Emotion perception improvement following high frequency transcranial random noise stimulation of the inferior frontal cortex.

Facial emotion perception plays a key role in interpersonal communication and is a precursor for a variety of socio-cognitive abilities. One brain region thought to support emotion perception is the inferior frontal cortex (IFC). The current study aimed to examine whether modulating neural activity in the IFC using high frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) could enhance emotion perception abilities. In Experiment 1, participants received either tRNS to IFC or sham stimulation prior to completing facial emotion and identity perception tasks. Those receiving tRNS significantly outperformed those receiving sham stimulation on facial emotion, but not identity, perception tasks. In Experiment 2, we examined whether baseline performance interacted with the effects of stimulation. Participants completed a facial emotion and identity discrimination task prior to and following tRNS to either IFC or an active control region (area V5/MT). Baseline performance was a significant predictor of emotion discrimination performance change following tRNS to IFC. This effect was not observed for tRNS targeted at V5/MT or for identity discrimination. Overall, the findings implicate the IFC in emotion processing and demonstrate that tRNS may be a useful tool to modulate emotion perception when accounting for individual differences in factors such as baseline task performance

It’s not the size, it’s the relationship: from ‘small states’ to asymmetry

Debate about the definition of “small state” has produced more fragmentation than consensus, even as the literature has demonstrated its subjects’ roles in joining international organizations propagating norms, executing creative diplomacy, influencing allies, avoiding and joining conflicts, and building peace. However, work on small states has struggled to identify commonalities in these states’ international relations, to cumulate knowledge, or to impact broader IR theory. This paper advocates a changed conceptual and definitional framework. Analysis of “small states” should pivot to examine the dynamics of the asymmetrical relationships in which these states are engaged. Instead of seeking an overall metric for size as the relevant variable—falling victim in a different way Dahl’s “lump-of-power fallacy,” we can recognize the multifaceted, variegated nature of power, whether in war or peacetime

Should we share qualitative data? Epistemological and practical insights from Conversation Analysis

Over the last thirty years, there has been substantial debate about the practical, ethical and epistemological issues uniquely associated with qualitative data sharing. In this paper we contribute to these debates by examining established data sharing practices in Conversation Analysis (CA). CA is an approach to the analysis of social interaction that relies on audio/video recordings of naturally occurring human interactions and moreover works at a level of detail that presents challenges for assumptions about participant anonymity. Nonetheless, data sharing occupies a central position in both the methodology and the wider academic culture of CA as a discipline and a community (ten Have, 2007). Despite this, CA has largely been ignored in qualitative data sharing debates and discussions. We argue that the methodological traditions of CA present a strong case for the value of qualitative data sharing (QDS) and offer open data sharing practices that might be usefully adopted in other qualitative approaches

Effects of nicotine and amphetamine on latent inhibition in human subjects

Latent inhibition (LI) is a phenomenon in which repeated non-reinforced exposure to a stimulus retards subsequent conditioning to that stimulus; it reflects a process whereby irrelevant stimuli become ignored, and has been the subject of study concerning attentional abnormalities in schizophrenia. Low doses of the indirect dopamine (DA) agonists, amphetamine and nicotine, disrupt LI in the rat. These drugs are believed to disrupt LI via DA release in the nucleus accumbens; LI in amphetamine- and nicotine-treated rats is reinstated by administration of the DA antagonist haloperidol. In human subjects, low doses of amphetamine abolish LI, and more recently haloperidol has been shown to potentiate LI. The present study investigated the effects of nicotine on LI in human subjects, and also attempted to replicate the abolition of LI by amphetamine. Nicotine failed to affect LI when administered either subcutaneously or by cigarette smoking. LI was, however, abolished in a group of subjects given 5 mg amphetamine 90 min before testing. Supplementary analyses of the data pooled from all three experiments showed that, in contrast to an earlier report, LI was no weaker in smokers than in nonsmokers