Search results for "NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY"
showing 10 items of 759 documents
Assessing the antecedents and consequences of threat appraisal of an acute psychosocial stressor: the role of optimism, displacement behavior, and ph…
2018
The feeling of stress is increasing in today's societies, particularly in young adults subjected to social evaluative situations in highly competitive academic and work contexts. Threat appraisal is a primary and fundamental reaction when people face a stressful situation. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of dispositional optimism as an antecedent and displacement behavior as a consequence of threat appraisal of a social-evaluative situation of stress. A second objective was to verify the moderating role of physiological responses to stress (heart rate and cortisol reactivity) in the relationship between threat appraisal and displacement behavior. To do this, we combined th…
Emotional communication in the context of joint attention for food stimuli: Effects on attentional and affective processing
2014
Guided by distinct theoretical frameworks (the embodiment theories, shared-signal hypothesis, and appraisal theories), we examined the effects of gaze direction and emotional expressions (joy, disgust, and neutral) of virtual characters on attention orienting and affective reactivity of participants while they were engaged in joint attention for food stimuli contrasted by preference (disliked, moderately liked, and liked). The participants were exposed to videos of avatars looking at food and displaying facial expressions with their gaze directed either toward the food only or toward the food and participants consecutively. We recorded eye-tracking responses, heart rate, facial electromyogr…
Surface Lightness Influences Perceived Room Height
2010
Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfaces on perceived height in two psychophysical experiments. Observers judged the height of rooms varying in physical height as well as in the lightness of ceiling, floor, and walls. Experiment 1 showed the expected increase of perceived height with increases in ceiling lightness. Unexpectedly, the perce…
Attention orienting and inhibitory control across the different mood states in bipolar disorder: An emotional antisaccade task
2013
An antisaccade experiment, using happy, sad, and neutral faces, was conducted to examine the effect of mood-congruent information on inhibitory control (antisaccade task) and attentional orienting (prosaccade task) during the different episodes of bipolar disorder (BD) - manic (n=22), depressive (n=25), and euthymic (n=24). A group of 28 healthy controls was also included. Results revealed that symptomatic patients committed more antisaccade errors than healthy individuals, especially with mood-congruent faces. The manic group committed more antisaccade errors in response to happy faces, while the depressed group tended to commit more antisaccade errors in response to sad faces. Additionall…
Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition
2014
We aimed at determining the functional neuroanatomy of working memory (WM) recognition of musical motifs that occurs while listening to music by adopting a non-standard procedure. Western tonal music provides naturally occurring repetition and variation of motifs. These serve as WM triggers, thus allowing us to study the phenomenon of motif tracking within real music. Adopting a modern tango as stimulus, a behavioural test helped to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course regressor of WM neural responses. This regressor was then correlated with the participants' (musicians') functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal obtained during a continuous listening condition. In…
Frontal–posterior theta oscillations reflect memory retrieval during sentence comprehension
2015
Abstract Successful working-memory retrieval requires that items be retained as distinct units. At the neural level, it has been shown that theta-band oscillatory power increases with the number of to-be-distinguished items during working-memory retrieval. Here we hypothesized that during sentence comprehension, verbal-working-memory retrieval demands lead to increased theta power over frontal cortex, supposedly supporting the distinction amongst stored items during verbal-working-memory retrieval. Also, synchronicity may increase between the frontal cortex and the posterior cortex, with the latter supposedly supporting item retention. We operationalized retrieval by using pronouns, which r…
Effects of Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms on Neuropsychological Test Performance: Complicating an Already Complicated Story
2011
Theoretical models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) implicate neurocognitive dysfunction, particularly deficits in nonverbal memory and executive functioning, in the pathogenesis of the disorder. The opposite hypothesis (poor performance in neuropsychological test as an epiphenomenon of OCD symptoms) has rarely been contemplated although checking behavior, obsessional doubt, lack of motivation, and slowness as well as preoccupation with touching objects may result in secondary test impairment and mimic manifestations of neural dysfunction. A total of 60 patients with OCD and 30 healthy controls were tested with a multi-functional neuropsychological battery. At the end of the testing p…
Chronology of panic and avoidance, age of onset in panic disorder, and prediction of treatment response. A report from the Cross-National Collaborati…
1991
The relevance of the chronology between panic disorder and avoidance behavior and of an early, medium or late onset of panic disorder was tested. Groups from the sample of the cross-national collaborative panic study (CNCPS) were compared for differences in basic characteristics and for the ability to predict treatment response. Patients who developed avoidance behavior before the full syndrome of panic disorder had less often a full agoraphobia but were not different in their response to treatment. Patients with an early onset of panic disorder suffered more often from agoraphobia. The treatment response was similar in the groups with early, medium or late onset of panic disorder. Neither …
The cumulative effect of positive and negative feedback on emotional experience.
2021
The cumulative effect of positive or negative feedback on subsequent emotional experiences remains unclear. Elucidating this effect could help individuals to better understand and accept the change in emotional experience, irrespective of when they or others receive consecutive positive or negative feedback. This study aimed to examine this effect on 37 participants using self-reported pleasantness and event-related potential data as indicators. After completing each trial, the participants received predetermined false feedback; they were then assessed on a nine-point pleasantness scale. There were 12 false feedback conditions categorized into three valence types. The positive type consiste…
Strength of memory encoding affects physiological responses in the Guilty Actions Test
2009
The Guilty Actions Test (GAT) is a valid and scientifically sound technique of forensic psychophysiology that allows for the detection of concealed memories. However, its application has been challenged because the results might be affected by the culprit's forgetting of crime details as well as the leakage of information to innocents. In the current study, these aspects were examined by varying the amount of time between a mock crime and the subsequent GAT, as well as by contrasting culprits with informed innocents. It turned out that culprits specifically forgot peripheral crime details during a period of 2 weeks whereas informed innocents showed similar forgetting for all details. As a c…