Self-referential dysfunction and default-mode hyperactivation in psychophysiological insomnia patients: A case-control fMRI study.
In this study we tested whether differences in terms of neural activation are present between a group of PI patients and a healthy-control group while they are exposed to idiosyncratic ruminations and worries, evoked visually by words, so as to explore their hypothetical link with default-mode network (DMN) dysfunction in PI. We recruited five PI patients diagnosed according to the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, version 2 (ICSD-2) of American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and five age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Patients were recruited at the outpatient Sleep Medicine Centre of the Coimbra Unive...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - March 30, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
EEG frequency characteristics in healthy advanced elderly.
In this study, we reexamined findings that EEG activity in healthy elderly individuals aged over 85 years (range 85–94) was the same or different compared to individuals younger than 84 years (range 65–84). We performed EEG frequency analysis to investigate the characteristics of resting state frequency components in a cross-sectional study. In individuals aged 85 and older, the dominant frequency component demonstrated a significant shift toward the slower alpha frequency in the left temporal and occipital regions. However, among the oldest individuals, a spectral peak appeared at 9.0–10.0 Hz, and power curves at pe...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - March 30, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Task-switching training and transfer: Age-related effects on late ERP components.
We used task-switching (TS) paradigms to study how cognitive training can compensate age-related cognitive decline. Thirty-nine young (age span: 18–25 years) and 40 older (age span: 60–75 years) women were assigned to training and control groups. The training group received 8 one-hour long cognitive training sessions in which the difficulty level of TS was individually adjusted. The other half of the sample did not receive any intervention. The reference task was an informatively cued TS paradigm with nogo stimuli. Performance was measured on reference, near-transfer, and far-transfer tasks by behavioral indicators and...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - March 30, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
In search of somatic precursors of spontaneous insight.
A considerable number of behavioral and neuroscientific studies on insight problem solving have revealed behavioral and neural correlates of the dynamic insight process; however, somatic correlates, particularly somatic precursors of creative insight, remain undetermined. To characterize the somatic precursor of spontaneous insight, 22 healthy volunteers were recruited to solve the compound remote associate (CRA) task in which a problem can be solved by either an insight or an analytic strategy. The participants’ peripheral nervous activities, particularly electrodermal and cardiovascular responses, were continuously mon...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - March 30, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Effect of comorbid post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder on defensive responding.
Although panic disorder (PD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterized by heightened sensitivity to threat, no study to date has examined the effect of comorbid PD and PTSD on defensive responding. The present study probed startle eyeblink response to an acoustic probe in three groups of participants recruited from the community: (1) healthy individuals (n = 63), (2) individuals with PD without PTSD (n = 62), and (3) individuals with comorbid PD and PTSD (n = 24). Results indicated that PD individuals without PTSD exhibited greater sensitivity to threat relative to controls, and comorbid individuals displ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - March 30, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Higher brain function and the laws of thermodynamics: Hans Berger and his time.
This editorial provides an overview of Hans Berger's discovery of human electroencephalography (EEG). Berger succeeded in recording mass brain signals first from animals (1902), then from patients with skull defects after neurosurgery, and finally from healthy volunteers (1924). Research in the first decades of the 20th century often appears both ambitious and na ïve to our modern scientific eyes, somehow bizarre. The idea of some psychic energy independent of brain mechanisms and function, perhaps immaterial, looked probably more acceptable in Berger’s time than we may estimate today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - February 22, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sannita, Walter G. Source Type: research
Short-term test-retest reliability of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in young adults.
We examined the 1-month test-retest reliability of resting measures of RSA as well as HP, systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in a sample of 41 healthy young adults. Test-retest reliability of all four measures was good-to-excellent across the 1-month period. However, uncontrolled mean RSA declined from Time 1 to Time 2, suggesting that while individual differences in RSA were stable, mean RSA appeared to be sensitive to condition effects. Even with random variation, all of these measures were stable across one month, demonstrating acceptable short-term test-retest reliability in emerging adulthood. (PsycINFO...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - January 16, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Trauma, pain, and psychological distress: Attentional bias and autonomic arousal in PTSD and chronic pain.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMP) are highly prevalent (Breslau, 2002) and comorbid disorders (Otis, Keane, & Kerns, 2003). The shared vulnerability model explains this overlap in part through a common attentional bias toward threat (Asmundson, Coons, Taylor, & Katz, 2002). The current study made use of the acoustic startle to assess cognitive bias to threat in participants (n = 106; 64% women) who reported experiencing a motor vehicle accident (MVA). Participants were divided into five groups based on their diagnoses: PTSD, CMP, both PTSD and CMP, any general (i.e., non-PTSD) anxi...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - January 16, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Assessing performance on an evaluated speaking task: The role of self-efficacy, anxiety, and cardiac autonomic reactivity.
Coping with social stress involves cognitive perceptions and the activation of several physiological mechanisms. Our main purpose was to examine how psychological factors such as cognitive appraisal, and particularly self-efficacy, may affect psychophysiological reactivity to social stress and young people’s performance on an evaluated speaking task. Thirty-five university students (18 men and 17 women) were exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and a control condition in a counterbalanced order. Self-efficacy, several dimensions of trait anxiety related to social evaluation, and changes in state anxiety were as...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - January 16, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Cortical and autonomic patterns of emotion experiencing during a recall task.
Emotions characterized by opposite valences (positive vs. negative) seem to lead to specific patterns of autonomic and cortical activity. For example, according to valence or approach-withdrawal hypotheses, specific emotions lead to an asymmetrical activation of left or right prefrontal cortex (PFC). The aim of the present study was to explore the psychophysiological underpinnings of emotion experiencing using a paradigm with higher ecological validity than is typically accomplished in neuroimaging research. A total of 28 healthy participants were instructed to recall personally-relevant situations from the past that cause...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Burnout of the mind—Burnout of the body?
We examined patients who had been diagnosed with burnout by their physicians (n = 32) and were also identified as burnout patients based on their score in the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) and compared them with a nonclinical control group (n = 19) with regard to indicators of allostatic load (i.e., ambulatory ECG, nocturnal urinary catecholamines, salivary morning cortisol secretion, blood pressure, and waist-to-hip ratio [WHR]). Contrary to expectations, a higher AL index suggesting elevated load in several of the parameters of the HPA and SAM axes was found in the control group but not in the burnout...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
An ERP investigation of object-scene incongruity: The early meeting of knowledge and perception.
The present study investigated the temporal dynamics of the object-scene congruity during a categorization task of objects embedded in a scene. Participants (n = 28) categorized objects in scenes as natural or man-made while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The object-scene associations were either congruous (e.g., a tent in a field) or incongruous (e.g., a fridge in a desert). The results confirmed that contextual congruity affects item processing in the 300–500 ms time window with larger N300/N400 complex in the incongruous than in the congruous condition. However, unlike previous work which found a...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Evaluative and psychophysiological responses to short film clips of different emotional content.
The study presents self-report and psychophysiological data obtained in response to short film clips representing scenes related to different emotions. This was done in order to obtain evidence on the structure of positive and negative affective states following a combined dimensional/categorical approach to emotion and based on responses to stimuli that are more realistic than the static pictures usually employed in the study of emotion. Affective ratings and self-report measures showed a differential structure of the response to positive and negative films (Experiment 1). While all negative films were rated as low in val...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The effects of menstrual cycle phase on processing of emotional images.
The ovarian hormone levels can affect subjective ratings and modulate late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes evoked by images of varying appeal. The present study examines how different progesterone levels influence the valence, arousal ratings and mean LPP amplitudes evoked by pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant images. Twenty-three healthy females were grouped by menstrual cycle days (estradiol and progesterone levels): 10 were included in the follicular phase group and 13 were included in the luteal phase group. Each female rated the affective images in terms of valence and arousal while event-related potentials (ERPs) ...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Impaired error processing and semantic processing during multitasking.
Neuronal mechanisms of error processing under multitasking and their impact on the processing of a concurrent task were examined. Twenty-one younger and twenty older healthy adults performed a visual-motor flanker task or an auditory-vocal semantic task or both tasks simultaneously. During task performance the electroencephalogram (EEG) was continuously recorded. The event-related potential (ERP) was derived from the EEG, and ERP components associated with error processing (Ne and Pe) and semantic processing (N400) were analyzed. Older participants responded more slowly than younger ones in the flanker task regardless of t...
Source: Journal of Psychophysiology - November 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
