Emotional eating and Pavlovian learning: evidence for conditioned appetitive responding to negative emotional states

Appetitive learning has been demonstrated several times using neutral cues or contexts as a predictor of food intake and it has been shown that humans easily learn cued desires for foods. It has, however, never been studied whether internal cues are also capable of appetitive conditioning. In this study, we tested whether humans can learn cued eating desires to negative moods as conditioned stimuli (CS), thereby offering a potential explanation of emotional eating (EE). Female participants were randomly presented with 10 different stimuli eliciting either negative or neutral emotional states, with one of these states paired with eating chocolate. Expectancy to eat, desire to eat, salivation, and unpleasantness of experiencing negative emotions were assessed. After conditioning, participants were brought into a negative emotional state and were asked to choose between money and chocolate. Data showed differential conditioned responding on the expectancy and desire measures, but not on salivation. Specific conditioned effects were obtained for participants with a higher BMI (body mass index) on the choice task, and for participants high on EE on the unpleasantness ratings. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for the idea that negative emotions can act as conditioned stimuli, and might suggest that classical conditioning is involved in EE.     

Examining the home advantage in the National Hockey League: Comparisons among regulation,overtime, and the shootout

ObjectivesTo investigate the magnitude of the home advantage in the National Hockey League (NHL) as games proceeded from regulation, to overtime, to the shootout, while adjusting for team quality.DesignArchival.MethodBinary logistic regression analyses were conducted using data from the 2005–2006 through 2013–2014 NHL seasons (N = 10,534 games) to compare home teams’ odds of winning in regulation, overtime, and the shootout.ResultsCompared to games decided in regulation, higher quality home teams' odds of winning were slightly lower when games concluded in either overtime or the shootout. Further, regardless of team quality, home teams’ odds of winning were moderately lower when games concluded in the shootout rather than overtime.ConclusionsThe shootout may affect home team players' psychological and behavioural states, generally resulting in a decrease in home teams’ odds of winning in the shootout relative to overtime.     

自我欺骗:为了调节个体心理状态

本研究旨在探索自我欺骗的研究方法、产生的原因和认知机制,以及这一领域中有待解决的新问题。近期研究发现:基于自我欺骗产生的动机特点,主要存在三类不同的定义方式,大多数心理学家是基于第三类定义来研究自我欺骗。研究方法上,适用性较强的自欺问卷是自欺性提升量表(SDE),操作性较强的经典实验范式是点追踪任务。在认知过程的任一阶段中,调节心理状态是个体产生自我欺骗的直接动机,改变个体的心理状态或对事物的模糊感知可能阻止个体自我欺骗的产生。未来应从如何调节个体心理状态的角度探讨和研究自我欺骗,能够利用点追踪任务,结合ERPs或fMRI技术为之后研究自欺产生的具体阶段、认知机制以及神经机制提供实证研究基础。     

情绪与决策：躯体标记假设及其研究新进展

人类的决策被广泛认为是一个理性的和认知主导的过程,因此在决策研究中,任何形式的情绪都被避免。最近,一些神经科学的研究显示,情绪是人类决策中的一部分,它不可以与认知分析过程相分离,并且有些时候,情绪甚至在决策过程中起着重要的作用。躯体标记假设就提供了一个情绪如何影响人们决策的神经解剖和认知的框架,其核心为决策受躯体状态（或标识信号）所影响,躯体状态来源于生物调节过程,包括情绪和情感过程。该文章介绍了何为躯体标记假设,躯体标记假设的实验研究,以及研究中的新进展。     

From acting to communicating: The analysis of a boy with a pathological organization1

The author presents the analysis of an 8 year‐old boy prematurely born after a high‐risk pregnancy, then hospitalized for two weeks. He was never breastfed and presented vomiting, intense activity and inadequate behaviour as symptoms. His highly dysfunctional family is composed of a non‐productive father and a homely, though aggressive, mother. The patient displayed a rigid defensive structure with perverse aspects and a cruel superego. His constant interest in magical characters frequently disguises an avoidance of reality. By means of transference interpretations, a trustworthy link with the analyst now allows him his own mental space, where hidden psychotic states come to light. In the clinical material, this boy's skills for insight mingle with oscillations from severely defensive states to integration and vice versa. The analytic relationship in this often hostile scenario has become strong. The analysis is hampered by constant demands from family and school‐both expect the analyst to prevent his frequent acting out. Whereas some perverse polymorphism is part of childhood and may persist throughout life, it is likely that the patient's pathological organization may yield to reality and facilitate reparation, relinquishing the world of make‐believe as well as the intense projective mental functioning.     

心理咨询与治疗中的领悟

不管哪种心理咨询和治疗流派,其最终目的都是促进来访者领悟,而领悟能不能出现,是治疗成功与否的关键。心理咨询师应该为了领悟的出现,作好充分的准备,促进领悟的出现,巩固领悟的成果,取得心理治疗的圆满成功。     

Contributions of emotion understanding to narrative comprehension in children and adults

This study examined to what extent children and adults differ in how they process negative emotions during reading, and how they rate their own and protagonists’ emotional states. Results show that both children’s and adults’ processing of target sentences was facilitated when they described negative emotions. Processing of spill-over sentences was facilitated for adults but inhibited for children, suggesting children needed additional time to process protagonists’ emotional states and integrate them into coherent mental representations. Children and adults were similar in their valence and arousal ratings as they rated protagonists’ emotional states as more negative and more intense than their own emotional states. However, they differed in that children rated their own emotional states as relatively neutral, whereas adults’ ratings of their own emotional states more closely matched the negative emotional states of the protagonists. This suggests a possible difference between children and adults in the mechanism underlying emotional inferencing.     

The effects of aging on location-based and distance-based processes in memory for time

Retrieving when an event occurred may depend on an estimation of the age of the event (distance-based processes) or on strategic reconstruction processes based on contextual information associated with the event (location-based processes). Young and older participants performed a list discrimination task that has been designed to dissociate the contribution of both types of processes. An adapted Remember/Know/Guess procedure [Can. J. Exp. Psychol. 50 (1996) 114] was developed to evaluate the processes used by the participants to recognize the stimuli and retrieve their list of occurrence. The results showed that aging disrupts location-based processes more than distance-based processes. In addition, a limitation of speed of processing and working-memory capacities was the main predictor of age-related differences on location-based processes, whereas working-memory capacities mediated partly age differences on distance-based processes.     

The relationship between purposiveness and information integration: The effect of metamotivational states on cognitive rules in sport

IntroductionInformation integration theory is based on an axiom of purposiveness (i.e. cognition is goal-motivated) and on an axiom of integration (i.e. an action or thought depends on the integration of several stimuli). The relationship between the two axioms has not previously been studied.ObjectiveTo explore the influence of metamotivational states on information integration. We looked at how 70 athletes combined four factors (autonomy, relatedness, competence, and the natural environment) when deciding whether or not to get involved in running under paratelic (activity-oriented) and telic (goal-oriented) conditions.MethodThe participants recorded their decision-making processes for two sets of 24 scenarios built from combinations of the four factors. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were applied to the data.ResultsAll four factors were taken into consideration by the participants when deciding whether or not to get involved in running. The participants used a conjunctive rule under the paratelic condition and an additive rule under the telic condition.ConclusionAn individual's metamotivational state may modify the cognitive algebra in information integration. Further research is required to confirm these initial findings.     

Power Analysis for the Likelihood-Ratio Test in Latent Markov Models: Shortcutting the Bootstrap p-Value-Based Method

The latent Markov (LM) model is a popular method for identifying distinct unobserved states and transitions between these states over time in longitudinally observed responses. The bootstrap likelihood-ratio (BLR) test yields the most rigorous test for determining the number of latent states, yet little is known about power analysis for this test. Power could be computed as the proportion of the bootstrap p values (PBP) for which the null hypothesis is rejected. This requires performing the full bootstrap procedure for a large number of samples generated from the model under the alternative hypothesis, which is computationally infeasible in most situations. This article presents a computationally feasible shortcut method for power computation for the BLR test. The shortcut method involves the following simple steps: (1) obtaining the parameters of the model under the null hypothesis, (2) constructing the empirical distributions of the likelihood ratio under the null and alternative hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulations, and (3) using these empirical distributions to compute the power. We evaluate the performance of the shortcut method by comparing it to the PBP method and, moreover, show how the shortcut method can be used for sample-size determination.