Vigilant State Research Articles

Focal microdialysis of CO2 in the perifornical-hypothalamic area increases ventilation during wakefulness but not NREM sleep

We investigated whether the perifornical-lateral hypothalamic area (PF-LHA), where the orexin neurons reside, is a central chemoreceptor site by microdialysis of artificial cerebrospinal fluid (aCSF) equilibrated with 25% CO2 into PF-LHA in conscious rats. This treatment is known to produce a focal tissue acidification like that associated with a 6–7mm Hg increase in arterial PCO2. Such focal acidification in the PF-LHA significantly increased ventilation up to 15% compared with microdialysis of normal aCSF equilibrated with 5% CO2 only in wakefulness but not in sleep in both the dark (P=0.004) and light (P<0.001) phases of the diurnal cycle. This response was predominantly due to a significant increase in respiratory frequency (11%, P<0.001). There were no significant effects on ventilation in the group with probes misplaced outside the PF-LHA. These results suggest that PF-LHA functions as a central chemoreceptor site in the central nervous system in a vigilant state dependent manner with predominant effects in wakefulness.

Which Helps Detect Lies, Eagerness or Vigilance? The Impact of Regulatory Focus on Lie Detection

The current research explored the influence of regulatory focus on the accuracy of lie detection. We propose that a prevention focus leads to greater performance in detecting lies than those under a promotion focus, because a prevention focus engenders a vigilant state and enhances people’s sensitivity to negative information. Four studies supported this hypothesis using different lie detection materials. The first two studies considered regulatory focus as a chronic individual difference and found that prevention focus was positively related to accuracy in detecting lies. Studies 3 and 4 manipulated regulatory focus by a) framing the task as truth detection vs. lie detection and b) asking participants to write essays about their aspirations and hopes vs. their duties and obligations. Results consistently found that individuals under a prevention focus had higher accuracy in detecting lies than promotion focused individuals. Importantly, a prevention focus did not produce a mere response bias and increase people’s tendency to judgment truth as lies. Implications for motivation and conflict resolution are discussed.

Associations between Regional Cortical Thickness and Attentional Networks as Measured by the Attention Network Test

Efficient attention is pivotal for cognitive functioning, and individual differences in attentional functions are likely related to variations in structural properties of the brain. Attention is supported by separate processes, and models of the relationship between attention and brain structure must take this into account. The Attention Network Test (ANT) yields behavioral measures of 3 independent attentional components: executive control (EC), alerting, and orienting. EC relates to resolving cognitive interference, alerting refers to continuous maintenance of a vigilant state, and orienting to selection of and orienting toward sensory information. Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies suggests that the ANT components recruit different cortical networks. However, the structural correlates are not established. Therefore, ANT scores were correlated with cortical thickness across the brain surface in 268 healthy adults spanning 20-84 years of age. Specific correlations were found between cortical thickness and EC and alerting in regions implicated by functional neuroimaging and lesion studies, including anterior cingulate, lateral prefrontal, and right inferior frontal gyri for EC and parietal areas for alerting. The brain-behavior correlations were relatively stable across adulthood, indicating that factors influencing cortical maturation rather than aging-related atrophy specifically were instrumental in shaping the structural foundation for visuospatial attention in adults.

Beyond the vigilant state: globalisation and intelligence

AbstractThe world of intelligence has grown exponentially over the last decade. This article suggests that prevailing explanation of this expansion – the spectre of ‘new terrorism’ – reflects serious misunderstandings. Much of the emergency legislation which has extended the power of the state so remarkably was already sitting in the pending trays of officials in the late 1990s. Instead, the rise of both the ‘new terrorism’ and its supposed nemesis – the secret state – both owe more to long-term structural factors. Globalisation has accelerated a wide range of sub-military transnational threats, of which the ‘new terrorism’ is but one example. Meanwhile the long-promised engines of global governance are nowhere in sight. In their absence, the underside of a globalising world is increasingly policed by ‘vigilant states’ that resort to a mixture of military power and intelligence power in an attempt to address these problems. Yet the intelligence services cannot meet the improbable demands for omniscience made by governments, nor can they square their new enforcer role with vocal demands by global civil society for improved ethical practice.

Microglia

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Vigilance in Female Bottlenose Dolphins (&lt;em&gt;Tursiops sp.&lt;/em&gt;) Before and After Calving

Previous research has indicated that bottlenose dolphins alternate activity levels between hemispheres while at rest. This rest strategy allows dolphins to maintain continuous vigilance of their external environment. Dolphins in the care of humans exhibit different behaviors while presumably at rest, including floating at the surface, lying at the bottom, and swimming at very slow speeds in stereotyped patterns. Dolphin mothers in the care of humans have been reported to “not rest” and swim continuously for extended periods of time (weeks or even months) when their calves are first born. The current study examined the night-time rest patterns and vigilance of five female bottlenose dolphins before and after parturition. By differentiating between two types of resting behaviors (floating and slow swimming), we found that mothers altered their rest strategy depending on the parturition state. Floating was only observed at high levels preparturition. In contrast, mothers primarily exhibited active swims (a vigilant state) the first two weeks, post-parturition. The remaining six weeks were characterized by a steady increase in slow swimming (a resting, vigilance state). This change in swim behavior may be associated with neonatal development and may allow mothers to sustain high levels of vigilance for extended periods of time. The results of a behavioral test of vigilance indicated that the mothers also increased their vigilance level post-parturition. Mothers sustained their increased response rate over the eight-week post-parturition period, demonstrating that dolphin mothers maintain high levels of vigilance for an extended period of time.

Sex and the City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Progressive Era

In 1912 Jane Addams breathed a sigh of relief that social control was on the rise. "Fortunately . . . for our moral progress," Addams noted optimis-tically, "the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be restrained by the demonstrable needs of society."1 In attacking such "specious and illegitimate theories of freedom," Addams joined a broad coalition of Progressive reformers seeking to reshape the tenets of liberalism. Had not the very forces of modernity, these reformers asked, rendered liberal ideals of personal freedom from state control obsolete and out of fashion? As the Supreme Court has infamously shown by its 1905 Lochner decision, in the machine age, individual freedom had all too often become an excuse for economic exploitation, striking down New York's ten-hour workday as an obstacle to "freedom of contract." Appeals to laissez-faire freedom—whatever "laissez-faire" might mean in the era of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the U.S. Rubber Company—only tied the hands of reformers, who increasingly felt that state and federal government offered the sole counterbalance to corporate control, urban degeneration, and social anomie. As Herbert Croly argued in The Promise of American Life, individual liberty was no longer a good to be protected from state intrusion, but rather a product of state regulation to be actively generated by a vigilant state. In this Progressive reconstruction of liberalism, the groundwork for true liberty lay in forms of "social control" that might paradoxically seem a restraint on "hard-won liberties."2 Yet what, in Jane Addams's view, necessitated such restraints? The attacks against "illegitimate theories of freedom" appear in her 1912 examination of commercial vice and white slavery, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. The white slavery scare, sweeping through Great Britain in the 1880s, but arriving [End Page 411] in the United States shortly before World War I, offered a particularly powerful context for social regulation. Unlike other Progressive Era issues concerning working hours or occupational safety, white slavery threatened to upset the basic framework of classical liberalism—the division of society into distinct private and public spheres. For if evil could penetrate into the home and steal away its most precious goods, was not the state obligated to leave the public sphere and enter into the hallways and bedrooms of the home to ensure every young girl's safety? Prostitution therefore came to dramatize, as few issues could, the practical necessity of responding to social problems on their own terms and tracing the roots of commercial vice into the private lives and daily routines that nurtured public immorality. Addams's own account illustrates such a tentative foray into the home. Basing her book upon the investigations waged by the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, Addams finds herself inundated in "a bewildering mass of information" gathered on the home life of one hundred Juvenile Court children and four thousand parents, supplemented by the personal histories of nearly a thousand girls working in the department stores, factories, offices, hotels, and restaurants of Cook County. In response to this mass of social data, Addams's book works to construct what she calls a "counter-knowledge" that would answer the pervasive network of sexual allurement in dance halls, nickelodeons, and amusement parks with an equally expansive circuit of social control involving, in her words, "city officials, policemen, judges, attorneys, employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men."3 In this essay, I will use one of the most popular linkages in the white slavery panic—the release of George Loane Tucker'...

Electrophysiological Correlates of Vigilance During a Continuous Performance Test in Healthy Adults

The present study evaluated patterns of electrophysiological activity associated with sustained vigilance in healthy adults. Quantitative electroencephalographs (QEEG) were recorded during the performance of a Continuous Performance Test (CPT). Participants were divided into low and high vigilance groups based upon their reaction time changes between the early and late portions of the CPT. Coherence measures were calculated from the QEEG across the baseline, early CPT, and late CPT experimental conditions. Participants in the low vigilance group had higher baseline and CPT frontal to posterior coherence in the alpha and beta bands suggestive of a less vigilant state throughout the entire study. Additionally, the low vigilance group had a significantly greater beta 1 band coherence drop from baseline to the initial portion of the CPT than the high vigilance group. The combined groups had significantly lower amounts of right hemisphere frontal to posterior coherence across a number of frequency bands throughout all of the phases of the study when compared to the homologous left hemisphere sites. These interhemispheric coherence differences are consistent with vigilance network theories that implicate the right frontal and parietal lobes in the maintenance of sustained attention (M. I. Posner & M. E. Raichle, 1994).

APPLYING THE CONSUMER DECISION MODEL TO ENFORCE MINIMUM AGE TOBACCO PURCHASING LAWS

This paper describes how the consumer decision-making model can be applied to store clerks faced with determining which customers should be carded for the purchase of tobacco products. Assuming that this task induces a vigilant (high involvement) decision state, clerks (N=256) rated four combined shopper-product profiles and assessed the likelihood that the shopper would be asked to provide identification. Results indicated that both age-related facial qualities and the gender of the customer contributed to the decision to request identification. The managerial implications and utility of the consumer decision model for enhancing compliance with minimum age purchasing laws are considered.

Limiting underage alcohol purchases: An application of the consumer decision model

The consumer decision-making model is applied to store clerks faced with determining which customers should be carded for the purchase of alcohol. Manipulated decisional time pressure induced either a vigilant (high involvement) or hypervigilant (low involvement) decision state. Clerks (N = 256) rated four combined shopper–product profiles under conditions of high or low time pressure and assessed the likelihood that the shopper would be carded. Results indicated that increased time pressure reduced the likelihood of being required to present identification and that males were least likely to be asked for identification under high time pressure. The managerial implications and utility of the consumer decision model for enhancing compliance with minimum legal drinking age laws are considered.

Hemodynamic and electrophysiological study of the role of the anterior cingulate in target-related processing and selection for action.

A number of experiments requiring attention or other complex cognitive functions have found substantial activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Some of these studies have suggested that this area may be involved in "selection for action," such as for selecting to respond to a target stimulus. Here, positron emission tomography (PET) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to study the effects of target probability during a demanding visual spatial attention task, in which the target percentage was either low (2%, 1 per approximately 26 sec) or high (16%, 1 per approximately 3.5 sec). As expected, ERPs to detected targets evoked large, bilaterally distributed P300 waves. The PET showed strong activation of the ACC, particularly dorsally, during all the attend conditions relative to passive. However, these PET activations did not significantly differ between the few-target and many-target conditions, showing only a small trend to be larger in the many-target case. Such results indicate that the bulk of the ACC activation does not reflect selection for action per se, while also suggesting that the ACC is not a likely source of the P300 effect. The current data, however, do not argue against the ACC serving a role in maintaining a vigilant or anticipatory state in which one may need to select for action, or in continually or repeatedly (i.e., for each stimulus) needing to resolve whether to select to act or to not act.

Clive Emsley. The English Police: A Political and Social History. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 253. $59.95. - Bernard Porter. The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell &amp; Brewer. 1991. Pp. xvi, 256. $59.00.

Clive Emsley. The English Police: A Political and Social History. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 253. $59.95. - Bernard Porter. The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell &amp; Brewer. 1991. Pp. xvi, 256. $59.00.

Sleep physiology and psychological aspects of the fibrositis (fibromyalgia) syndrome.

Fibrositis (fibromyalgia) patients were compared with normal controls in terms of electrophysiology (EEG), self-report indicants of awakening, quality of sleep, behaviourally signalled awakenings, and Symptom Check List 90R (SCL-90R) scores. The results differentiated fibrositis patients from normal controls in terms of SCL-90R scores, with fibrositis patients showing significantly more psychopathology. Fibrositis patients had more alpha EEG sleep and less REM and Stage 1 sleep. They were better able to recall their behaviourally signalled awakenings the following morning and reported qualitatively less satisfying sleep than the normal controls. The alpha EEG sleep anomaly may reflect a vigilant arousal state during nocturnal sleep and result in the daytime experience of unrefreshing sleep, psychologic distress, that re-enforces the perpetuation of the sleep-related symptoms.

The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War

'This vividly written, fascinating study will be essential reading not only for historians of the British state, but to anyone concerned to understand the origins of contemporary policing problems.' NEW SOCIETY The origins of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch are shrouded in secrecy; its establishment took place against a background of fierce opposition to any kind of political force in Britain. This is the first book to seek to probe beneath that secrecy and examine the origins, methods and achievements of the Special Branch. It will be of interest to everyone concerned with the growth of today's 'secret state'.(Originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987)

Electrocortical synchronization resulting from reduced proprioceptive drive caused by neuromuscular blocking agents

1. 1. Intravenous injection of flaxedil produces electrocortical synchronization (ECS). Such ECS may be maintained for many hours by approximately 2–4 mg/kg of flaxedil alone. 2. 2. If flaxedil is not repeated and ECS allowed to wear off, the resulting desynchronized brain potentials are rapidly synchronized again on injection of minute doses (0.25–0.50 mg/kg) of barbiturate. 3. 3. ECS is accompanied by the behavioral attributes of sleep. Desynchronization by sensory stimulation coincides with behavioral arousal—invariably by dilatation of the pupil, and sometimes by a rise in blood pressure, attempts at spontaneous respiration, or somatic movements. 4. 4. Intracarotid injection of flaxedil does not produce ECS. It is therefore suggested that cortical synchronization elicited by this drug is not due to direct action on brain activity. Rather, cortical synchronization is considered to be an indirect result of the withdrawal of proprioceptive impulses to the cortex. Such partial deafferentation results in a level of afferent supply insufficient to maintain the brain in a vigilant state. 5. 5. Mechanisms and pathways by which these effects are mediated probably involved indirect, long-latency cerebellar influences. 6. 6. Applications of the data to anesthesiology are indicated.