Variations on a theme--singing as an epileptic automatism.
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A case report giving the clinical and EEG details of a patient with right temporal lobe epilepsy in whom singing was the predominant feature of the automatism. (+info)
Automatic processing of psychological distance: evidence from a Stroop task.
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A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of psychological distance by words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth, with the words appearing relatively close to or distant from the observer. The participants classified the spatial distance of words faster when the word's implicit psychological distance matched its spatial distance (e.g., a geographically close word was classified faster when it was "friend" than when it was "enemy"). The findings are consistent with the idea that psychological distance is accessed automatically, even when it is not directly related to people's current goals, and suggest that psychological distance is an important dimension of meaning, common to spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. (+info)
Amygdala reactivity to masked negative faces is associated with automatic judgmental bias in major depression: a 3 T fMRI study.
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OBJECTIVE: In a previous study, we demonstrated that amygdala reactivity to masked negative facial emotions predicts negative judgmental bias in healthy subjects. In the present study, we extended the paradigm to a sample of 35 inpatients suffering from depression to investigate the effect of amygdala reactivity on automatic negative judgmental bias and clinical characteristics in depression. METHODS: Amygdala activity was recorded in response to masked displays of angry, sad and happy facial expressions by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T. In a subsequent experiment, the patients performed an affective priming task that characterizes automatic emotion processing by investigating the biasing effect of subliminally presented emotional faces on evaluative ratings to subsequently presented neutral stimuli. RESULTS: Significant associations between (right) amygdala reactivity and automatic negative judgmental bias were replicated in our patient sample (r=-0.59, p<0.001). Further, negatively biased evaluative processing was associated with severity and longer course of illness (r=-0.57, p=0.001). CONCLUSION: Amygdala hyperactivity is a neural substrate of negatively biased automatic emotion processing that could be a determinant for a more severe disease course. (+info)
Segmentation in the perception and memory of events.
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Using a stimulus correlated with reprimands to suppress automatically maintained eye poking.
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A functional analysis indicated that chronic eye poking exhibited by a woman with profound mental retardation persisted in the absence of social contingencies. We initiated a procedure in which a therapist delivered a punisher (mild reprimand) contingent on eye poking in the presence, but not the absence, of a neutral stimulus (wristbands). Subsequently, eye poking was suppressed when the participant wore the wristbands in novel environments without the reprimand contingency. (+info)
Automatic and controlled response inhibition: associative learning in the go/no-go and stop-signal paradigms.
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