The effect of exercise and distraction on blood pressure recovery following an anger-provoking stressor in normotensive young adults.
Ruminating about a prior anger provoking event is found to elevate blood pressure (BP) and delay BP recovery. Delayed BP recovery may be associated with increased risk of hypertension. Interventions that improve BP recovery may be beneficial for cardiovascular health. The purposes of this study were to evaluate the influence of rumination and anger on BP reactivity and recovery, to compare the effect of an exercise intervention or distraction intervention on BP recovery and to explore if exercise improved BP recovery by distracting participants from stressor-related rumination and anger. Healthy, normotensive participants ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - April 6, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Routledge, Faye S.; McFetridge-Durdle, Judith A.; Macdonald, Marilyn; Breau, Lynn; Campbell, Tavis Source Type: research
The effects of vigilance and visual distraction on the P50 mid-latency auditory evoked potential.
Sensory gating function has been investigated through measurement of the P50 evoked potential. However, the susceptibility of auditory P50 sensory gating to attentional modulation remains unclear. We sought to investigate the effects of vigilance (sustaining alertness across multiple recording blocks) and visual distraction (watching a muted movie versus a static fixation cross). We specifically chose a movie as the distracting stimulus because investigators sometimes show muted movies during P50 paradigms and the effects of this method were previously unknown. We recorded evoked potentials in a standard paired-click parad...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 9, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Yadon, Carly A.; Kisley, Michael A.; Davalos, Deana B. Source Type: research
Physical fitness and resting EEG in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: An exploratory study.
Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are characterized by a deviant pattern of brain oscillations during resting state, particularly elevated theta power and increased theta/alpha and theta/beta ratios that are related to cognitive functioning. Physical fitness has been found beneficial to cognitive performance in a wide age population. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between physical fitness and resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations in children with ADHD. EEG was recorded during eyes-open resting for 28 children (23 boys and 5 girls, 8.66 ± ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 9, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Huang, Ching-Wen; Huang, Chung-Ju; Hung, Chiao-Ling; Shih, Chia-Hao; Hung, Tsung-Min Source Type: research
Familiarity of faces: Sense or feeling? An exploratory investigation with eye movements and skin conductance.
Where does the experience of familiarity come from? Is it the same as sensory perception? Two novel approaches were combined to investigate the highly adaptive process of familiar face recognition: the inclusion of friends and family members as personally familiar faces and measures of eye movements and skin conductance responses (SCR). A sample of 16 university students was asked to look at photographs of 8 personally familiar faces (friends and relatives) and 8 unfamiliar faces. From the analysis of eye movement patterns, a preference for internal features (mouth, eyes, nose) for both familiar and unfamiliar faces emerge...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 9, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bonifacci, Paola; Desideri, Lorenzo; Ottaviani, Cristina Source Type: research
Psychophysiological responses during the anticipation of emotional pictures.
The present study sought to investigate peripheral physiological responses to the anticipation of explicitly and ambiguously cued emotional pictures. Emotionally positive and negative as well as neutral pictures were presented to 32 healthy subjects. At the beginning of an anticipation period they were cued about the valence of the upcoming picture (neutral, positive, negative, or ambiguous). Skin conductance, heart rate, and zygomaticus and corrugator electromyogram responses were measured during anticipation and perception. Responses specific to the emotional conditions were observed during anticipation as well as during...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 9, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schumacher, Sonja; Herwig, Uwe; Baur, Volker; Mueller-Pfeiffer, Christoph; Martin-Soelch, Chantal; Rufer, Michael; Brühl, Annette B. Source Type: research
Feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300 are sensitive to temporal-order violation in transitive action representation.
Coherent representation of action sequences implies that the logical temporal order of each action can be correctly represented. Violation of this logical order may induce a sort of expectancies disruption of the temporal structure. Thus the present study explored the event-related potential (ERP) effect related to the cortical response to this violation. Action sequence composed by four frames with final congruous or incongruous endings was submitted to 28 subjects. Two distinct ERP effects, feedback-related negativity (FRN), and P300, were found in response to incongruous endings, with also significant increased RTs. The...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 9, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Balconi, Michela; Canavesio, Ylenia Source Type: research
A comorbid major depression in patients with panic disorder affects the HPA axis response in the DEX-CRH test.
Panic disorder (PD) has been associated with an altered reactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system in the dexamethasone-corticotropin-releasing-hormone (DEX-CRH) test. Recent findings showed that the duration of the PD and the severity of psychopathology are prominent moderators of the HPA-axis reactivity under hormonal stress induction. As major depression (MD) often occurs as comorbidity in patients with PD, a secondary MD might influence the reactivity of HPA-axis in the DEX-CRH test. For this study, the DEX-CRH test was implemented to observe the adreno-corticotropin-hormone (ACTH) and the cor...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 17, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Petrowski, Katja; Wintermann, Gloria-Beatrice; Kirschbaum, Clemens; Bornstein, Stefan R. Source Type: research
Phase difference between chronotypes in self-reported maximum of alertness rhythm: An EEG predictor and a model-based explanation.
An objective physiological predictor of self-reported chronotypological differences in circadian timing of alertness peak (> 5 hr) has not been yet identified. Our goals were to establish external validity of such a predictor, and to explain the observations of inequality of chronotypological differences in alertness peak and bed/rising times (> 5 and5-hr chronotypological difference between alertness peaks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Journal of Psychophysiology)
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 17, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Putilov, Arcady A.; Donskaya, Olga G.; Verevkin, Evgeniy G. Source Type: research
Arousal and habituation effects (excitability) on startle responses to the International Affective Picture Systems (IAPS).
In conclusion, our results emphasize the usefulness of arousing pictures to study startle reflex response and show evidence of different response mechanisms for pleasant and unpleasant pictures conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Journal of Psychophysiology)
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 17, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Balada, Ferran; Blanch, Angel; Aluja, Anton Source Type: research
Cardiac perception enhances stress experience.
In the present study we aimed to investigate the impact of the ability to perceive bodily changes as indexed by the perception of one’s heartbeat (cardiac perception) on emotional experience when being confronted with a mental stressor. To induce stress, participants high and low in cardiac perception performed a computerized mental arithmetic test while listening to a white noise increasing in volume. Emotional experience and heart rate were assessed as indices of stress response. Our results show that participants high in cardiac perception reported more negative emotions during the stress period compared to participan...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 17, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kindermann, Nicole K.; Werner, Natalie S. Source Type: research
Rapid mental fatigue amplifies age-related attentional deficits.
Deficient information processing with increasing age has been assigned to reduced efficiency in frontal executive control functions. Dopamine has been assumed to play a central role for this decline. Dopamine, however, is also essential for the maintenance of motivation for a longer period of time and is therefore a core factor for mental fatigue. Combining these two findings, we tested to what degree older adults are more prone to performance loss due to increasing time on task than younger adults. Twelve younger and twelve older participants performed an inhibition of return task for 80 min. Performance declined in the o...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - September 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wascher, Edmund; Getzmann, Stephan Source Type: research
Age differences in the processing of context information: Is it age or is it performance?
This study aimed at determining whether age differences in electrophysiological correlates of context updating in a pro-and reactive manner are independent of individual differences in task performance. To this end, younger and older adults were split into four groups according to their updating efficiency in behavioral data. Nineteen younger and 18 older adults completed a modified AX-Continuous-Performance Task (Lenartowicz, Escobedo-Quiroz, & Cohen, 2010) in which correct responses to probes were either dependent (c-dep) or independent (c-indep) on a preceding contextual cue. Analysis of the behavioral data showed no di...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - September 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schmitt, Hannah; Wolff, Maren C.; Ferdinand, Nicola K.; Kray, Jutta Source Type: research
Age differences in memory-based task switching with and without cues: An ERP study.
The study investigated the neuronal mechanisms of age-related changes in mixing costs during memory-based task switching with two levels of working memory (WM) load. Forty-eight healthy younger and 45 healthy older participants performed a memory based (high WM load) and a memory plus cue based (low WM load) switching task while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were registered. Older adults revealed larger mixing costs in both reaction time (RT) and accuracy at higher WM loads than younger adults. The presence of explicit cues substantially reduced age differences in mixing costs for accuracy but not for RT. Similarly...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - September 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schapkin, Sergei A.; Gajewski, Patrick D.; Freude, Gabriele Source Type: research
Neuro-behavioral correlates of post-deviance distraction in middle-aged and old adults.
The presentation of a task-irrelevant deviant (novel) stimulus among otherwise repeated standard stimuli usually reduces performance not only for the deviant stimulus, but also for the standard following that deviant. Here, the so-called post-deviance distraction was investigated in 58 middle-aged and 52 old adults, using an auditory duration discrimination task and event-related potential (ERP) measures. After a deviant stimulus, the participants showed a decrease in performance in the subsequent standard stimulus. This effect was more pronounced in the old, than middle-aged, group. Relative to the standard stimuli preced...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - September 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Getzmann, Stephan; Falkenstein, Michael; Gajewski, Patrick D. Source Type: research
Age-related effects on ERP and oscillatory EEG-dynamics in a 2-back task.
It is well known that working memory is one of the most vulnerable cognitive functions in elderly. However, little is known about the neuronal underpinnings and temporal dynamics of working memory mechanisms in healthy aging which are necessary to understand the age-related changes. To this end, 36 young and 36 old healthy individuals performed a 2-back task and a 0-back control task, while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Participants were instructed to press a response key whenever a target appeared and not to respond in case of nontargets. Expectedly, older participants showed considerably slower RTs and sig...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - September 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Gajewski, Patrick D.; Falkenstein, Michael Source Type: research
