Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
Sex differences in event-related potentials and attentional biases to emotional facial stimuli.
Attentional processes play an important role in the processing of emotional information. Previous research reported attentional biases during stimulus processing in anxiety and depression. However, sex differences in the processing of emotional stimuli and higher prevalence rates of anxiety disorders among women, compared to men, suggest that attentional biases may also differ between the two sexes. ⋯ Probe P1 amplitudes correlated negatively with self-reported alexithymia, most of these correlations were only observable in women. Our results suggest that women orient their attention to a greater extent to facial stimuli than men and corroborate that alexithymia is a correlate of reduced emotional reactivity on a neuronal level. We recommend using a difference wave approach when addressing attentional processes of orientation and disengagement also in future studies.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
Does pronounceability modulate the letter string deficit of children with dyslexia? A study with the rate and amount model.
The locus of the deficit of children with dyslexia in dealing with strings of letters may be a deficit at a pre-lexical graphemic level or an inability to bind orthographic and phonological information. We evaluate these alternative hypotheses in two experiments by examining the role of stimulus pronounceability in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a forced-choice letter discrimination task (Reicher-Wheeler paradigm). Seventeen fourth grade children with dyslexia and 24 peer control readers participated to two experiments. ⋯ No global factor was detected in this task which requires the discrimination between a target letter and a competitor but does not involve simultaneous letter string processing. Overall, children with dyslexia show a selective difficulty in simultaneously processing a letter string as a whole, independent of its pronounceability; however, when the task involves isolated letter processing, also these children can make use of the ortho-phono-tactic information derived from a previously seen letter string. This pattern of findings is in keeping with the idea that an impairment in pre-lexical graphemic analysis may be a core deficit in developmental dyslexia.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
Attentional biases toward threat: the concomitant presence of difficulty of disengagement and attentional avoidance in low trait anxious individuals.
Attentional biases toward threats (ABTs) have been described in high anxious individuals and in clinical samples whereas they have been rarely reported in non-clinical samples (Bar-Haim et al., 2007; Cisler and Koster, 2010). Three kinds of ABTs have been identified (facilitation, difficulty of disengagement, and avoidance) but their mechanisms and time courses are still unclear. ⋯ The main results showed that HTA individuals have an attentional facilitation bias at 100 ms (likely automatic in nature) whereas LTA individuals show attentional avoidance and difficulty to disengage from threatening stimuli at 200 ms (likely related to a strategic processing). Such findings demonstrate that threat biases attention with specific mechanisms and time courses, and that anxiety levels modulate attention allocation.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2014
Corrigendum: Number-induced shifts in spatial attention: a replication study.
[This corrects the article on p. 987 in vol. 5, PMID: 25309472.].
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The perception of unpleasant stimuli enhances whereas the perception of pleasant stimuli decreases pain perception. In contrast, the effects of pain on the processing of emotional stimuli are much less known. Especially given the recent interest in facial expressions of pain as a special category of emotional stimuli, a main topic in this research line is the mutual influence of pain and facial expression processing. ⋯ However, it was demonstrated that pain selectively enhances the processing of facial expressions if these are pain-related (i.e., facial expressions of pain). Extending a mere affective modulation theory, the latter results suggest pain-specific effects which may be explained by the perception-action model of empathy. Together, these results underscore the important mutual influence of pain and emotional face processing.