Regional brain activity during face and word discrimination: simultaneous recording of event-related potentials and positron emission tomography

In order to clarify the brain mechanisms involved in the recognition of faces, words, and figures, spatiotemporal analyses were carried out with event-related potentials (ERPs) and positron emission tomography (PET) in normal subjects. In the first experiment, we analyzed the ERPs of eight normal subjects under a passive habituation paradigm using pictures of faces and letters. In the second experiment, regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) measured using PET was obtained simultaneously with the ERP recordings during a continuous performance task (CPT) in 12 normal subjects. This required the active discrimination of famous people's faces, meaningful words consisting of two Japanese hiragana characters, and simple geometric figures. There were similar deflections in the global field power (GFP) in the first 200 ms of the passive and active tasks, regardless of type of stimuli. This suggests a common time course in the visual information processing mechanisms during the preattentive stage. Mesiotemporal activity, dominant on the right, was seen during the face discrimination task in both the PET results and the ERP topographies. In the word task, activity that was clearly dominant on the left was observed at around a 160 ms latency in the posteriotemporal region of the ERP topography and this again coincided well with the PET data. The spatiotemporal resolution of the analyses was improved by combining PET and topographic ERP studies, and this provided additional neurophysiological information concerning cognitive processing.     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.     

Developmental Process of Japanese Psychotherapists Based on Their Life Histories

We identified the mastery processes of experienced psychotherapists by drawing their life histories, which indicated principles for guiding the development of young psychotherapists. Participants were psychotherapists with over 30 years of experience (N = 7, six men and one woman, mean age = 71.86 years). The data were analyzed using the trajectory equifinality model (TEM). The results indicated that a psychotherapist might continue to practice even while experiencing conflicts and might eventually integrate and establish their unique therapeutic approach into their work. Essential factors in facilitating the motivation to be a psychotherapist include: hope; good friends, coworkers, and supervisors; experience with many cases; learning from a global perspective; and interest in human beings. Moreover, after the mid-career, adverse events in participants' private lives had positive effects on their development as experts. It was concluded that the development of a psychotherapist is a process of growth as a person. This study indicated factors necessary to continue as a psychotherapist while facing conflicts, which is considered useful for educating future Japanese psychotherapists.