Feedforward: turning feedback around

Feedback on summative work comes too late. Feedback lacks specificity to future assessment tasks. Feedback must be timely for it to be effective. Students fail to engage with assessment criteria, and often do not read feedback

Binge drinking and unplanned sexual behaviour: deconstructing the role of impulsivity

The co-occurrence of binge drinking and unplanned sexual behaviour (USB) is a physiological and social concern; however, potential underlying mechanisms in this relationship remain largely unexplored. The current study compared low and high-binge drinkers on impulsivity variants and USB. Participants were 122 university students (71 females). Questionnaires measured binge drinking, USB, reward sensitivity, and trait impulsivity (Barratt Impulsiveness Scales). Cognitive-behavioural aspects of impulsivity were assessed using a Stop Signal Task (response inhibition) and an Information Sampling Task (IST: reflection-impulsivity). ANOVAs revealed that high-binge drinkers scored more impulsively than low-bingers on self-report impulsivity, and the decreasing win condition of the IST. A positive relationship was found between USB and self-report, but not cognitive-behavioural, impulsivity. In regression analysis, both binge drinking and trait impulsivity were found to have a unique effect on the proclivity to engage in USB. Findings provide an insight into demarcating impulsivity’s relationship with both binge drinking and USB

Facial emotion recognition in people with different patterns of alcohol consumption: an eye-tracking study

Impairment in emotion recognition for those with alcohol dependence has been shown to be exacerbated by the number of detoxifications experienced. Flooding of the brain with alcohol and then withdrawing is a similar process to that experienced by binge drinkers. It has already been shown that high binge drinkers display cognitive deficits compared with low binge drinking controls. It has not yet been shown whether they experience similar deficits with regard to facial emotion recognition (FER). This study aimed to explore the relationship between drinking patterns and FER amongst those without alcohol dependence. Fifty six students completed the Alcohol Use Questionnaire (AUQ) to measure alcohol consumption and binge drinking patterns. Two groups, high binge drinkers (HBD) and low binge drinkers (LBD) were created using the median binge drinking score. The CANTAB Emotion Recognition Task (ERT) was used to measure the ability to accurately identify emotions and the Tobii Eye-tracker to explore how participants gathered information about faces for processing. The study found no significant difference between high and low binge drinkers on ability to correctly identify emotions. However, the gaze patterns of those in the HBD group fixated on fearful faces quicker and disengaged quicker than the LBD. For angry faces the HBD fixated for a shorter time on the expression but came back to fixate on the image more frequently than the LBD. This suggests hyper-vigilance and anxiety towards negative emotions particularly fear and anger. This supports previous research and might have implications for healthy social interactions

International genome-wide meta-analysis identifies new primary biliary cirrhosis risk loci and targetable pathogenic pathways.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a classical autoimmune liver disease for which effective immunomodulatory therapy is lacking. Here we perform meta-analyses of discovery data sets from genome-wide association studies of European subjects (n=2,764 cases and 10,475 controls) followed by validation genotyping in an independent cohort (n=3,716 cases and 4,261 controls). We discover and validate six previously unknown risk loci for PBC (Pcombined<5 × 10(-8)) and used pathway analysis to identify JAK-STAT/IL12/IL27 signalling and cytokine-cytokine pathways, for which relevant therapies exist

Attentional bias associated with alcohol cues: differences between heavy and occasional social drinkers

Rationale: Previous research has shown an attentional bias toward drug-related stimuli in opiate addicts and toward emotionally threatening words in anxiety patients. Objective: The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether non-dependent heavy social drinkers would differ in their selective attention towards alcohol-related stimuli in comparison with a group of occasional social drinkers. Methods: Attentional bias was assessed using alcohol-related pictures and words in a dot probe detection task. Picture and word pairs were visually presented, followed by a dot probe that replaced one of the items. Attentional bias was determined from latencies in responding to the dot probe. Questionnaires were used to examine the relationships among attention, outcome expectancies after alcohol consumption, and personality traits. Higher-order executive function was also measured with two cognitive tasks, recognition memory and attentional shift. Results: The heavy social drinkers showed an attentional bias towards the alcohol-related stimuli when compared to the occasional social drinkers. The heavy social drinkers also scored more highly on expectancy factors of sociability and sexuality and lower on the personality traits of self-directedness and persistence. Conclusion: The results support cognitive theories of addictive behaviour in which the ability of drug-related stimuli to capture attention is suggested to play a part in drug dependence, craving and relapse

Binge drinking, cognitive performance and mood in a population of young social drinkers

Background: Binge drinking may lead to brain damage and have implications for the development of alcohol dependence. The aims of the present study were to determine individual characteristics as well as to compare mood states and cognitive function between binge and nonbinge drinkers and thus further validate the new tool used to identify these populations among social drinkers. Methods: The lowest and the highest 33.3% from a database of 245 social drinkers' binge scores derived from the Alcohol Use Questionnaire (AUQ) were used as cutoff points to identify nonbinge drinkers and binge drinkers in a further population of 100 young healthy volunteers. Personality characteristics, expectations of the effects of alcohol and current mood were evaluated. Cognitive performance was tested with a Matching to Sample Visual Search task (MTS) and a Spatial Working Memory task (SWM) both from the CANTAB battery, and a Vigilance task from the Gordon Diagnostic System. Results: The binge drinkers had less positive mood than the nonbinge drinkers. In the MTS choice time on an 8-pattern condition and movement time on an 8- and 4-pattern condition was found to be faster in the binge drinkers compared to nonbinge drinkers. A gender by binge drinking interaction in the SWM and the Gordon Diagnostic System task revealed that female binge drinkers were worse on both these tasks than the female nonbinge drinkers. Conclusions: These results confirm previous findings in binge drinkers and suggest that in a nondependent alcohol-drinking group, differences can be seen in mood and cognitive performance between those that binge drink and those that do not

Mixed Emotions: Alcoholics' impairments in the recognition of specific emotional facial expressions.

Facial expression recognition is a central feature of emotional and social behaviour and previous studies have found that alcoholics are impaired in this skill when presented with single emotions of differing intensities. The aim of this study was to explore biases in alcoholics' recognition of emotions when they were a mixture of two closely related emotions. The amygdala is intimately involved in encoding of emotions, especially those related to fear. In animals an increased number of withdrawals from alcohol leads to increased seizure sensitivity associated with facilitated transmission in the amygdala and related circuits. A further objective therefore was to explore the effect of previous alcohol detoxifications on the recognition of emotional facial expressions. Fourteen alcoholic inpatients were compared with 14 age and sex matched social drinking controls. They were asked to rate how much of each of six emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger) were present in morphed pictures portraying a mix of two of those emotions. The alcoholic group showed enhanced fear responses to all of the pictures compared to the controls and showed a different pattern of responding on anger and disgust. There were no differences between groups on decoding of sad, happy and surprised expressions. In addition the enhanced fear recognition found in the alcoholic group was related to the number of previous detoxifications. These results provide further evidence for impairment in facial expression recognition present in alcoholic patients. In addition, since the amygdala has been associated with the processing of facial expressions of emotion, particularly those of fear, the present data furthermore suggest that previous detoxifications may be related to changes within the amygdala