The Relationship of a Measure of Frustration Intolerance with Emotional Dysfunction in a Student Sample

This study extended earlier research (Harrington in Cong Ther Res 30:699–709, 2006) on the relationship of the multidimensional Frustration Discomfort Scale (FDS) with measures of depressed mood, anxiety and anger, independent of self-esteem. The study employed a non-clinical student sample (N = 323) and measures of both state and trait anger and anxiety. In addition, the Unconditional Self-Acceptance Questionnaire (USAQ) was also used to specifically assess REBT self-acceptance beliefs regarding self-worth, as well as a measure of self-esteem. A Serbian version of the FDS was developed for use in the study. Consistent with the earlier research, significant predictive relationships were found, whilst controlling for self-worth, between entitlement and anger, emotional intolerance and anxiety, and discomfort intolerance with depressed mood. Emotional intolerance also proved to be a significant positive predictor of depression, whilst achievement frustration had a negative relationship with depression. Overall, the FDS dimensions had a weaker relationship with emotional states than traits. The results are discussed in regard to the relationship between FDS dimensions and dysfunctional emotions in a non-clinical sample.     

Cogex: A semantically and contextually enriched logic prover for question answering

This paper presents the architecture and functionality of a logic prover designed for question answering. The approach transforms questions and answer passages into logic representations based on syntactic, semantic and contextual information. World knowledge supplements the linguistic, ontological, and temporal axioms supplied to the prover which renders a deep understanding of the relationship between the question and answer text. The trace of the proofs provides a basis for generating human comprehensible answer justifications. The results show that the prover boosts the performance of the Question Answering system on TREC 2004 questions by 12%.     

The inner speech of behavioral regulation: Intentions and task performance strengthen when you talk to yourself as a You

People often talk to themselves using the first‐person pronoun (I), but they also talk to themselves as if they are speaking to someone else, using the second‐person pronoun (You). Yet, the relative behavioral control achieved by I and You self‐talk remains unknown. The current research was designed to examine the potential behavioral advantage of using You in self‐talk and the role of attitudes in this process. Three experiments compared the effects of I and You self‐talk on problem solving performance and behavioral intentions. Experiment 1 revealed that giving self‐advice about a hypothetical social situation using You yielded better anagram task performance than using I. Experiment 2 showed that using You self‐talk in preparation for an anagram task enhanced anagram performance and intentions to work on anagrams more than I self‐talk, and that these effects were mediated by participants' attitudes toward the task. Experiment 3 extended these findings to exercise intentions and highlighted the role of attitudes in this effect. Altogether, the current research showed that second‐person self‐talk strengthens both actual behavior performance and prospective behavioral intentions more than first‐person self‐talk. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Event-related potentials of emotional memory: encoding pleasant,unpleasant, and neutral pictures

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than nonemotional events. We investigated this phenomenon by measuring two event-related potential (ERP) effects: the emotion effect (more positive ERPs for pleasant or unpleasant stimuli than for neutral stimuli) and the subsequent memory effect (more positive ERPs for subsequently remembered items than for subsequently forgotten items). ERPs were measured while subjects rated the emotional content of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures. As was expected, subsequent recall was better for pleasant and unpleasant pictures than for neutral pictures. The emotion effect was sensitive to arousal in parietal electrodes and to both arousal and valence in frontocentral electrodes. The subsequent memory effect at centroparietal electrodes was greater for emotional pictures than for neutral pictures during an early epoch (400-600 msec). This result suggests that emotional information has privileged access to processing resources, possibly leading to better memory formation.     

Reliving emotional personal memories: affective biases linked to personality and sex-related differences

Although available evidence suggests that the emotional valence and recollective properties of autobiographical memories (AMs) may be influenced by personality- and sex-related differences, overall these relationships remain poorly understood. The present study investigated these issues by comparing the effect of general personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) and specific traits linked to emotion regulation (ER) strategies (reappraisal and suppression) on the retrieval of emotional AMs and on the associated postretrieval emotional states, in men and women. First, extraversion predicted recollection of positive AMs in both men and women, whereas neuroticism predicted the proportion of negative AMs in men and the frequency of rehearsing negative AMs in women. Second, reappraisal predicted positive AMs in men, and suppression predicted negative AMs in women. Third, while reliving of positive memories had an overall indirect effect on postretrieval positive mood through extraversion, reliving of negative AMs had a direct effect on postretrieval negative mood, which was linked to inefficient engagement of suppression in women. Our findings suggest that personality traits associated with positive affect predict recollection of positive AMs and maintenance of a positive mood, whereas personality traits associated with negative affect, along with differential engagement of habitual ER strategies in men and women, predict sex-related differences in the recollection and experiencing of negative AMs. These findings provide insight into the factors that influence affective biases in reliving AMs, and into their possible link to sex-related differences in the susceptibility to affective disorders.     

Sex differences in the response to emotional distraction: an event-related fMRI investigation

Evidence has suggested that women have greater emotional reactivity than men. However, it is unclear whether these differences in basic emotional responses are also associated with differences in emotional distractibility, and what the neural mechanisms that implement differences in emotional distractibility between women and men are. Functional MRI recording was used in conjunction with a working memory (WM) task, with emotional distraction (angry faces) presented during the interval between the memoranda and the probes. First, we found an increased impact of emotional distraction among women in trials associated with high-confidence responses, in the context of overall similar WM performance in women and men. Second, women showed increased sensitivity to emotional distraction in brain areas associated with “hot” emotional processing, whereas men showed increased sensitivity in areas associated with “cold” executive processing, in the context of overall similar patterns of response to emotional distraction in women and men. Third, a sex-related dorsal–ventral hemispheric dissociation emerged in the lateral PFC related to coping with emotional distraction, with women showing a positive correlation with WM performance in left ventral PFC, and men showing similar effects in the right dorsal PFC. In addition to extending to men results that have previously been reported in women, by showing that both sexes engage mechanisms that are similar overall in response to emotional distraction, the present study identifies sex differences in both the response to and coping with emotional distraction. These results have implications for understanding sex differences in the susceptibility to affective disorders, in which basic emotional responses, emotional distractibility, and coping abilities are altered.     

Binding neutral information to emotional contexts: Brain dynamics of long-term recognition memory

There is abundant evidence in memory research that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral stimuli. However, effects of an emotionally charged context on memory for associated neutral elements is also important, particularly in trauma and stress-related disorders, where strong memories are often activated by neutral cues due to their emotional associations. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate long-term recognition memory (1-week delay) for neutral objects that had been paired with emotionally arousing or neutral scenes during encoding. Context effects were clearly evident in the ERPs: An early frontal ERP old/new difference (300–500 ms) was enhanced for objects encoded in unpleasant compared to pleasant and neutral contexts; and a late central-parietal old/new difference (400–700 ms) was observed for objects paired with both pleasant and unpleasant contexts but not for items paired with neutral backgrounds. Interestingly, objects encoded in emotional contexts (and novel objects) also prompted an enhanced frontal early (180–220 ms) positivity compared to objects paired with neutral scenes indicating early perceptual significance. The present data suggest that emotional—particularly unpleasant—backgrounds strengthen memory for items encountered within these contexts and engage automatic and explicit recognition processes. These results could help in understanding binding mechanisms involved in the activation of trauma-related memories by neutral cues.     

Emotional influences on perception and working memory

Although there has been steady progress elucidating the influence of emotion on cognition, it remains unclear precisely when and why emotion impairs or facilitates cognition. The present study investigated the mechanisms involved in the influence of emotion on perception and working memory (WM), using modified 0-back and 2-back tasks, respectively. First, results showed that attentional focus modulated the impact of emotion on perception. Specifically, emotion facilitated perceptual task performance when it was relevant to the task, but it impaired performance when it was irrelevant to the task. The differential behavioural effect of emotion on perception as a function of attentional focus diminished under high WM load. Second, attentional focus did not directly modulate the impact of emotion on WM, but rather its influence depended on the dynamic relationship between internal representations. Specifically, WM performance was worse when the material already being held online and the new input were of matching emotions (e.g. both were negative), compared to when they were not. We propose that the competition between “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing for limited cognitive resources explains the nature of the influence of emotion on both perception and WM.     

Effects of Aging on Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala for Subsequent Memory of Negative Pictures: A Network Analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data

ABSTRACT— Aging is associated with preserved enhancement of emotional memory, as well as with age-related reductions in memory for negative stimuli, but the neural networks underlying such alterations are not clear. We used a subsequent-memory paradigm to identify brain activity predicting enhanced emotional memory in young and older adults. Activity in the amygdala predicted enhanced emotional memory, with subsequent-memory activity greater for negative stimuli than for neutral stimuli, across age groups, a finding consistent with an overall enhancement of emotional memory. However, older adults recruited greater activity in anterior regions and less activity in posterior regions in general for negative stimuli that were subsequently remembered. Functional connectivity of the amygdala with the rest of the brain was consistent with age-related reductions in memory for negative stimuli: Older adults showed decreased functional connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus, but increased functional connectivity between the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. These findings suggest that age-related differences in the enhancement of emotional memory might reflect decreased connectivity between the amygdala and typical subsequent-memory regions, as well as the engagement of regulatory processes that inhibit emotional responses.