Negative Cues Research Articles

Anticipating social incentives recruits alpha-beta oscillations in the human substantia nigra and invigorates behavior across the life span

Anticipating social and non-social incentives recruits shared brain structures and promotes behavior. However, little is known about possible age-related behavioral changes, and how the human substantia nigra (SN) signals positive and negative social information. Therefore, we recorded intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) from the SN of Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients (n = 12, intraoperative, OFF medication) in combination with a social incentive delay task including photos of neutral, positive or negative human gestures and mimics as feedback. We also tested a group of non-operated PD patients (n = 24, ON and OFF medication), and a sample of healthy young (n = 51) and older (n = 52) adults with behavioral readouts only. Behaviorally, the anticipation of both positive and negative social feedback equally accelerated response times in contrast to neutral social feedback in healthy young and older adults. Although this effect was not significant in the group of operated PD patients – most likely due to the small sample size – iEEG recordings in their SN showed a significant increase in alpha-beta power (9–20 Hz) from 300 to 600 ms after cue onset again for both positive and negative cues. Finally, in non-operated PD patients, the behavioral effect was not modulated by medication status (ON vs OFF medication) suggesting that other processes than dopaminergic neuromodulation play a role in driving invigoration by social incentives. Together, our findings provide novel and direct evidence for a role of the SN in processing positive and negative social information via specific oscillatory mechanisms in the alpha-beta range, and they suggest that anticipating social value in simple cue-outcome associations is intact in healthy aging and PD.

Antinormative Messaging, Group Cues, and the Nuclear Ban Treaty

What types of foreign policy cues are most likely to turn public opinion against a popular emerging norm? Since 2017, the US government has sought to discredit the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and its nuclear nonpossession norm among the largely prodisarmament American public. We fielded a national US survey experiment (N=1,219) to evaluate the effects of these elite cues as well as social group cues on public opinion. Our study thus offers one of the first experimental assessments of public attitudes toward nuclear disarmament. We find that both negative government messages and group cues can shift attitudes. Direct exposure to official rhetoric—particularly substantive security and institutional critiques—most effectively increases opposition to the norm. Yet, we observe that all cues have little effect on respondents’ existing opposition to nuclear arms. The American population may support eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, but majority backing for immediate disarmament appears far from assured.

The effects of emotional valence and perceived life stress on recalling personal experiences and envisioning future events.

Although it is understood that engaging in mental time travel to remember the past and imagine the future relies on similar cognitive processes, there are important differences. Notably, there is evidence that emotional valence differently affects how past and future events are accessed. Here, we explored the differential effect of emotional valence on past and future event generation in the context of personal stress. This is based on findings that an individual's current life stress -a metric of mental health-alters emotional mental time travel. In an online experiment conducted during the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, 421 participants generated specific past and future events to a series of positive and negative cues and then rated the likelihood that the event would occur in the future, the emotion conveyed in the event, and the difficulty of generating the event. Participants also completed a questionnaire estimating current life stress. We found a general bias toward generating specific positive future events that was not present when generating past events. Additionally, we found a small but significant effect of stress levels on ratings of difficulty and likelihood for events generated in response to positive cues. These results provide new insight into how an individual's current stress selectively targets the way positive life events are perceived. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Evidence for a hijacked brain reward system but no desensitized threat system in quitting-motivated smokers: An fMRI study.

Several aspects of how quitting-motivated tobacco use disorder (TUD) subjects and never-smokers differ in terms of reward and threat processing remain unresolved. We aimed to examine aberrant reward and threat processes in TUD and the association with smoking characteristics. A between- and within-subjects functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment with a 2(groups) × 4 (stimulus type) factorial design. The experimental paradigm had four conditions: pictures of (1) cigarettes served as drug-related-positive cues, (2) food as alternative reward cues, (3) long-term consequences of smoking as drug-related-negative cues and (4) neutral pictures as control. Adult participants (n = 38 TUD subjects and n = 42 never-smokers) were recruited in Berlin, Germany. As contrasts of primary interest, the interactions of group × stimulus-type were assessed. Significance threshold correction for multiple testing was carried out with the family-wise error method. Correlation analyses were used to test the association with smoking characteristics. The 2 × 2 interaction of smoking status and stimulus type revealed activations in the brain reward system to drug-related-positive cues in TUD subjects (between-subjects effect: P-values ≤ 0.036). As a response to drug-related-negative cues, TUD subjects showed no reduced activation of the aversive brain network. Within the TUD group, a significant negative association was found between response of the aversive brain system to drug-related-negative cues (within-subjects effect: P-values ≤ 0.021) and the number of cigarettes smoked per day (right insula r = -0.386, P = 0.024; left insula r = -0.351, P = 0.042; right ACC r = -0.359, P = 0.037). Moderate smokers with tobacco use disorder appear to have altered brain reward processing of drug-related-positive (but not negative) cues compared with never smokers.

Bottled water usage and willingness to pay among Indian tourists: visual nudges and the theory of planned behaviour

ABSTRACT Consumption of bottled water creates large amounts of non-biodegradable plastic waste that poses a serious threat to marine life. Single-use plastic bags have been banned in several states in India. However, bottled water usage is still widely prevalent. We use Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour to understand how beliefs, attitudes, social norms, perceived costs, and perceived benefits affect tourists’ intentions to reduce bottled water usage. We use visual cues to compare the effect of positive and negative framing on tourists’ behavioural intentions and their willingness to pay an environmental tax. Pro-environmental beliefs, attitudes, and social norms affect tourists’ intention to carry their own water. Perceived costs such as the inconvenience of carrying water and changing habits are the primary barriers to eco-friendly intentions. Negative visual cues that nudge the tourist to be aware of environmental costs increase the willingness to pay an environmental tax but do not affect behavioural intentions. Women are more environmentally friendly than men, both with respect to behavioural intentions and willingness to pay. This study is the first to provide insight into the pro-environmental behavioural intentions of Indian tourists. Increasing consumer awareness and providing alternatives for clean drinking water may reduce bottled water consumption.

Specificity and wealth of autobiographical memories in restrictive and mixed anorexic patients.

The reduced specificity of positive and negative autobiographical memories observed in anorexic (AN) patients may reflect a global disturbance in their emotional information processing. However, their emotional difficulties may differ according to the subtype of AN, implying possible differences in the manifestation of autobiographical memory impairments. The aims of the study were (1) to confirm the autobiographical memory deficits in AN patients in terms of specificity and wealth of memories, and (2) to compare autobiographical deficits according to the AN subtype: restrictive type (AR) or binge/purging type (AB). Ninety-five non-clinical (NC) individuals and 95 AN patients including 69 AR and 22 AB patients were administered the Williams’ and Scott’s Autobiographical Memory Test. The results confirmed a lack of specificity regardless of emotional valence in the overall AN patient group without any distinction of subtype, which was linked to the number of hospitalizations. When the AN subtype was considered, AR patients demonstrated reduced specificity for negative memories only, suggesting differences in emotional functioning or in the mechanisms underlying reduced specificity between AR and AB patients. Furthermore, the overall AN group demonstrated lower variability and complexity in their memory content than the NC group. However, this difference in the complexity of recalled memories was only found in response to negative cues. When AN subtypes were considered, AR patients showed fewer complex memories than NC individuals. Beyond a reduced specificity, AN patients also depict a poverty in the range of event recall and a difficulty in developing narrative content. The clinical implications of such autobiographical memory deficits need to be further investigated.

“Nobody Really Knows What We Do”: Exploring the Organizational and Occupational Identification of Academic Librarians

ABSTRACT This study investigates the organizational and occupational identification of academic librarians. Results from 21 semi-structured interviews with librarians with instruction roles at an Ivy-league and two state universities reveal that academic librarians identify primarily with their occupation rather than organization. In addition, communication partner as well as two types of identity cues influence participants’ communicative strategies during the process of identification. Consistent with communication accommodation theory, in-group or out-group status is triggered by stereotypes, which affects participants’ accommodation or nonaccommodation decisions. Unlike previous studies, we find that perceived external prestige can serve as a negative cue limiting the amount of identification in a certain context. Other findings and implications are also discussed.

Prospective memory, emotions and Alzheimer's disease

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to implement intended actionsin the future. PM is particularly affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The main objective of this study was to examine the links between PM and emotions in AD. Since it has been shown that generally AD patients memorize a better information with emotional positive valence ("age-related positive effect"). Our hypothesis was that prior presentation of cue-action pairs to memorize would help to remember the prospective tasks to perform, if these actions were associated with emotional valences. Twenty patients with mild AD and 20 healthy participants were included in this study. The experimental protocol consisted in viewing a video simulating a visit to a shopping center. After receiving a shopping list, participants had to recall these actions after a given time ("time-based") or passing in front of particular stores ("event-based"). During the training, actions were associated with positive, negative or neutral cues. We also manipulated the task difficulty by giving weak or strong cue-action links, and by introducing distractors. The results showed that the patients' performance was significantly lower than that of the healthy elderly participants both in "event-based" and "time-based" task conditions. However, patients obtained scores similar to those obtained by elderly heathy subjects in "event-based" tasks associated with positive valence, and only when the link between the cues and the actions was strong. Associating positive stimuli with strong linked cue-action pairs seems to allow AD patients to compensate their difficulties in prospective memory. These results open avenues of future research for the rehabilitation of PM disorders in Alzheimer's disease.

Sense and timing: Localizing objects during emotional distraction.

There is substantial evidence demonstrating that emotional information influences perception. Yet across studies, findings of how it does so have been highly inconsistent. In particular, emotional context (task-unrelated emotional information in the environment) has a variable influence on spatial perceptual accuracy, sometimes improving and sometimes impairing the ability to localize objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the heterogenous nature of emotional influences on target localization is influenced by the specific combination of sensory modalities used in the task. In the present series of experiments, we used a cross-modal localization task to identify how emotional context influences the accuracy of spatial perception. By presenting nonemotional target stimuli alongside emotional nonspatial distractor items (facial expressions or vocalizations), we were able to systematically investigate how emotional stimuli presented to individual sensory modalities acted to modulate spatial perception at distinct stages of perception and action. In three separate experiments, distractor items were presented prior to or during target presentation or after presentation during the localization response. Intramodal emotional distractors influenced localization accuracy when they overlapped in timing with targets, and the direction of this effect was both modality and valence specific (Experiment I). Additionally, targeted contrasts revealed that auditory but not visual emotional distractors influenced localization of visual targets when presented during the behavioral response, with negative cues improving localization accuracy compared to neutral or positive cues (Experiment II). We suggest such effects reflect distinct patterns of unimodal versus multimodal processing in brain regions involved in early versus late stages of perceptual processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Age differences in facial trustworthiness perception are diminished by affective processing.

While perceptions of facial trustworthiness usually serve as our first references for social interactions, these impressions may ultimately turn out to be inaccurate or unreliable. Compared with younger adults, older adults generally face a higher risk of fraudulent exploitation; the characteristics of older adults' facial trustworthiness perception may play an important role in revealing the underlying mechanism of their being cheated. Previous studies have demonstrated that, in comparison with their younger counterparts, older adults tend to overestimate strangers' facial trustworthiness. In the present study, two experiments were conducted, aiming at testing (1) the age-related differences in facial trustworthiness perceptions (Experiment 1) and (2) whether any interventions (e.g., encouraging more deliberative processing or more affective processing) could be applied to help older adults reduce their tendency to overestimate trustworthiness, thus reducing their facial trustworthiness ratings to a lower level (Experiment 2). The results indicated that (1) consistent with previous studies, older adults provided higher trustworthiness ratings for unfamiliar faces than did younger adults (Experiment 1) and (2) more importantly, affective processing instead of deliberative processing could benefit older adults in their assessments of facial trustworthiness, leading them toward demonstrating similar-not significantly higher-levels of trust toward strange faces as younger adults (Experiment 2). A possible mechanism was offered, suggesting that affective processing might help older adults to detect negative cues in unfamiliar faces.

P103 The Power of Music: Creating a Pleasurable Eating Experience for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

<h3>Objective</h3> To evaluate whether the Community Support Services (CSS) Lunch Clinic can contribute to increased pleasure in eating and a reduction in challenging behavior during mealtimes by adjustments in environmental cues. <h3>Target audience</h3> Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) who are currently clients at CSS. <h3>Program Description</h3> This 8-week pilot program (30-minute session weekly) uses classical music to alter the eating environment for individuals with histories of rapid eating and disruptive mealtime behaviors. Behavioral changes during mealtimes are assessed via pre-/pos<i>t</i> test assessments from support staff. <h3>Use of Research or Theory</h3> Research suggests that music is an environmental factor that has direct influence on consumption patterns. Moreover, musical properties such as tempo and instrumentation can affect both the rate of eating as well as meal duration. The CSS Lunch Clinic incorporates these factors into a simple intervention involving the use of piano arrangements that are 45-120 beats per minute. <h3>Evaluation Methods</h3> In a pre-test format, support staff were interviewed about their clients' current eating habits and mealtime behaviors; the same individuals participated in a pos<i>t</i> test activity where they provided information regarding changes in their client's behavior. Staff input included observations of both positive and negative nonverbal cues such as frowning or smiling. <h3>Results</h3> The observational data indicates that clients experienced the music as soothing and found the experience pleasurable. An assessment of reported nonverbal cues in the pre and pos<i>t</i> test interviews revealed a 50% increase in positive nonverbal cues (eg, smiling, swaying to music) and a 30% decrease in negative nonverbal cues (eg, frowning and restlessness) from the baseline. The staff additionally reported in the pos<i>t</i> test interviews that the clients responded positively to the Lunch Clinic, looked forward to the sessions, and seemed more relaxed during these mealtimes. <h3>Conclusion</h3> The CSS Lunch Clinic shows potential as a way to create a more enjoyable environment for the clients during mealtimes. Limitations included difficulty creating quantitative measurements to assess the eating pace and obtaining feedback from nonverbal clients. Future iterations of this program will continue to use staff observations as a primary research tool, a qualitative alternative to assess eating behavior.

Medical students’ experience of the hidden curriculum around primary care careers: a qualitative exploration of reflective diaries

ObjectivesPrimary healthcare internationally is facing a workforce crisis with fewer junior doctors choosing general practice (GP) as a career. In the UK, a national report on GP careers highlighted adverse...

Dissociable impact of childhood trauma and deployment trauma on affective modulation of startle

Trauma disorders are often associated with alterations in aversive anticipation and disruptions in emotion/fear circuits. Heightened or blunted anticipatory responding to negative cues in adulthood may be due to differential trauma exposure during development, and previous trauma exposure in childhood may also modify effects of subsequent trauma in adulthood. The aim of the current investigation was to examine the contributions of childhood trauma on affective modulation of startle before and after trauma exposure in adulthood (a combat deployment). Adult male participants from the Marine Resilience Study with (n = 1145) and without (n = 1312) a history of reported childhood trauma completed an affective modulation of startle task to assess aversive anticipation. Affective startle response was operationalized by electromyography (EMG) recording of the orbicularis oculi muscle in response to acoustic stimuli when anticipating positive and negative affective images. Startle responses to affective images were also assessed. Testing occurred over three time-points; before going on a 7 month combat deployment and 3 and 6 months after returning from deployment. Startle response when anticipating negative images was greater compared to pleasant images across all three test periods. Across all 3 time points, childhood trauma was consistently associated with significantly blunted startle when anticipating negative images, suggesting reliable effects of childhood trauma on aversive anticipation. Conversely, deployment trauma was associated with increased startle reactivity post-deployment compared to pre-deployment, which was independent of childhood trauma and image valence. These results support the hypothesis that trauma exposure during development vs. adulthood may have dissociable effects on aversive anticipation and arousal mechanisms. Further study in women and across more refined age groups is needed to test generalizability and identify potential developmental windows for these differential effects.

Linking emotional intelligence to safety performance: The roles of situational awareness and safety training

Introduction: Safety outcomes in the workplace require individual employees to perform (behave) safely in everyday duties. While the literature suggests that emotional management capabilities or traits can be positively related to individual performance in certain conditions, it is not clear how they can influence safety-related performance in high-risk work contexts. Drawing upon trait activation theory, this paper aims to examine when emotional intelligence (EI) benefits employees’ safety performance. We propose that when employees receive inadequate safety training, EI is more likely to trigger their situational awareness and consequently promote their safety performance. Method: We collected time-lagged data from 133 full-time airplane pilots working in commercial aviation industry. Hierarchical moderated regression analysis was conducted to test the moderating effect of safety training inadequacy on the EI–situational awareness relationship. The moderated mediation model, which involves conditional indirect effects of EI on safety performance via situational awareness across different levels of safety training inadequacy, was tested using the PROCESS-based bootstrap confidence interval. Results: Safety training inadequacy negatively moderated the relationship between EI and situational awareness, such that EI was significantly related to situational awareness only when safety training inadequacy was more salient. The more inadequate safety training was, the greater the indirect effect of EI on safety performance via situational awareness was. Conclusions: Inadequate safety training, as a negative situational cue, can activate individuals’ EI to drive their safety-related cognitions (e.g., situational awareness) and behaviors. Effective safety training may be able to complement employees’ low EI in shaping their situational awareness and safety behaviors. Practical Applications: Aviation managers should monitor the adequacy and effectiveness of safety training; this could make pilots’ situational awareness and safety performance depend less on personal attributes (e.g., EI), which organizations are less able to control. When training capacity is temporarily limited, priority might be given to those with low EI.

When symmetric and curved visual contour meet intentional instructions: Hedonic value and preference.

Symmetry and contour take part in shaping visual preference. However, less is known about their combined contribution to preference. We examined the hedonic tone and preference triggered by the interaction of symmetry and contour. Symmetric/curved, symmetric/sharp-angled, asymmetric/curved, and asymmetric/sharp-angled stimuli were presented in an implicit and explicit task. The implicit task consisted of an affective stimulus-response compatibility task where participants matched the stimuli with positive and negative valence response cues. The explicit task recorded liking ratings from the same stimuli. We used instructed mindset to induce participants to focus on symmetry or contour in different parts of the experimental session. We found an implicit compatibility of symmetry and curvature with positive hedonic tone. Explicit results showed preference for symmetry and curvature. In both tasks, symmetry and curvature showed a cumulative interaction, with a larger contribution of symmetry to the overall effect. While symmetric and asymmetric stimuli contributed to the implicit positive valence of symmetry, the effect of curvature was mainly caused by inclination towards curved contours rather than rejection of sharp-angled contours. We did not find any correlation between implicit and explicit measures, suggesting that they may involve different cognitive processing.

Wolbachia manipulate fitness benefits of olfactory associative learning in a parasitoid wasp.

Upon encountering a host, a female parasitoid wasp has to decide whether to learn positive or negative cues related to the host. The optimal female decision will depend on the fitness costs and benefits of learned stimuli. Reward quality is positively related to the rate of behavioral acquisition in processes such as associative learning. Wolbachia, an endosymbiotic bacterium, often plays an impressive role in the manipulation of its arthropod host's biology. Here, we studied the responses of two natural Wolbachia infected/uninfected Trichogramma brassicae wasp populations to theoretically high- and low-reward values during a conditioning process and the consequences of their responses in terms of memory duration. According to our results, uninfected wasps showed an attraction response to high-value rewards, but showed aversive learning in response to low-value rewards. The memory span of uninfected wasps after conditioning by low-value rewards was significantly shorter than that for high-value rewards. As our results revealed, responses to high-quality hosts will bring more benefits (bigger size, increased fecundity and enhanced survival) than those to low-quality hosts for uninfected wasps. Infected wasps were attracted to conditioned stimuli with the same memory duration after conditioning by both types of hosts. This was linked to the fact that parasitoids emerging from both types of hosts present the same life-history traits. Therefore, these hosts represent the same quality reward for infected wasps. According to the obtained results, it can be concluded that Wolbachia manipulates the learning ability of its host, resulting in the wasp responding to all reward values similarly.

Manipulating oligodendrocyte intrinsic regeneration mechanism to promote remyelination.

In demyelinated lesions, astrocytes, activated microglia and infiltrating macrophages secrete several factors regulating oligodendrocyte precursor cells' behaviour. What appears to be the initiation of an intrinsic mechanism of myelin repair is only leading to partial recovery and inefficient remyelination, a process worsening over the course of the disease. This failure is largely due to the concomitant accumulation of inhibitory cues in and around the lesion sites opposing to growth promoting factors. Here starts a complex game of interactions between the signalling pathways controlling oligodendrocytes migration or differentiation. Receptors of positive or negative cues are modulating Ras, PI3K or RhoGTPases pathways acting on oligodendrocyte cytoskeleton remodelling. From the description of this intricate signalling network, this review addresses the extent to which the modulation of the global response to inhibitory cues may pave the route towards novel therapeutic approaches for myelin repair.

Neural correlates of alcohol use disorder severity among nontreatment-seeking heavy drinkers: An examination of the incentive salience and negative emotionality domains of the alcohol and addiction research domain criteria.

The Alcohol and Addiction Research Domain Criteria (AARDoC) propose that alcohol use disorder is associated with neural dysfunction in three primary domains: incentive salience, negative emotionality, and executive function. Prior studies in heavy drinking samples have examined brain activation changes associated with alcohol and negative affect cues, representing the incentive salience and negative emotionality domains, respectively. Yet studies examining such cue-induced changes in functional connectivity (FC) are relatively sparse. Nontreatment-seeking heavy drinking adults (N=149, 56.0% male, 48.6% non-white, mean age 34.8years (SD=10.0)) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during presentation of alcohol, negative, and neutral pictures. We focused on FC changes involving the nucleus accumbens and amygdala in addition to activation and FC correlations with self-reported AUD severity. For alcohol cues versus neutral cues, we observed accumbens FC changes in the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex (PFC), and amygdala FC changes with occipital, parietal, and hippocampal regions. AUD severity correlated positively with activation in the cerebellum (p<0.05), accumbens FC in the cingulate gyri, somatosensory gyri, and cerebellum (p<0.05), and with amygdala FC in the PFC and inferior parietal lobule (p<0.05) for alcohol cues versus neutral cues. For negative cues versus neutral cues, we observed accumbens FC changes in the lateral temporal, occipital, and parietal regions, and amygdala FC changes in the fusiform and lingual gyri (p<0.05). The present findings provide empirical support for the AARDoC domains of incentive salience and negative emotionality and indicate that AUD severity is associated with salience and response control for reward cues. When covarying for differences in nonalcohol substance use and mood disorder diagnoses, AUD severity was also associated with emotional reactivity for negative cues.

Negation Detection on Mexican Spanish Tweets: The T-MexNeg Corpus

In this paper, we introduce the T-MexNeg corpus of Tweets written in Mexican Spanish. It consists of 13,704 Tweets, of which 4895 contain negation structures. We performed an analysis of negation statements embedded in the language employed on social media. This research paper aims to present the annotation guidelines along with a novel resource targeted at the negation detection task. The corpus was manually annotated with labels of negation cue, scope, and, event. We report the analysis of the inter-annotator agreement for all the components of the negation structure. This resource is freely available. Furthermore, we performed various experiments to automatically identify negation using the T-MexNeg corpus and the SFU ReviewSP-NEG for training a machine learning algorithm. By comparing two different methodologies, one based on a dictionary and the other based on the Conditional Random Fields algorithm, we found that the results of negation identification on Twitter are lower when the model is trained on the SFU ReviewSP-NEG Corpus. Therefore, this paper shows the importance of having resources built specifically to deal with social media language.

Anxiety increases sensitivity to errors and negative feedback over time

Anxiety is characterized by sensitivity to negative external and internal information, apparent both in symptoms (e.g., hypervigilance and worry) and neural performance monitoring measures (i.e., feedback- and error-related negativity (FRN and ERN)). Here we examine whether anxiety is associated with persistent neural sensitivity to negative performance markers reflected in both the FRN and ERN (n = 273). Higher anxiety was associated with larger responses to both negative feedback and errors as the task progressed compared to those with lower anxiety particularly in women, suggesting that anxiety makes reactions to negative cues more persistent. Similar hypotheses were investigated for depression, which is associated with similar negative cognitive biases and deficits in reward-related processing, but results were mixed. Together, the findings identify variation over time-in-task as an overlooked dimension by which FRN and ERN may serve as a biomarker of anxiety but suggest that depression is not consistently related to performance monitoring.