Altered Negative Unconscious Processing in Major Depressive Disorder: An Exploratory Neuropsychological Study

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been characterized by abnormalities in emotional processing. However, what remains unclear is whether MDD also shows deficits in the unconscious processing of either positive or negative emotions. We conducted a psychological study in healthy and MDD subjects to investigate unconscious emotion processing and its valence-specific alterations in MDD patients.We combined a well established paradigm for unconscious visual processing, the continuous flash suppression, with positive and negative emotional valences to detect the attentional preference evoked by the invisible emotional facial expressions.Healthy subjects showed an attentional bias for negative emotions in the unconscious condition while this valence bias remained absent in MDD patients. In contrast, this attentional bias diminished in the conscious condition for both healthy subjects and MDD.Our findings demonstrate for the first time valence-specific deficits specifically in the unconscious processing of emotions in MDD; this may have major implications for subsequent neurobiological investigations as well as for clinical diagnosis and therapy

Influence of socioeconomic factors on pregnancy outcome in women with structural heart disease

OBJECTIVE: Cardiac disease is the leading cause of indirect maternal mortality. The aim of this study was to analyse to what extent socioeconomic factors influence the outcome of pregnancy in women with heart disease.  METHODS: The Registry of Pregnancy and Cardiac disease is a global prospective registry. For this analysis, countries that enrolled ≥10 patients were included. A combined cardiac endpoint included maternal cardiac death, arrhythmia requiring treatment, heart failure, thromboembolic event, aortic dissection, endocarditis, acute coronary syndrome, hospitalisation for cardiac reason or intervention. Associations between patient characteristics, country characteristics (income inequality expressed as Gini coefficient, health expenditure, schooling, gross domestic product, birth rate and hospital beds) and cardiac endpoints were checked in a three-level model (patient-centre-country).  RESULTS: A total of 30 countries enrolled 2924 patients from 89 centres. At least one endpoint occurred in 645 women (22.1%). Maternal age, New York Heart Association classification and modified WHO risk classification were associated with the combined endpoint and explained 37% of variance in outcome. Gini coefficient and country-specific birth rate explained an additional 4%. There were large differences between the individual countries, but the need for multilevel modelling to account for these differences disappeared after adjustment for patient characteristics, Gini and country-specific birth rate.  CONCLUSION: While there are definite interregional differences in pregnancy outcome in women with cardiac disease, these differences seem to be mainly driven by individual patient characteristics. Adjustment for country characteristics refined the results to a limited extent, but maternal condition seems to be the main determinant of outcome

With peppermints you’re not my prince: Aroma modulates self-other integration

Recent studies showed that self-other integration, as indexed by the joint Simon effect (JSE), can be modulated by biasing participants towards particular (integrative vs. exclusive) cognitive-control states. Interestingly, there is evidence suggesting that such control states can be induced by particular odors: stimulating odors (e.g., peppermint aroma) seem to induce a more focused, exclusive state; relaxing odors (e.g., lavender aroma) are thought to induce a broader, more integrative state. In the present study, we tested the possible impact of peppermint and lavender aromas on self-other integration. Pairs of participants performed the joint Simon task in an either peppermint- or lavender-scented testing room. Results showed that both aromas modulated the size of the JSE, although they had a dissociable effect on reaction times (RTs) and percentage of errors (PEs). Whilst the JSE in RTs was found to be less pronounced in the peppermint group, compared to the lavender and no-aroma groups, the JSE in PEs was significantly more pronounced in the lavender group, compared to the peppermint and no-aroma group. These results are consistent with the emerging literature suggesting that the degree of self-other integration does not reflect a trait but a particular cognitive state, which can be biased towards excluding or integrating the other in one’s self-representation

Donsker's weak invariance principle with rates for C[0,1]-valued, dependent random-functions

SIGLETIB: RN 2414 (337) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Automatic contrast:Evidence that automatic comparison with the social self affects evaluative responses

The aim of the present research was to investigate whether unconsciously presented affective information may cause opposite evaluative responses depending on what social category the information originates from. We argue that automatic comparison processes between the self and the unconscious affective information produce this evaluative contrast effect. Consistent with research on automatic behaviour, we propose that when an intergroup context is activated, an automatic comparison to the social self may determine the automatic evaluative responses, at least for highly visible categories (e.g. sex, ethnicity). Contrary to previous research on evaluative priming, we predict automatic contrastive responses to affective information originating from an outgroup category such that the evaluative response to neutral targets is opposite to the valence of the suboptimal primes. Two studies using different intergroup contexts provide support for our hypotheses