Human factors in triaging forensic items: Casework pressures and ambiguity aversion.

Triaging is an important step in deciding which items collected from crime scenes to select for forensic analysis, and so subsequent examination and findings often depend on it. This study aims to evaluate the influence of casework pressures and tolerance to ambiguity on triaging of items collected from a crime scene. A realistic pressure manipulation paradigm was developed and was found to be effective in inducing feelings of pressure in participants in an online setting.

Connectome-Based Predictive Modeling of PTSD Development Among Recent Trauma Survivors.

Importance: The weak link between subjective symptom-based diagnostics for posttraumatic psychopathology and objective neurobiological indices hinders the development of effective personalized treatments.

Objective: To identify early neural networks associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) development among recent trauma survivors.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This prognostic study used data from the Neurobehavioral Moderators of Posttraumatic Disease Trajectories (NMPTDT) large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging dataset of recent trauma survivors.

Modeling decision-making under uncertainty with qualitative outcomes.

Modeling decision-making under uncertainty typically relies on quantitative outcomes. Many decisions, however, are qualitative in nature, posing problems for traditional models. Here, we aimed to model uncertainty attitudes in decisions with qualitative outcomes.

Moderate stability of risk and ambiguity attitudes across quantitative and qualitative decisions.

Uncertainty lies at the heart of everyday choices, affecting both decisions about precise quantities and those with less tangible, more qualitative, outcomes. Previous literature on decisions under uncertainty focused on alternatives with quantifiable outcomes, for example monetary lotteries. In such scenarios, decision-makers make decisions based on success chance, outcome magnitude, and individual preferences for uncertainty.

Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits.

To understand human learning and progress, it is crucial to understand curiosity. But how consistent is curiosity's conception and assessment across scientific research disciplines? We present the results of a large collaborative project assessing the correspondence between curiosity measures in personality psychology and cognitive science. A total of 820 participants completed 15 personality trait measures and 9 cognitive tasks that tested multiple aspects of information demand.

Representation of Anticipated Rewards and Punishments in the Human Brain.

Subjective value is a core concept in neuroeconomics, serving as the basis for decision making. Despite the extensive literature on the neural encoding of subjective reward value in humans, the neural representation of punishment value remains relatively understudied. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the neural representation of reward value, including methodologies, involved brain regions, and the concept of a common currency representation of diverse reward types in decision-making and learning processes.

Affective motivations for substance misuse differentially relate to consideration of multiple costs during effortful decision making.

Heightened sensitivity to costs during decision making consistently has been related to substance use. However, no work in this area has manipulated cost information to examine how people evaluate and compare multiple costs. Furthermore, limited work has examined how affective motivations for substance use modulate the evaluation of cost information.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study of Risk and Ambiguity in Monetary and Medical Decision-Making.

How do decision-makers choose between alternatives offering outcomes that are not easily quantifiable? Previous literature on decisions under uncertainty focused on alternatives with quantifiable outcomes, for example monetary lotteries. In such scenarios, decision-makers make decisions based on success chance, outcome magnitude, and individual preferences for uncertainty. It is not clear, however, how individuals construct subjective values when outcomes are not directly quantifiable.

Unpacking workplace stress and forensic expert decision-making: From theory to practice.

Workplace stress can affect forensic experts' job satisfaction and performance, which holds financial and other implications for forensic service providers. Therefore, it is important to understand and manage workplace stress, but that is not simple or straightforward. This paper explores stress as a human factor that influences forensic expert decision-making.

Emotional State Transitions in Trauma-Exposed Individuals With and Without Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Importance: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is marked by the contrasting symptoms of hyperemotional reactivity and emotional numbing (ie, reduced emotional reactivity). Comprehending the mechanism that governs the transition between neutral and negative emotional states is crucial for developing targeted therapeutic strategies.

Objectives: To explore whether individuals with PTSD experience a more pronounced shift between neutral and negative emotional states and how the intensity of emotional numbing symptoms impacts this shift.

Manipulating the reliability of target-color information modulates value-driven attentional capture.

Previously rewarded stimuli slow response times (RTs) during visual search, despite being physically non-salient and no longer task-relevant or rewarding. Such value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) has been measured in a training-test paradigm. In the training phase, the search target is rendered in one of two colors (one predicting high reward and the other low reward).

Structural Neuroimaging of Hippocampus and Amygdala Subregions in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Scoping Review.

Numerous studies have explored the relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the hippocampus and the amygdala because both regions are implicated in the disorder's pathogenesis and pathophysiology. Nevertheless, those key limbic regions consist of functionally and cytoarchitecturally distinct substructures that may play different roles in the etiology of PTSD. Spurred by the availability of automatic segmentation software, structural neuroimaging studies of human hippocampal and amygdala subregions have proliferated in recent years.

Neural patterns differentiate traumatic from sad autobiographical memories in PTSD.

For people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), recall of traumatic memories often displays as intrusions that differ profoundly from processing of 'regular' negative memories. These mnemonic features fueled theories speculating a unique cognitive state linked with traumatic memories. Yet, to date, little empirical evidence supports this view.

Examining the association between posttraumatic stress disorder and disruptions in cortical networks identified using data-driven methods.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with lower cortical thickness (CT) in prefrontal, cingulate, and insular cortices in diverse trauma-affected samples. However, some studies have failed to detect differences between PTSD patients and healthy controls or reported that PTSD is associated with greater CT. Using data-driven dimensionality reduction, we sought to conduct a well-powered study to identify vulnerable networks without regard to neuroanatomic boundaries.

Effects of a dissociative drug on fronto-limbic resting-state functional connectivity in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled pilot study.

Rationale: A subanesthetic dose of ketamine, a non-competitive N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist, elicits dissociation in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who also often suffer from chronic dissociative symptoms in daily life. These debilitating symptoms have not only been linked to worse PTSD trajectories, but also to increased resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala, supporting the conceptualization of dissociation as emotion overmodulation. Yet, as studies were observational, causal evidence is lacking.

Long term structural and functional neural changes following a single infusion of Ketamine in PTSD.

NMDA receptor antagonists have a vital role in extinction, learning, and reconsolidation processes. During the reconsolidation window, memories are activated into a labile state and can be reconsolidated in an altered form. This concept might have significant clinical implications in treating PTSD.

Uncertainty in learning and decision-making: Introduction to the special issue.

Uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of the environment. This special issue presents interdisciplinary research on decision-making and learning under uncertainty. Thirty-one research and review papers report the findings of the behavioral, neural, and computational bases of coping with uncertainty, as well as changes of these mechanisms in development, aging, and psychopathology.

Neural valuation of rewards and punishments in posttraumatic stress disorder: a computational approach.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with changes in fear learning and decision-making, suggesting involvement of the brain's valuation system. Here we investigate the neural mechanisms of subjective valuation of rewards and punishments in combat veterans. In a functional MRI study, male combat veterans with a wide range of posttrauma symptoms (N = 48, Clinician Administered PTSD Scale, CAPS-IV) made a series of choices between sure and uncertain monetary gains and losses.

Evaluating the Evidence for Brain-Based Biotypes of Psychiatric Vulnerability in the Acute Aftermath of Trauma.

Objective: The weak link between subjective symptom-based diagnostic methods for posttraumatic psychopathology and objectively measured neurobiological indices forms a barrier to the development of effective personalized treatments. To overcome this problem, recent studies have aimed to stratify psychiatric disorders by identifying consistent subgroups based on objective neural markers. Along these lines, a promising 2021 study by Stevens et al.

Emotional numbing in PTSD is associated with lower amygdala reactivity to pain.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with altered pain perception, namely increased pain threshold and higher pain response. While pain consists of physiological and affective components, affective components are often overlooked. Similar patterns of increased threshold-high response in PTSD were shown in response to emotional stimuli, i.

A comparison of methods to harmonize cortical thickness measurements across scanners and sites.

Results of neuroimaging datasets aggregated from multiple sites may be biased by site-specific profiles in participants' demographic and clinical characteristics, as well as MRI acquisition protocols and scanning platforms. We compared the impact of four different harmonization methods on results obtained from analyses of cortical thickness data: (1) linear mixed-effects model (LME) that models site-specific random intercepts (LME), (2) LME that models both site-specific random intercepts and age-related random slopes (LME), (3) ComBat, and (4) ComBat with a generalized additive model (ComBat-GAM). Our test case for comparing harmonization methods was cortical thickness data aggregated from 29 sites, which included 1,340 cases with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (6.