As climate change and population growth increasingly stress freshwater resources, government agencies and scientists have recognized the importance of water reuse (the beneficial use of reclaimed or recycled water). While end users (municipalities and farmers) are largely open to exploring water reuse, a barrier to using this water source is the public's negative perception, or the 'yuck factor'. Recognizing that water reuse is becoming a necessity, there is an urgent need to determine how to improve public acceptance of this water source.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Over half of US military veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) use alcohol heavily, potentially to cope with their symptoms. This study investigated the neural underpinnings of PTSD symptoms and heavy drinking in veterans. We focused on brain responses to salient outcomes within predictive coding theory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Neuropsychopharmacologic effects of long-term opioid therapy (LTOT) in the context of chronic pain may result in subjective anhedonia coupled with decreased attention to natural rewards. Yet, there are no known efficacious treatments for anhedonia and reward deficits associated with chronic opioid use. Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a novel behavioral intervention combining training in mindfulness with savoring of natural rewards, may hold promise for treating anhedonia in LTOT.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDistress Tolerance (DT) is a transdiagnostic risk and maintenance factor implicated in a wide range of internalizing spectrum (INT) disorders. DT is commonly conceptualized as a higher-order construct, yet its lower-order dimensions are still debated. While the tolerance of negative emotions, frustration, and physical discomfort are widely considered to be central features of DT, the inclusions of intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and anxiety sensitivity (AS) are disputed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) required all Public Housing Authorities to become smokefree in July 2018, following an 18-month implementation period that began February 2017.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Young adults new to tobacco (including e-cigarettes) are at an increased risk of e-cigarette use after e-cigarette exposure. This study examined the association between noticing e-cigarette advertising features and perceived product appeal among non-tobacco-using young adults.
Methods: A sample of non-tobacco-using young adults (ages 18-29 years; n=1993) completed an online survey in 2021.
This EEG methods tutorial provides both a conceptual and practical introduction to a promising data reduction approach for time-frequency representations of EEG data: Time-Frequency Principal Components Analysis (TF-PCA). Briefly, the unique value of TF-PCA is that it provides a data-reduction approach that does not rely on strong a priori constraints regarding the specific timing or frequency boundaries for an effect of interest. Given that the time-frequency characteristics of various neurocognitive process are known to change across development, the TF-PCA approach is thus particularly well suited for the analysis of developmental TF data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince its beginnings in the early 20th century, the psychophysiological study of human brain function has included research into the spectral properties of electrical and magnetic brain signals. Now, dramatic advances in digital signal processing, biophysics, and computer science have enabled increasingly sophisticated methodology for neural time series analysis. Innovations in hardware and recording techniques have further expanded the range of tools available to researchers interested in measuring, quantifying, modeling, and altering the spectral properties of neural time series.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Opioid misuse is hypothesized to compromise the ability to regulate negative emotions, as manifested through visceral and peripheral physiological signals. However, neurophysiological impairment of top-down cognitive emotion regulation in opioid misuse has not previously been shown.
Methods: Patients with chronic pain who had been taking opioids for 90 days or longer (N = 149; female, n = 98) underwent a negative emotion regulation task with electroencephalography.
One critical aspect of reward-feedback is the impact of local outcome history-how past experiences with choices and outcomes influences current behavior and neural activity. Yet, prior event-related potential work in this area has been contentious. This study contributes to this field by using time-frequency measures to better isolate constituent processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Tobacco price promotions may prompt tobacco trials among youth. We assessed whether receiving price promotions for any tobacco, cigarettes, e-cigarettes and cigars was associated with product use progression.
Methods: The analysis included a nationally representative sample of youth never tobacco users (aged 12-16; n=9405) from wave 4 (2016-2018) of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study.
Fraud can cause severe financial losses and affect the physical and mental health of victims. This study aimed to explore the manipulative characteristics of fraudsters and their relationship with other psychological variables. Thirty-four fraudsters were selected from a medium-security prison in China, and thirty-one healthy participants were recruited online.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEven though people spend the majority of their time indoors, the role of buildings in shaping human experience is still not well understood. The objective of this experimental project is to develop, test, and validate a data-driven neuroscience approach to understand the built environment's impact on occupant cognitive function and mental health. The present study utilized virtual environments and electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) approaches, to provide objective neurophysiological information about how sustainable buildings (SBs) impact people's affective and cognitive functioning differently compared to conventional building (CBs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvery year, most Black Americans report experiencing racial discrimination, which has been shown to have a variety of negative consequences. Aspects of racial identity, particularly holding a positive perception of one's racial group (private regard), may buffer the impact of negative experiences including racial discrimination through differential coping strategy use. The current study (1) examined whether level of private regard impacted the type of coping strategies used across various forms of perceived experiences of racial discrimination and (2) tested for indirect pathways from perceived experiences of racial discrimination to different coping strategy use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFP3 amplitude reductions, commonly elicited in oddball paradigms, have been associated with both internalizing (e.g., depression and anxiety) and externalizing problems (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use has become increasingly prevalent among US youth and young adults in recent years. Exposure to e-cigarette marketing may stimulate e-cigarette use. In this study, we estimated the longitudinal association between e-cigarette marketing exposure and e-cigarette experimentation among US youth and young adult never tobacco users.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRelatively little attention has been paid to the neural basis of superior memory despite its potential in providing important insight into efforts to improve memory in the general population or to offset age-related cognitive decline. The current study reports a rare opportunity to reproduce and isolate specific neural activities directly associated with exceptional memory. To capture the brain processes responsible for superior memory, we returned to a laboratory task and analytic approach used to explore the nature of exceptional memory, namely, digit-span task combined with verbal protocol analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTheta oscillations (4-8 Hz) provide an organizing principle of cognitive control, allowing goal-directed behavior. In adults, theta power over medial-frontal cortex (MFC) underlies conflict/error monitoring, whereas theta connectivity between MFC and lateral-frontal regions reflects cognitive control recruitment. However, prior work has not separated theta responses that occur before and immediately after a motor response, nor explained how medial-lateral connectivity drives different kinds of control behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychophysiology
September 2018
The role of reward context has been investigated as an important factor in feedback processing. Previous work has demonstrated that the amplitude of the feedback negativity (FN) depends on the value of the outcome relative to the range of possible outcomes in a given context, not the objective value of the outcome. However, some research has shown that the FN does not scale with loss magnitude in loss-only contexts, suggesting that some contexts do not show a pattern of context dependence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe feedback negativity (FN) event-related potential (ERP) is widely studied during gambling feedback tasks. However, research on FN and anxiety is minimal and the findings are mixed. To clarify these discrepancies, the current study (N = 238) used time-frequency analysis to disentangle overlapping contributions of delta (0-3 Hz) and theta (3-7 Hz) to feedback processing in a clinically anxious sample, with severity assessed through general worry and physiological arousal scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe neurophysiological mechanisms involved in the evaluation of performance feedback have been widely studied in the ERP literature over the past twenty years, but understanding has been limited by the use of traditional time-domain amplitude analytic approaches. Gambling outcome valence has been identified as an important factor modulating event-related potential (ERP) components, most notably the feedback negativity (FN). Recent work employing time-frequency analysis has shown that processes indexed by the FN are confounded in the time-domain and can be better represented as separable feedback-related processes in the theta (3-7 Hz) and delta (0-3 Hz) frequency bands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is a tremendous global and national (US) burden associated with alcohol misuse and alcohol use disorder (AUD). Further, of the mental health disorders, AUD has the widest treatment gap. Thus, there is a critical need for improved understanding of the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of AUD.
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