Music Perception in Older Adults With Hearing Loss: Protective Effect of Musical Experience.

Objectives: The goal of this project was to investigate the impact of musical experience, hearing loss, and age on music perception in older adults. The authors hypothesized that older adults with a varying degree of musical experience would perform better at music perception tasks than their counterparts without musical experience while controlling for age and hearing loss.

Design: This study used a descriptive correlational cross-sectional design.

Maternal trauma exposure is linked to adult offspring's cognitive functioning in the context of mass violence.

Objective: This study aimed to examine whether mothers' level of trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are related to their offspring's cognitive functioning.

Method: Mothers exposed to the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi ( = 181) and one of their adult offspring were recruited in Rwanda. Mothers and their offspring answered questionnaires on sociodemographic information, the level of trauma exposure, and PTSD symptoms.

Understanding the structure of autobiographical memories: A study of trauma memories from the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

How do we remember traumatic events, and are these memories different in individuals who experience post-traumatic stress? Some evidence suggests that traumatic events are mnemonically enhanced, or include more episodic detail, relative to other types of memories. Simultaneously, individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have more non-episodic details in all of their memories, a pattern hypothesized to result from impairment in executive function. Here, we explore these questions in a unique population that experienced severely traumatic events more than 20 years ago - individuals who lived through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Hearing fearful prosody impairs visual working memory maintenance.

Interference by distractors has been associated multiple times with diminished visual and auditory working memory (WM) performance. Negative emotional distractors in particular lead to detrimental effects on WM. However, these associations have only been seen when distractors and items to maintain in WM are from the same sensory modality.

An investigation of the mechanisms underlying the link between abstract reasoning and intrusive memories: A trauma analogue study.

Potentially traumatic events elicit intrusive memories to which some individuals are more vulnerable than others. Lower abstract reasoning capacity has been related to more intrusive memories. A more perceptual processing style when encoding the event may mediate this link.

Intergenerational transmission of trauma and its association with attitudes toward reconciliation.

Objective: We aimed to investigate the link between mothers' posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and their adult offspring's attitudes toward reconciliation and psychopathology among survivors of the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda. We also sought to examine whether parenting styles mediate the relationship between mothers' PTSD symptoms and their adult offspring's psychopathology, if any.

Method: Mother-child dyads ( = 181) were recruited in Rwanda and completed measures of trauma exposure, PTSD, depression, attitudes toward reconciliation, and parenting styles.

Affective States During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Progression of Intensity and Relation With Public Health Compliance Behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic was expected to cause intense affective reactions. This situation provided a unique opportunity to examine the characteristics and correlates of emotions in a real-world context with great significance. Our study aimed to describe the progression of positive and negative affective states during the pandemic, and to investigate which affective states predicted compliance with public health measures.

DLPFC controls the rapid neural response to visual threat: An ERP and rTMS study.

Individuals are faster at detecting threatening stimuli than neutral stimuli. While generally considered a rapid bottom-up response, this threat superiority effect is also modulated by top-down mechanisms known to rely on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). What remains unclear is whether the response is modulated only at later stages of processing, or whether rapid attention to threat itself is controlled in a top-down manner.

Disruption of working memory and contralateral delay activity by nociceptive stimuli is modulated by task demands.

Top-down processes allow the selection and prioritization of information by limiting attentional capture by distractors, and these mechanisms depend on task demands such as working memory (WM) load. However, bottom-up processes give salient stimuli a stronger neuronal representation and provoke attentional capture. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of salient nociceptive stimuli on WM while manipulating task demands.

Alteration of early attentional processing after analogue trauma exposure: evidence from event-related potentials.

The present study aimed to determine whether exposure to an analogue traumatic event affects attentional processing of emotional information. Two groups of non-clinical participants matched on anxiety level, depression symptoms and stressful life events viewed either a trauma or a neutral film. They then performed an emotional Stroop task during which both continuous electroencephalographic activity was recorded and intrusive memories were measured.

Visual exploration in adults: Habituation, mere exposure, or optimal level of arousal?

Exploration is one of the most powerful behaviours that drive learning from infancy to adulthood. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of novelty and subjective preference in visual exploration. To do this, we combined a visual exploration task with a subjective evaluation task, presenting novel and familiar pictures.

Perceptual processing of stimuli related to an analogue traumatic event: An ERP study.

Previous research has suggested that exposure to potentially traumatic events can lead to increased perceptual processing specific to trauma-related stimuli. Moreover, conceptual processing strategies during encoding may reduce the effect of trauma exposure on perceptual processing. The current study investigated the effect of a trauma film on perceptual processing with visual evoked potentials.

Exploring the mechanisms responsible for the modulating role of frowning in emotional reasoning: An ERP study.

Studies show that emotions impact reasoning, and that emotions are embodied. A recent study revealed that emotions embodied in facial expressions can modulate the impact of emotional content on reasoning accuracy. In the current study, we aimed to explore the mechanisms responsible for the impact of frowning on emotional reasoning using electrophysiology.

Stressful Life Events Are Related to More Negative Interpretations, but Not Under Acute Stress.

Studies have identified deleterious effects of stress on multiple cognitive processes such as memory and attention. Little is known about the impact of stress on interpretation. We investigated how an induced acute stress and more long-term stress related to life events were associated with interpretations of ambiguous stimuli.

Reduction of Pain and Spinal Nociceptive Transmission by Working Memory is Load Dependant.

Working memory (WM) engagement produces pain inhibition. However, it remains unclear whether higher WM load increases this effect. The aim of this study was to investigate the interaction between WM load and pain inhibition by WM and examine the contribution of cerebrospinal mechanism.

Negative emotions influence EEG correlates of inference formation during analogical reasoning.

Previous research indicates that negative emotions influence cognitive resource utilization during analogical reasoning. However, no research has yet demonstrated an influence of negative emotions on inference formation during analogical reasoning. For this reason, we used evoked response potentials to investigate how negatively valenced content affects inference formation during analogical reasoning.

Impact of Music on Working Memory in Rwanda.

Previous research shows that listening to pleasant, stimulating and familiar music is likely to improve working memory performance. The benefits of music on cognition have been widely studied in Western populations, but not in other cultures. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of music on working memory in a non-Western sociocultural context: Rwanda.

The psychological correlates of transitional justice in Rwanda: A long-term assessment.

Objective: We tested the psychological correlates of the Gacaca tribunals, a massive program of transitional justice put in place by the Rwandan government following the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi.

Method: The sample consisted of 679 Rwandese participants, among which 373 (55%) were survivors of the genocide. We contrasted three groups of participants: (1) those who had never attended the Gacaca ( = 229), the control group, (2) those who had attended without testifying ( = 275), the attendance group, and (3) those who had attended and testified ( = 120), the testimony group.

The impact of trauma exposure on explicit and implicit memory.

The present study aimed to determine whether explicit and implicit memory systems are modulated by the type of content (neutral, emotional trauma-related and generally-emotional) in sexual abuse victims who did not develop PTSD, compared to non-exposed controls. A mixed-factorial design with Content (neutral, trauma-related, generally-emotional) as a within-subject variable and Group (victims, controls) as a between-subject variable was used in two experiments. In both experiments, participants were required to learn three stories presented orally: a neutral, an emotional trauma-related (sexual abuse) and a generally-emotional story.

Is it dangerous? The role of an emotional visual search strategy and threat-relevant training in the detection of guns and knives.

Counter-terrorism strategies rely on the assumption that it is possible to increase threat detection by providing explicit verbal instructions to orient people's attention to dangerous objects and hostile behaviours in their environment. Nevertheless, whether verbal cues can be used to enhance threat detection performance under laboratory conditions is currently unclear. In Experiment 1, student participants were required to detect a picture of a dangerous or neutral object embedded within a visual search display on the basis of an emotional strategy 'is it dangerous?' or a semantic strategy 'is it an object?'.

Peritraumatic dissociation and post-traumatic stress disorder in individuals exposed to armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The purpose of this study was to verify the hypothesis that there is an association between peritraumatic dissociation (PD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in individuals exposed to recurrent armed conflict. More specifically, we sought to evaluate whether PD differentially predicts PTSD according to the degree of exposure to the potentially traumatic event (PTE), the level of education, and gender. A total of 120 individuals between 17 and 75 years of age, including 51 women, completed the Traumatic Events List, the Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire, and the French version of the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist Scale, as well as a questionnaire providing information regarding sociodemographic details.

The local perceptual bias of a non-remote and educated population.

In 1977, Navon argued that perception is biased towards the processing of global as opposed to local visual information (or the forest before the trees) and implicitly assumed this to be true across places and cultures. Previous work with normally developing participants has supported this assumption except in one extremely remote African population. Here, we explore local-global perceptual bias in normally developing African participants living much less remotely than the African population tested previously.

Lateralized Affective Word Priming and Gender Effect.

Affective priming research suggests that processing of affective words is a quick and short lived process. Using the divided visual field (DVF) paradigm, investigations of the lateralization of affective word processing have yielded inconsistent results. However, research on semantic processing of words generally suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) is the location where rapid processing occurs.

Improving working memory and pain inhibition in older persons using transcranial direct current stimulation.

The aim of the present study was to examine whether transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) could enhance working memory and pain inhibition in older persons. Fifteen volunteers (7 women, 8 men; mean ± SD: 64 ± 4.4 y.

Reasoning and concurrent timing: a study of the mechanisms underlying the effect of emotion on reasoning.

Negative emotions typically have an adverse effect on reasoning, especially analytic or logical reasoning. This effect can be explained using an attentional framework in which emotion detracts limited-capacity cognitive resources which are required for reasoning. Another possibility is that the effect of emotion on reasoning is mediated by arousal, as previous research has shown that physiological arousal can be associated with decreased reasoning performance.