Personality and Social Contexts Commons^™

Psychopathy In Society: Understanding The Neural Mechanisms That Give Rise To Psychopathic Traits, Phoebe Zalenski

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Psychopathy is characterized as an individual exhibiting callousness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, and manipulative behavior towards others over a long period of time. Given these symptoms, psychopathy is associated with a markedly increased risk of arrest and imprisonment. Together, these findings highlight the importance of understanding the cause(s) of psychopathy, as doing so may help to develop treatments or preventative interventions. Prior work has suggested that structural abnormalities in the amygdala may play a role in clinical psychopathy; however, it is less clear whether amygdala abnormalities exist on a continuum of psychopathic traits. In this study, I aimed to determine …

The Influence Of Happy Faces On Spatiotemporal Vision, Siera Nicole Bramschreiber

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Past research demonstrates that fearful faces lead to an increase in temporal and a decrease in spatial gap detection, an effect proposed to be caused by a flow of input to the magnocellular pathways from the amygdala to the visual system (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009). The amygdala is also active for positive and arousing stimuli, including happy faces. The current study extends past research by presenting happy facial cues just before a gap detection task. Facial stimuli (i.e., happy/neutral faces) were presented in the periphery of the receptive field and quickly followed by a Landolt circle. Half of the participants …

Attitudes, William A. Cunningham, Ingrid J. Haas, Andrew Jahn

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This chapter reviews social neuroscience research that links social psychological attitudes and evaluative processes to their presumed neural bases. The chapter is organized into four parts. The first section discusses how attitude representations are transformed into evaluative states that can be used to guide thought and action. The next two sections address the related processes of attitude learning and change. The final section discusses applications of these concepts for the study of prejudice and political behavior.

Amygdala Hyperreactivity In Borderline Personality Disorder: Implications For Emotional Dysregulation, Nelson H. Donegan, Charles A. Sanislow, Hilary P. Blumberg, Robert K. Fulbright, Cheryl Lacadie, Pawel Skudlarski, John C. Gore, Ingrid R. Olson, Thomas H. Mcglashan, Bruce E. Wexler

Charles A. Sanislow, Ph.D.

BACKGROUND: Disturbed interpersonal relations and emotional dysregulation are fundamental aspects of borderline personality disorder (BPD). The amygdala plays important roles in modulating vigilance and generating negative emotional states and is often abnormally reactive in disorders of mood and emotion. The aim of this study was to assess amygdala reactivity in BPD patients relative to normal control subjects. We hypothesized that amygdala hyperreactivity contributes to hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, and disturbed interpersonal relations in BPD.

METHODS: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined neural responses to 20-sec blocks of neutral, happy, sad, and fearful facial expression (or a fixation point) in 15 …