Psychology Commons^™

Regulating Rumination By Anger: Evidence For The Mutual Promotion And Counteraction (Mpmc) Theory Of Emotionality, Jun Zhan, Fan Tang, Mei He, Jin Fan, Jing Xiao, Chang Liu, Jing Luo

Publications and Research

Unlike the strategy of cognitive regulation that relies heavily on the top-down control function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which was recently found may be critically impaired in stressful situations, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views different types of emotionality as having mutual promotion and counteraction (MPMC) relationships, implying a novel approach that requires less cognition to emotional regulation. Actually, our previous studies have indicated that anger responses could be successfully regulated via the induction of sadness, and this efficiency could not be influenced by stress, thus providing evidences for the hypothesis of “sadness counteracts anger” (SCA) proposed by the …

Language Experience With A Native-Language Phoneme Sequence Modulates The Effects Of Attention On Cortical Sensory Processing, Valerie L. Shafer, Monica Wagner, Jungmee Lee, Francesca Mingino, Colleen O'Brien, Adam Constantine, Mitchell Steinschneider

Publications and Research

Auditory evoked potentials (AEP) reflect spectro-temporal feature changes within the spoken word and are sufficiently reliable to probe deficits in auditory processing. The current research assessed whether attentional modulation would alter the morphology of these AEPs and whether native-language experience with phoneme sequences would influence the effects of attention. Native-English and native-Polish adults listened to nonsense word pairs that contained the phoneme sequence onsets /st/, /sət/, /pət/ that occur in both the Polish and English languages and the phoneme sequence onset /pt/ that occurs in the Polish language, but not the English language. Participants listened to word pairs within two …

Saccade Adaptation Deficits In Developmental Dyslexia Suggest Disruption Of Cerebellar-Dependent Learning, Edward G. Freedman, Sophie Molholm, Michael J. Gray, Daniel Belyusar, John J. Foxe

Publications and Research

Background: Estimates of the prevalence of developmental dyslexia in the general population range from 5% to as many as 10%. Symptoms include reading, writing, and language deficits, but the severity and mix of symptoms can vary widely across individuals. In at least some people with dyslexia, the structure and function of the cerebellum may be disordered. Saccadic adaptation requires proper function of the cerebellum and brainstem circuitry and might provide a simple, noninvasive assay for early identification and sub-phenotyping in populations of children who may have dyslexia.

Methods: Children between the ages of 7 and 15 served as participants in …

Combined Mnemonic Strategy Training And High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation For Memory Deficits In Mild Cognitive Impairment, Benjamin M. Hampstead, Krishnankutty Sathian, Marom Bikson, Anthony Y. Stringer

Publications and Research

Introduction: Memory deficits characterize Alzheimer’s dementia and the clinical precursor stage known as mild cognitive impairment. Nonpharmacologic interventions hold promise for enhancing functioning in these patients, potentially delaying functional impairment that denotes transition to dementia. Previous findings revealed that mnemonic strategy training (MST) enhances long-term retention of trained stimuli and is accompanied by increased blood oxygen level–dependent signal in the lateral frontal and parietal cortices as well as in the hippocampus. The present study was designed to enhance MST generalization, and the range of patients who benefit, via concurrent delivery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Methods: This protocol describes …

Regulating Anger Under Stress Via Cognitive Reappraisal And Sadness, Jun Zhan, Xiaofei Wu, Jin Fan, Jiayou Guo, Jianshe Zhou, Jun Ren, Chang Liu, Jing Luo

Publications and Research

Previous studies have reported the failure of cognitive emotion regulation (CER), especially in regulating unpleasant emotions under stress. The underlying reason for this failure was the application of CER depends heavily on the executive function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), but this function can be impaired by stress-related neuroendocrine hormones. This observation highlights the necessity of developing selfregulatory strategies that require less top-down cognitive control. Based on traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, which examine how different types of emotions promote or counteract one another, we have developed a novel emotion regulation strategy whereby one emotion is used to alter another. …

How Stable Are Human Aesthetic Preferences Across The Lifespan?, Cameron Pugach, Helmut Leder, Daniel J. Graham

Publications and Research

How stable are human aesthetic preferences, and how does stability change over the lifespan?Here we investigate the stability of aesthetic taste in a cross-sectional study. We employed a simple rank-order preference task using paintings and photographs of faces and landscapes. In each of the four stimulus classes, we find that aesthetic stability generally follows an inverted U-shaped function, with the greatest degree of stability appearing in early to middle adulthood. We propose that one possible interpretation of this result is that it indicates a role for cognitive control (i.e., the ability to adapt cognition to current situations) in the construction …

Inhibitory Control Under Threat: The Role Of Spontaneous Eye Blinks In Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mikael Rubin, Denise A. Hien, Dipanjana Das, Robert D. Melara

Publications and Research

This study is the first to explore spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR) in individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We investigated the connection between the magnitude of flanker interference in PTSD participants and sEBR during performance on a modified version of the Eriksen flanker task. As a peripheral measure of cognitive control and dopaminergic function, sEBR may illuminate the relationship between PTSD and executive function. Findings revealed a positive relationship between sEBR and flanker interference in participants diagnosed with PTSD, to both threat-related and neutral stimuli, whereas this relationship was negative in participants exposed to trauma but without PTSD and …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

Language Complexity, Belief-Consistency And The Evaluation Of Policies, Matthew H. Goldberg, Cheryl L. Carmichael

Publications and Research

Policy proposals often contain complex legal, technical, or scientific jargon, making it difficult for people to evaluate their favorability toward the policy. We proposed one experiment testing the effect of language complexity on people’s evaluation of a policy proposal as moderated by their initial policy beliefs. We hypothesized that when a policy was consistent with one’s beliefs or if participants had no policy preference, they would evaluate it more favorably when it was simple than when it was complex; when a policy was inconsistent with one’s beliefs, they would evaluate it less unfavorably when it was complex than when it …