. However, during a 30-minute follow-up period after the training, indices of heart rate variability showed improved stress recovery only in the attention training condition. Attentional training is proposed as a promising strategy to prevent enduring stress reactions.     

Risk Factors for the Occurrence of Child Abuse and Neglect

SUMMARY

A large, nationally representative database of child abuse and neglect cases was analyzed to identify demographic risk factors for the occurrence of different types of abuse and neglect. The analyses used the data collected in the second National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (the NIS-2) concerning children who were harmed by abuse or neglect. Multiple-factor logistic models were developed to identify risk factors for the occurrence of abuse or neglect in six categories of maltreatment: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment, physical neglect, educational neglect, and multiple maltreatment. A key finding was that children in families with incomes under $15,000 per year were at far greater risk in every category of maltreatment. Also, older children were generally at greater risk in every category, and risk was related to family structure, family size, child's sex and race/ethnicity, and metropolitan status of the county. However, these relationships applied to only certain types of abuse or neglect or took different forms in different maltreatment categories. Interactions among risk factors were the rule rather than the exception. Findings emphasize the need for better coordination between human services and income support services to families. The results imply that risk assessment would be appreciably advanced by going beyond simple matrix approaches that independently consider different factors by developing assessment models that include interactions between different risk factors.     

Introduction

A dynamic model of affect suggests that positive and negative affect (PA and NA) are normally relatively independent of one another, whereas the heightened apprehensiveness and narrowed cognitive attention in persons with anxiety may contribute to a more unidimensional affect structure. This possibility was examined in a sample of 230 patients seeking treatment for anxiety and depressive disorders in the Netherlands. Two methods, a multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Fisher's z test of correlations, were used to test these predicted relationships within a sample of persons diagnosed with either a depressive or an anxiety disorder. Both methods supported these predictions, with the depressed group exhibiting relatively independent PA and NA while the anxious group's affects were more strongly inversely correlated.     

Moving the Arm at Different Rates: Slow Movements are Avoided

Qualitative and quantitative changes characterize locomotion and rhythmic interlimb coordination at different speeds. Legs and hands do not move more or less quickly; they also adopt different relative coordination patterns. In the present article, the authors asked whether similar transitions occur for unimanual hand movements when speed is slowed below the preferred speed. Participants moved a handheld dowel back and forth between 2 large circular targets in time with a metronome at periods between 370 ms and 1667 ms. The authors analyzed the kinematics of participants’ movements at each period and found that proportional dwell time and number of peaks in the velocity profile increased as driving periods increased. Path lengths and peak velocities remained relatively constant for driving periods exceeding 800 ms. Participants made only gradual changes to their movement parameters, so that they went from a continuous mode to a more discrete mode of behavior for longer driving periods. Thus, unlike for rhythmic bimanual movements or locomotory patterns, there are quantitative but no clear qualitative changes for unimanual movements. The results suggest that participants tried to move close to their preferred tempo at different rates, and that they avoided moving slowly.     

Freely Chosen Index Finger Tapping Frequency Is Increased in Repeated Bouts of Tapping

Healthy individuals (n = 40) performed index finger tapping at freely chosen frequency during repeated bouts and before and after near-maximal muscle action consisting of 3 intense flexions of the index finger metacarpal phalangeal joint. One experiment showed, unexpectedly, that a bout of tapping increased the tapping frequency in the subsequent bout. Thus, a cumulating increase of 8.2 ± 5.4% (p < .001) occurred across 4 bouts, which were all separated by 10 min rest periods. Follow-up experiments revealed that tapping frequency was still increased in consecutive bouts when rest periods were extended to 20 min. Besides, near-maximal muscle activation, followed by 5 min rest, did not affect the tapping frequency. In conclusion, freely chosen tapping frequency was increased in repeated bouts of tapping, which were separated by 10–20 min rest periods. The observed phenomenon is suggested to be termed repeated bout rate enhancement.     

Near-term fetal response to maternal spoken voice

Knowledge about prenatal learning has been largely predicated on the observation that newborns appear to recognize the maternal voice. Few studies have examined the process underlying this phenomenon; that is, whether and how the fetus responds to maternal voice in situ. Fetal heart rate and motor activity were recorded at 36 weeks gestation (n = 69) while pregnant women read aloud from a neutral passage. Compared to a baseline period, fetuses responded with a decrease in motor activity in the 10 s following onset of maternal speech and a trend level decelerative heart rate response, consistent with an orienting response. Subsequent analyses revealed that the fetal response was modified by both maternal and fetal factors. Fetuses of women who were previously awake and talking (n = 40) showed an orienting response to onset of maternal reading aloud, while fetuses of mothers who had previously been resting and silent (n = 29) responded with elevated heart rate and increased movement. The magnitude of the fetal response was further dependent on baseline fetal heart rate variability such that largest response was demonstrated by fetuses with low variability of mothers who were previously resting and silent. Results indicate that fetal responsivity is affected by both maternal and fetal state and have implications for understanding fetal learning of the maternal voice under naturalistic conditions.     

Adverse childhood experiences and autonomic regulation in response to acute stress: the role of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems

Background and objectives: After a previous report demonstrated blunted heart rate (HR) reactivity in association with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) [Voellmin, A., Winzeler, K., Hug, E., Wilhelm, F. H., Schaefer, V., Gaab, J.,?…?Bader, K. (2015). Blunted endocrine and cardiovascular reactivity in young healthy women reporting a history of childhood adversity. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 51, 58–67. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.09.008], the present analysis aimed at clarifying the role of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system in this relationship.

Design and Methods: One hundred eighteen healthy young women provided data on ACEs and underwent psychosocial stress testing. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA, quantified by high-frequency HR variability) were assessed as measures of sympathetic and parasympathetic cardiovascular activity, respectively. A mediation model was calculated to test the indirect effects of ACEs on HR via SBP and RSA.

Results: The effect of ACEs on HR reactivity was mediated by SBP reactivity but not by RSA reactivity. ACEs were associated with reduced SBP at rest.

Conclusions: ACEs were associated with down-regulation in a measure of sympathetic but no alteration in a measure of parasympathetic cardiovascular stress reactivity in adulthood. Future research will need to clarify whether this indicates risk or resilience.     

Categorical perception: effects of the extent and rate of spectral change

ABSTRACT

Two experiments evaluated a potential explanation of categorical perception (CP) for place of articulation – namely, that listeners derive limited information from rapid spectral changes. Experiment 1 examined vowel context effects for /b/–/d/ continua that included consonant–vowel tokens with F2 onset frequencies that varied systematically from the F2 frequencies of their corresponding steady-states. Phoneme categorisation sharply shifted with F2 direction at locations along the continuum where discrimination performance peaked, indicating CP. Experiment 2 compared findings for a replicated condition against conditions with vowels reduced to match consonant duration or consonants extended to match vowels. CP was similarly obtained for replicated and vowel-reduced conditions. However, listeners frequently perceived diphthongs centrally on the consonant-extended continuum. Some listeners demonstrated CP, although aggregate performance appeared more continuous. These experiments indicate a model based upon the perceived direction of frequency transitions.     

Power of the desired self: Influence of induced perceptions of the self on reasoning

This research shows that the motivation to posses a desired characteristic (or to avoid an undesired one) results in self-perceptions that guide people’s use of base rate in the Lawyer–Engineer problem (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). In four studies, participants induced to believe (or recall, Exp. 2) that a rational cognitive style is success-conducive (or an intuitive cognitive style failure-conducive) subsequently viewed themselves as more rational and relied more on base rate in their probability estimates than those induced to believe that a rational cognitive style is failure-conducive (or an intuitive cognitive style success-conducive). These findings show that the desired self had an influence on reasoning in the self-unrelated lawyer–engineer task, since the use of base rates was mediated by changes in participants’ perceptions of their own rationality. These findings therefore show that the desired self, through the working self-concept that it entails, constitutes another factor influencing people’s use of distinct modes of reasoning.