Within-person changes in reproductive hormones and cognition in the menopause transition.

Objectives: Most women complain of cognitive deficits in the menopause transition, though the cause is unclear. The current study investigated the role that within-person changes in reproductive hormones, particularly estradiol, may play in triggering such perimenopausal cognitive difficulties.

Study Design: Participants were 43 women aged 45-55 years and currently in the menopause transition.

Menstrual cycle influences on cue-induced smoking cravings and heart rate variability.

Women experience greater difficulties in quitting smoking than men, though the hormonal factors contributing to this sex difference remain to be clarified. The current study aimed to examine menstrual cycle effects on smoking cue-induced cravings as well as examine dynamic reproductive hormone change as a potential mediator underlying any cycle effects observed. Twenty-one women who smoke underwent two laboratory sessions - one in the mid-follicular phase and the other in the late luteal phase - involving an in-vivo smoking cue task, administered before and after exposure to a psychosocial laboratory stressor.

Testosterone and depressive symptoms during the late menopause transition.

Background: The menopause transition is associated with an increased risk of depression. While the mechanisms behind this increased risk are not well understood, the changing perimenopausal hormonal environment has been hypothesized to play a role. The current study examined the potential influence of testosterone and the ratio of testosterone to estradiol as a potential contributor to depressed mood in the menopause transition.

The effect of reproductive hormones on women's daily smoking across the menstrual cycle.

Background: Women attempt to quit smoking less often than men and are less likely to maintain abstinence. Reproductive hormones have been postulated as a reason for this sex difference, though this remains to be clarified. Research suggests that estradiol and progesterone may influence nicotine addiction, though various methodologies have led to inconsistent findings.

Perimenopausal vasomotor symptoms and the cortisol awakening response.

Objective: Vasomotor symptoms (VMS) are associated with a poorer cardiovascular risk profile. Although the mechanisms underlying this relationship are poorly understood, alterations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress axis have been hypothesized to play a role. This study examined the within- and between-subject relationship between VMS and cortisol in a sample of healthy perimenopausal women.

Mood sensitivity to estradiol predicts depressive symptoms in the menopause transition.

Background: The risk for depression markedly rises during the 5-6 years leading up to the cessation of menstruation, known as the menopause transition. Exposure to extreme estradiol levels may help explain this increase but few studies have examined individual sensitivity to estradiol in predicting perimenopausal depression.

Method: The current study recruited 101 perimenopausal women.

Estradiol Fluctuation, Sensitivity to Stress, and Depressive Symptoms in the Menopause Transition: A Pilot Study.

The menopause transition is associated with an increased risk of depressed mood. Preliminary evidence suggests that increased sensitivity to psychosocial stress, triggered by exaggerated perimenopausal estradiol fluctuation, may play a role. However, accurately quantifying estradiol fluctuation while minimizing participant burden has posed a methodological challenge in the field.

What's in a line? Verbal, facial, and emotional influences on the line bisection task.

In Bryden and MacRae's [(1988). Dichotic laterality effects obtained with emotional words. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology, 1(3), 171-176] dichotic listening task, attending to verbal (left hemisphere) or emotional (right hemisphere) auditory stimuli can result in opposite patterns of behaviour.

The relationship between line bisection performance and emotion processing: Where do you draw the line?

A recent study demonstrated that higher accuracy on a line bisection task related to greater ratings of evocative impact from paintings. The authors suggested that line bisection accuracy may act as a "barometer" for both visuospatial and emotion processing, likely as a function of overlapping neural correlates in the right temporoparietal region. We suggest and test an alternative explanation: that visuospatial bias interacted with asymmetries in the paintings and the rating scales to produce the apparent relationship between emotion and visuospatial functions.

Size and emotion averaging: costs of dividing attention after all.

Perceptual averaging is a process by which sets of similar items are represented by summary statistics such as their average size, luminance, or orientation. Researchers have argued that this process is automatic, able to be carried out without interference from concurrent processing. Here, we challenge this conclusion and demonstrate a reliable cost of computing the mean size of circles distinguished by colour (Experiments 1 and 2) and the mean emotionality of faces distinguished by sex (Experiment 3).

The relationship between collisions and pseudoneglect: is it right?

When walking through narrow doorways people collide more frequently on the right side than on the left. This rightward collision bias has been attributed to pseudoneglect. Originally pseudoneglect was defined as leftward errors on a line bisection task; however, the term is used more broadly now to refer to the slight tendency to neglect the right side of space and attend more towards the left.

Men are more accurate than women in aiming at targets in both near space and extrapersonal space.

Men excel at motor tasks requiring aiming accuracy whereas women excel at different tasks requiring fine motor skill. However, these tasks are confounded with proximity to the body, as fine motor tasks are performed proximally and aiming tasks are directed at distal targets. As such, it is not known whether the male advantage on tasks requiring aiming accuracy is because men have better aim or is better in the proximal domain in which the task is usually presented.

Throwing accuracy during prism adaptation: male advantage for throwing accuracy is independent of prism adaptation rate.

Previous studies have found that men are more accurate at throwing an object at a target than are women, independent of experience. However, these studies' results are based on average scores from multiple trials. As such, it is unknown whether the male advantage results from superior throwing accuracy or from a superior ability to calibrate subsequent throws.

Female advantage for spatial location memory in both static and dynamic environments.

A female advantage has previously been found for spatial location tests of object memory. Previous studies have used static, 2-D tasks to test this advantage. This study used a computerized adaptation of the game Concentration to test object location memory in both a static and dynamic array of 24 pairs of line drawings.