Hallucinations, negative symptoms, and response bias in a verbal recognition task in schizophrenia

Several studies have reported an association between hallucinations and tendency to make false alarms in acoustic signal detection tasks. Previous work on patients with schizophrenia has suggested that false recognitions and other types of memory error were positively associated with hallucinations and inversely associated with certain negative symptoms of withdrawal. In this study, 40 patients with schizophrenia were administered a word recognition task. Mixed lists of high- and low-frequency words were presented, then the target words had to be recognized among distractors in immediate and delayed recognition conditions. Hallucination scores were correlated with an increased bias toward false recognitions of nonpresented words. Affective flattening tended to be correlated with a reduced bias toward false recognitions. Anhedonia was significantly correlated with a reduced response bias. Hallucinations and anhedonia therefore presented an opposite association with the response bias. The influence of word frequency and delay on this association is discussed.     

The relationship of hostility, negative affect and ethnicity to cardiovascular responses: an ambulatory study in Singapore.

This study tested the hypotheses that ambulatory heart rate and blood pressure would be higher for individuals high but not low in hostility when they experienced negative affect or social stress and that this interaction would be stronger for Indians compared with other Singapore ethnic groups. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring was done on 108 male Singapore patrol officers as they went about their daily duties. After each BP measurement participants completed a computerized questionnaire including items on emotional experience. Individuals high in hostility showed higher systolic blood pressure when reporting negative affect whereas this was not true for those low in hostility. Ethnic differences were obtained such that Indians showed an increase in mean arterial pressure when angered whereas MAP was negatively related to anger for Malays and unrelated for Chinese. Also a three-way interaction between ethnicity, hostility, and social stress indicated that hostility and social stress interacted in their effects on DBP for Indian participants but not for Chinese or Malays. Finally, a three-way interaction was obtained between ethnicity, hostility and negative affect for heart rate in which heart rate increased with increasing levels of negative affect for Chinese high in hostility and Malays low in hostility but decreased with increasing negative affect for all other participants. These data are consistent with higher CHD rates among individuals high in hostility and also provide additional evidence on ethnic differences in cardiovascular reactivity in Singapore.     

Sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion-cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of "sad benefit", which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes.     

Working through shame with an intercultural couple in Japan: Transforming negative emotional interactions and expanding positive emotional resources

Japan is often described as an intricate yet contradictory society in which the elements of the most advanced technologies and ancient cultural traditions coexist. Social cohesion rooted in uniformity and ethnic purity has long been the implicit, normative ideal in Japan, while diversity as intrinsic value is still a relatively new concept. In this monocultural milieu, intercultural couples often encounter issues associated with culturally-bound notions of gender roles and the societal pressure to conform to the implicit cultural ideal. The distress of unresolved past emotional injuries may also surface, which often results in the couple getting stuck in negative emotional cycles. This paper will discuss the case of Yoko and Frank, who were treated with an affect-focused approach in which their emotional conflicts, particularly their feelings of shame, were worked through while each partner developed their self- and other-emotion regulating capacity. The therapist also helped the couple develop new patterns of positive emotional interaction.     

Affective engagement for facial expressions and emotional scenes: the influence of social anxiety

Pictures of emotional facial expressions or natural scenes are often used as cues in emotion research. We examined the extent to which these different stimuli engage emotion and attention, and whether the presence of social anxiety symptoms influences responding to facial cues. Sixty participants reporting high or low social anxiety viewed pictures of angry, neutral, and happy faces, as well as violent, neutral, and erotic scenes, while skin conductance and event-related potentials were recorded. Acoustic startle probes were presented throughout picture viewing, and blink magnitude, probe P3 and reaction time to the startle probe also were measured. Results indicated that viewing emotional scenes prompted strong reactions in autonomic, central, and reflex measures, whereas pictures of faces were generally weak elicitors of measurable emotional response. However, higher social anxiety was associated with modest electrodermal changes when viewing angry faces and mild startle potentiation when viewing either angry or smiling faces, compared to neutral. Taken together, pictures of facial expressions do not strongly engage fundamental affective reactions, but these cues appeared to be effective in distinguishing between high and low social anxiety participants, supporting their use in anxiety research.     

Water escape learning in mice. II. Replicated selection for increased learning speed

A replicated four-generation selection experiment for faster learning speed in mice is described. Realized heritability was found to be 6.5%±2%, whereas the parent—offspring regression method yielded an estimate of 4.6%±5.2%. Learning speed in albino mice was found to be considerably less than that in either black or agouti mice, although escape speed on the first trial was identical. This suggests that the slow learning in albino mice is not simply a visual effect. It was concluded that learning speed, as measured in this experiment, has low additive genetic variance. Such a pattern of inheritance would be expected with a fitness trait.     

Emotional expectancy: Brain electrical activity associated with an emotional bias in interpreting life events

University students in either an optimistic or pessimistic mood state read brief stories of daily life events as event-related brain potentials were collected during the final word of each story. For subjects in a pessimistic mood, a bias to expect negative outcomes was seen as an N400/P300 effect over posterior scalp regions. For subjects in an optimistic mood, a differentiation between good and bad outcomes was also observed, but it was specific to medial frontal areas. Analysis of single-trial P300 latencies suggested that semantically incongruent and mood-incongruent outcome words resulted in increased median latency of the late positive complex (LPC) and resulted in increased variability of LPC latency across trials.     

Memory in learning disabled children: Digit span and the Rey auditory verbal learning test

Scores on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) were compared to WISC-R digit span results in a sample of 153 learning disabled students. With statistical controls for age and IQ, regression analyses indicated no significant relationships between the RAVLT and longest forward span, longest backward span and total digit span raw score. Factor analysis of the RAVLT variables, forward span, backward span and total digit span raw score yielded three factors that were interpreted to represent a long term memory factor, a short-term memory factor with high coding demands and a short-term memory factor with low coding demands. Conclusions were made regarding the inadequacy of using only digit span when making diagnostic statements about the auditory memory functioning of learning disabled students.     

Changes in alpha rhythm asymmetry during learning of verbal and visuospatial tasks.

Alpha activity in the two cortical hemispheres was examined during learning and overlearning of a verbal and a visuospatial task. Compared to a pretask baseline condition, the amount of alpha activity during the tasks was decreased. An increase in alpha activity was found from learning to overlearning in both tasks. A greater amount of alpha was found in the right hemisphere for both tasks. In addition, no difference in the degree of alpha asymmetry was found between the tasks. This was discussed in light of prior contrary findings. A significant positive correlation was found between change in learning rate and change in alpha asymmetry during the verbal task. An interpretation of this finding was offered in terms of the level of hemispheric activation reflecting the degree of task engagement.     

Alexithymia: anxiety and hostility in psychosomatic and psychoneurotic patients.

Verbal samples obtained from 40 psychoneurotic and 40 psychosomatic patients, matched with respect to age, sex, intelligence and some social indicators, were examined using different methods of content analysis. According to the concept of 'alexithymia' it was postulated that the restricted fantasy life and difficulty in expressing feelings attributed to psychosomatic patients would be reflected at the speech level (psycho-analytic interviews). The measurement of anxiety and hostility using the Gottschalk-Gleser scales gave the following results: with total anxiety in particular, and its subscales guilt, shame, separation and diffuse anxiety, and with hostility, the psychosomatic patients showed lower values than the neurotic patients, which were in part highly significant. The results confirm the existence of the 'psychosomatic phenomenon' but they do not permit statements concerning its etiology.     

Norms for depressed patients for the California verbal learning test: associations with depression severity and self-report of cognitive difficulties.

This study provides norms for depressed subjects for a widely used test of verbal memory, the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT). Subjects were 156 outpatients with major depression tested during a drug washout period. Mean CVLT memory scores for these patients were generally between one-half and one standard deviation below age- and sex-corrected norms for nondepressed populations. Severity of depression in the patients was not associated with memory performance, but was associated with self-report of cognitive difficulties. A table of age-, sex-, and education-specific norms for the CVLT is provided.     

Positive illusory bias and the self-protective hypothesis in children with learning disabilities.

We tested the hypothesis that overestimations of performance by children with learning disabilities (LD) are self-protective and will dissipate following positive feedback. Twenty-three boys and 17 girls with LD (ages 10.6 to 13.5 years) and a control group of non-LD matched children (22 boys and 17 girls) provided a prediction of their performance on a spelling test prior to completing the test. Subsequently, they were randomly assigned to either a positive feedback or a no-feedback condition. Finally, they provided a second prediction of performance on an equivalent spelling test. In children with LD, there was a positive bias in their predictions of performance, and, following positive feedback, their predictions became accurate. In children without LD, there was no positive bias and no effect of feedback. The results provide further support for the presence of a positive illusory bias and for the self-protective hypothesis in children with LD.     

Stimulus-driven saccades are characterized by an invariant undershooting bias: no evidence for a range effect

The insular cortex has been related to various sensory, regulatory, and learning processes, which frequently include affective-emotional components. The objective of this study was to investigate the possibility of inducing reinforcing effects by electrical stimulation of this cortical region in Wistar rats. Concurrent conditioned place preference tasks were conducted for this purpose, using two rectangular mazes that differed in dimensions, texture, and spatial orientation. A significant correlation was found in the preferences induced by insular cortex electrical stimulation between the two mazes. Animals showed consistent preference or avoidance behaviors associated with simultaneous insular cortex stimulation. No electrical self-stimulation was achieved. In a second experiment, animals that showed consistent place preference after the simultaneous insular cortex electrical stimulation were administered with 4 mg/ml/kg of naloxone. The results revealed that this opiate antagonist blocked concurrent place preference learning when the task was conducted in a new maze but not when it was conducted in the same maze as that in which the animals had learned the task. These results are discussed in terms of the participation of the insular cortex in various reward and aversion modalities.     

Patients' negative emotional cues and concerns in hospital consultations: a video-based observational study

ObjectiveLittle is known about the frequency and occurrence of patients’ negative emotional cues and concerns (NECC) across specialties in hospital departments.MethodsNinety-six consultations were videotaped in a general hospital. The VR-CoDES (Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences) were used to code the patients’ NECC. Cohen's kappa was used to establish reliability between coders.ResultsCohen's kappa was above 0.60. NECC were observed in more than half of the consultations. The number of NECC in the consultations was 163, with 109 negative emotional cues and 54 concerns. The mean number of NECC in the consultations was 1.69, with a median of 1. The first NECC in consultations were stated after a median duration of 5 min 21 s. We could not find significant differences related to the gender and age of the patient or the physician, or the specialty of the physician.ConclusionsMore than half of the concerns were not preceded by a negative emotional cue. Few consultations contained more than 3 NECC, and NECC tended to be expressed relatively early.Practice implicationsPatients’ expressions of emotional issues are few, and most of them are subtle. Physicians should be thoroughly trained to identify and respond to them.