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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology
Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout
Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout
Theses and Dissertations
Dispositional anxiety is an important risk factor for the development of anxiety and other psychological disorders. Symptoms commonly expressed by highly anxious individuals include intrusive memories, uncertainty, and worry — all occurring in the absence of immediate threat. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals have difficulty governing threat’s access to working memory, the mental workspace where goal-related information is actively retained for guiding on-going behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while 81 subjects completed a well-validated working memory task, I show that threat-related and neutral distracters unnecessarily gain access to working memory, as evidenced by increased neural activity …
Facilitating Visual Selective Attention Via Monetary Reward: The Influence Of Feedback, Hedonic Capacity, And Lifetime Major Depressive Disorder, Lauren Elizabeth Taubitz
Facilitating Visual Selective Attention Via Monetary Reward: The Influence Of Feedback, Hedonic Capacity, And Lifetime Major Depressive Disorder, Lauren Elizabeth Taubitz
Theses and Dissertations
Recently, several researchers have demonstrated that reward enhances visual selective attention; however, no one has evaluated how individual differences in reward sensitivity or psychopathology involving disturbances in hedonic capacity (e.g., Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)) affect this process. In this investigation, a novel incentivized visual search task was developed to unite the literatures on reward facilitation of attention with the studies of individual differences in hedonic capacity and remitted MDD (rMDD). 161 undergraduates responded to self-report measures and completed standard and incentivized visual search tasks. In the standard task, subjects had to indicate if a letter F (target) was present or …