Impact of valence and age on olfactory induced brain activation in healthy women.

The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of age on cerebral correlates of olfactory induced negative emotions. We investigated 15 healthy women (aged 21–47) in a functional MRI (fMRI) study during passive smelling of one negative odor (rotten yeast) and two control conditions presenting a neutral odor (vanilla) and odorless ambient air. Besides odor-specific differences in ratings of valence (yeast less pleasant than vanilla and air), intensity (yeast more intense than vanilla and air), and arousal (yeast more arousing than vanilla and air), self-ratings verified the intended mood induction effect: subjects experienced more disgust during yeast stimulation compared to ambient air and vanilla. Along with the superior temporal cortex, medial, and lateral orbitofrontal activations were found to discriminate between negative and neutral olfactory stimulation (yeast and vanilla) directly. Activations of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the caudate were correlated with age and showed stronger valence-related responses (yeast vs. vanilla) in younger compared to older women. Stronger BOLD signals within the anterior cingulate gyrus, insula and motor areas were found during negative compared to neutral stimulation and are considered to represent an attempt to down-regulate the strong emotional experience and the organisms' preparation for withdrawal, respectively. Our results stress the role of orbitofrontal and superior temporal brain regions in odor-related valence coding and stress the necessity to consider age as a modulating factor for further studies, even in relatively young samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Masked fearful faces modulate the orienting of covert spatial attention.

Dot probe studies indicate that masked fearful faces modulate spatial attention. However, without a baseline to compare congruent and incongruent reaction times, it is unclear which aspect(s) of attention (orienting or disengagement) is affected. Additionally, backward masking studies commonly use a neutral face as the mask stimulus. This method results in greater perceptual inconsistencies for fearful as opposed to neutral faces. Therefore, it is currently unclear whether the effects of backward masked fearful faces are due to the fearful nature of the face or perceptual inconsistencies. Equally unclear, is whether this spatial attention effect is due to orienting or disengagement. Two modified dot probe experiments with neutral (closed mouth in Experiment 1) and smiling (open mouth in Experiment 2) masks were used to determine the role of perceptual inconsistencies in mediating the spatial attention effects elicited by masked fearful faces. The results indicate that masked fearful faces modulate the orienting of spatial attention, and it appears that this effect is due to the fearful nature of the face rather than perceptual inconsistencies between the initial faces and masks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces.

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p     

Fearful faces but not fearful eyes alone delay attention disengagement in 7-month-old infants.

Adult-like attentional biases toward fearful faces can be observed in 7-month-old infants. It is possible, however, that infants merely allocate attention to simple features such as enlarged fearful eyes. In the present study, 7-month-old infants (n = 15) were first shown individual emotional faces to determine their visual scanning patterns of the expressions. Second, an overlap task was used to examine the latency of attention disengagement from centrally presented faces. In both tasks, the stimuli were fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions, and a neutral face with fearful eyes. Eye-tracking data from the first task showed that infants scanned the eyes more than other regions of the face; however, there were no differences in scanning patterns across expressions. In the overlap task, infants were slower in disengaging attention from fearful as compared to happy and neutral faces and also to neutral faces with fearful eyes. Together, these results provide evidence that threat-related stimuli tend to hold attention preferentially in 7-month-old infants and that the effect does not reflect a simple response to differentially salient eyes in fearful faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of memory activation in creating false memories of encoding context.

Using 3 experiments, I examined false memory for encoding context by presenting Deese–Roediger–McDermott themes (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in usual-looking fonts and by testing related, but unstudied, lure items in a font that was shown during encoding. In 2 of the experiments, testing lure items in the font used to study their associated themes increased false recognition relative to testing lure items in a font that was used to study a different lure’s theme. Further, studying a larger number of associates exacerbated the influence of testing lure items in a font used to study their associated themes. Finally, testing lures in a font that was encoded many times, but was not used to present the lures’ studied associates, increased lure errors more than testing lures in a font that was encoded relatively fewer times. These results favor the explanation of false recognition offered by global-matching models of recognition memory over the explanations of activation-monitoring theory and fuzzy-trace theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cortical brain regions engaged by masked emotional faces in adolescents and adults: An fMRI study.

Face-emotion processing has shown signs of developmental change during adolescence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used on 10 adolescents and 10 adults to contrast brain regions engaged by a masked emotional-face task (viewing a fixation cross and a series of masked happy and masked fearful faces), while blood oxygen level dependent signal was monitored by a 1.5-T MRI scanner. Brain regions differentially engaged in the 2 age groups were mapped by using statistical parametric mapping. Summed across groups, the contrast of masked face versus fixation-cross viewing generated activations in occipital-temporal regions previously activated in passive face-viewing tasks. Adolescents showed higher maxima for activations in posterior association cortex for 3 of the 4 statistical contrasts. Adolescents and adults differed in the degree to which posterior hemisphere brain areas were engaged by viewing masked facial displays of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brain injury in battered women.

The goals of the present study were to examine (a) whether battered women in a sample of both shelter and nonshelter women are sustaining brain injuries from their partners, and (b) if so, whether such brain injuries are associated with partner abuse severity, cognitive functioning, or psychopathology. Ninety nine battered women were assessed using neuropsychological, psychopathology, and abuse history measures. Almost three quarters of the sample sustained at least 1 partner-related brain injury and half sustained multiple partner-related brain injuries. Further, in a subset of women (n = 57), brain injury severity was negatively associated with measures of memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility and was positively associated with partner abuse severity, general distress, anhedonic depression, worry, anxious arousal, and posttraumatic stress disorder symptomatology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of traumatic brain injury on working memory-related brain activation in adolescents.

Eight adolescents (ages 13-18 years) who sustained traumatic brain injury (TBI) and eight gender- and age-matched typically developing (TD) adolescents underwent event-related functional MRI (fMRI) while performing a Sternberg letter recognition task. Encoding, maintenance, and retrieval were examined with memory loads of one or four items during imaging. Both groups performed above a 70% accuracy criterion and did not differ in performance. TD adolescents showed greater increase in frontal and parietal activation during high-load relative to low-load maintenance than the TBI group. The TBI patients showed greater increase in activation during high-load relative to low-load encoding and retrieval than the TD group. Results from this preliminary study suggest that the capability to differentially allocate neural resources according to memory load is disrupted by TBI for the maintenance subcomponent of working memory. The overrecruitment of frontal and extrafrontal regions during encoding and retrieval following TBI may represent a compensatory process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptions of women and men as entrepreneurs: Evidence for differential effects of attributional augmenting.

It was hypothesized that perceptions of women who become entrepreneurs are enhanced by attributional augmenting because they adopt this role despite major obstacles to doing so. In contrast, attributional augmenting was expected to operate to a lesser degree for men who become entrepreneurs because they presumably face weaker obstacles. Three studies offered support for these hypotheses; all of these investigations used between-subjects designs in which women and men shown in standard-format photos were described to different groups of raters as being either entrepreneurs or managers. As predicted, raters assigned significantly higher scores to women, but not to men, when they were described as entrepreneurs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural correlates of sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men.

Men exhibit much higher levels of genital and subjective arousal to sexual stimuli containing their preferred sex than they do to stimuli containing only the nonpreferred sex. This study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how this category-specific pattern would be reflected in the brains of homosexual (n = 11) and heterosexual (n = 11) men. Comparisons of activation to preferred sexual stimuli, nonpreferred sexual stimuli, and sports stimuli revealed large networks correlated with sexual arousal, spanning multiple cortical and subcortical areas. Both homosexual and heterosexual men exhibited category-specific arousal in brain activity. Within the amygdala, greater preference-related activity was observed in homosexual men, but it is unclear whether this is a cause or a consequence of their sexuality. In a subsequent analysis of regions hypothesized to support arousal, both participant groups demonstrated widespread increases in evoked activity for preferred stimuli. Aggregate data from these regions produced significant differences between stimulus types in 16 out of 22 participants. Significant activational differences matched reported sexual orientation in 15 of these 16 participants, representing an advance in psychophysiological measures of arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural responses to masked fear faces: Sex differences and trauma exposure in posttraumatic stress disorder.

Although women have a greater propensity than men to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following trauma, sex differences in neural activations to threat have received little investigation. This study tested the prediction that trauma would heighten activity in automatic fear-processing networks to a greater extent in women than in men. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were recorded in 23 participants with PTSD (13 women, 10 men), 21 trauma-exposed controls (9 women, 12 men), and 42 non-trauma-exposed controls (22 women, 20 men) while they viewed masked facial expressions of fear. Exposure to trauma was associated with enhanced brainstem activity to fear in women, regardless of the presence of PTSD, but in men, it was associated only with the development of PTSD. Men with PTSD displayed greater hippocampal activity to fear than did women. Both men and women with PTSD showed enhanced amygdala activity to fear relative to controls. The authors conclude that greater brainstem activation to threat stimuli may contribute to the greater prevalence of PTSD in women, and greater hippocampal activation in men may subserve an enhanced capacity for contextualizing fear-related stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The confounded nature of angry men and happy women.

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brain activation in restrained and unrestrained eaters: An fMRI study.

Restraint theory has been used to model the process that produces binge eating. However, there is no satisfactory explanation for the tendency of restrained eaters (REs) to engage in counterregulatory eating, an ostensible analogue of binge eating. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors investigated brain activation of normal weight REs (N = 9) and unrestrained eaters (UREs; N = 10) when fasted and fed and viewing pictures of highly and moderately palatable foods and neutral objects. When fasted and viewing highly palatable foods, UREs showed widespread bilateral activation in areas associated with hunger and motivation, whereas REs showed activation only in the cerebellum, an area previously implicated in low-level processing of appetitive stimuli. When fed and viewing high palatability foods, UREs showed activation in areas related to satiation and memory, whereas REs showed activation in areas implicated in desire, expectation of reward, and goal-defined behavior. These findings parallel those from behavioral research. The authors propose that the counterintuitive findings from preload studies and the present study are due to the fact that REs are less hungry than UREs when fasted and find palatable food more appealing than UREs when fed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality structure as viewed through early memories and identity status in college men and women.

Early memories were obtained from 98 undergraduates in the 4 identity status categories and rated for psychosocial maturity in order to replicate an earlier study by R. L. Josselson (see record 1983-23229-001) with college women. In a result that was consistent with those of that earlier study and other studies in which deeper aspects of personality development that underlie identity formation were assessed, identity-achievement and moratorium Ss exhibited more developmentally advanced concerns in their early memories than did foreclosure and identity-diffusion Ss. In another result that was consistent with the interpretation that identity achievement often involves a rapprochement between needs for the relatedness and individuation, identity-achievement Ss of both sexes were found to blend secondary, less mature themes involving nurturance and security with the more mature themes of mastery, competition, and independent activity that were primary in their early memories. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressive symptoms, social support, and personal health behaviors in young men and women.

This study investigated the relationship of depressive symptoms, social support, and a range of personal health behaviors in 2,091 male and 3,438 female university students from 16 countries. Depressive symptoms and social support were measured using the short Beck Depression Inventory and the Social Support Questionnaire; 9 personal health behaviors were also assessed. After the authors took age, social support, and clustering by country into account, depressive symptoms were significantly associated with lack of physical activity, not eating breakfast, irregular sleep hours, and not using a seat belt in both men and women, and additionally with smoking, not eating fruit, and not using sunscreen among women. Low social support was independently associated with low alcohol consumption, lack of physical activity, irregular sleep hours, and not using a seat belt in men and women. Bidirectional causal pathways are likely to link health behaviors with depressed mood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The moderating effects of dispositional empathy on alcohol-related aggression in men and women.

The author investigated the influence of dispositional empathy on alcohol-related aggression in men and women. Participants were 204 (111 men, 93 women) healthy social drinkers, 21-35 years old. Dispositional empathy was measured with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Following the consumption of either an alcoholic or a placebo beverage, participants were tested on a modified version of the Taylor Aggression Paradigm in which mild electric shocks were received from, and administered to, a fictitious opponent during a competitive task. Alcohol increased aggression for persons (particularly men) with lower, as opposed to higher, levels of empathy. Men with lower empathy levels exhibited the most aggression followed by men with higher empathy levels. Women displayed the least aggression regardless of their empathy levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does Brain size matter? A Reply to Rushton and Ankney.

Rushton and Ankney (1995) show that new Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI studies allow the statement that brain size and IQ are correlated. However, the evidence does not justify statements about the relation of brain size and IQ across race and sex. Rushton & Ankney's comparisons of brain size across races are based on brain weights corrected for body weights, but the corrections are not justifiable for within-species comparisons. Large variations of brain size within race groupings (as defined by Rushton & Ankney), and large secular changes in brain size add to doubts about the validity of Rushton & Ankney's arguments about race/brain size/IQ relations. Rushton & Ankney suggest that sex differences in brain size relate to sex differences in IQ and spatial abilities; however, the sex differences in IQ do not stand in proportion to differences in brain size, and spatial performance in women does not correlate with brain size. Scaling brain size across sexes remains an unsolved problem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Greater sustained anxiety but not phasic fear in women compared to men.

Startle reflex studies in rodents indicate that female are more reactive than rats in experimental models of sustained anxiety but not in models of phasic fear (Toufexis, 2007). This study examined evidence for a similar effect in humans. Participants were exposed to three conditions, (1) predictable aversive shocks signaled by a cue, (2) unpredictable shocks, and (3) no shocks. Acoustic startle stimuli were delivered regularly across conditions. Phasic startle potential to the threat cue in the predictable condition was not affected by sex. In contrast, and consistent with basic research, the sustained increase in startle in the predictable and unpredictable conditions was greater in women compared to men. Animal studies suggest that such an effect may be mediated by the effects of sexual dimorphism in limbic structures, including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. However, psychosocial factors may also contribute to this effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in fMRI Following Cognitive Rehabilitation in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Case Study.

Objective: To illustrate the relationship between changes in neuropsychological testing and changes in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT). Study Design: Single case study. Setting: Outpatient treatment center. Participant: A woman with history of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) 16 years before study. Intervention: Individualized CRT using a developmental metacognitive model. Main Outcome Measures: Neuropsychological tests and fMRI imaging performed during an eye movement task and a reading comprehension task. Results: Improvements on some neuropsychological test scores (>1 SD) and changes in the magnitude and distribution of the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response as a function of task performance on both fMRI tasks. Conclusions: Individuals with severe TBI many years postinjury can demonstrate improvements in neuropsychological testing following CRT. Behavioral improvements can be related to changes in brain activity using fMRI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)