Impacts of trait anxiety on visual working memory, as a function of task demand and situational stress.

Higher trait anxiety can impair cognitive functioning via attention, but relatively little is known about the impacts on visual working memory. These were investigated using previously validated visual feature binding tasks. In Study 1, participants' memory for visual features (shapes) and feature bindings (coloured shapes) was assessed.

Cognitive Appraisals Mediate Affective Reactivity in Affiliative Extraversion.

Extraversion is comprised of two main components of affiliation and agency. Affiliative and agentic extraversion have been found to predict positive activation in response to appetitive stimuli, and affiliative extraversion also predicts warmth-affection in response to affiliative stimuli. The aim of this study was to test whether cognitive appraisals could account for these personality-emotion relationships.

Bias in beliefs about the self is associated with depressive but not anxious mood.

Background: Biases in beliefs about the self are associated with psychopathology and depressive and anxious mood, but it is not clear if both negative and positive beliefs are associated with depression or anxiety. We examined these relationships in people who present with a wide range of depressive and anxious mood across diagnostic categories.

Methods: We probed positive and negative beliefs about the self with a task in which 74 female participants with either affective disorder (depression and/or anxiety), borderline personality disorder or no psychiatric history indicated the degree to which 60 self-related words was "like them" or "not like them".

Beliefs and emotions have different roles in generating attitudes toward providing personal help and state-sponsored help for people with a mental illness.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of emotions like pity and anger in mediating the relationship between beliefs about the controllability of a mental illness, and the willingness to help someone with a mental illness. In particular, we tested the hypothesis that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to provide personal help are mediated by the emotions of pity and anger, but that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to condone state-organised help were more direct, and not mediated by emotions. A between-groups design was employed to investigate the effects of manipulating controllability attributions via 3 hypothetical vignettes.

Saudi normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting test, Stroop test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence-3, Picture Completion and Vocabulary (subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised).

Objective: There are 2 aims for this study: first, to collect normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Stroop test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (TONI-3), Picture Completion (PC) and Vocabulary (VOC) sub-test of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised for use in a Saudi Arabian culture, and second, to use the normative data provided to generate the regression equations.

Methods: To collect the normative data and generate the regression equations, 198 healthy individuals were selected to provide a representative distribution for age, gender, years of education, and socioeconomic class. The WCST, Stroop test, TONI-3, PC, and VOC were administrated to the healthy individuals.

Changes in the relationship between self-reference and emotional valence as a function of dysphoria.

The self-positivity bias is found to be an aspect of normal cognitive function. Changes in this bias are usually associated with changes in emotional states, such as dysphoria or depression. The aim of the present study was to clarify the role of emotional valence within self-referential processing.

Seeing yourself in a positive light: brain correlates of the self-positivity bias.

Individuals are found to have better recall for self-referent information than other types of information. However, attribution research has shown that self-reference is highly correlated with emotional valence. The present study attempted to identify and separate the processing of self-reference and emotional valence using ERPs.

A model of personality change after traumatic brain injury and the development of the Brain Injury Personality Scales.

Objective: The aims of this study were to develop models of personality change after traumatic brain injury (TBI) based on information provided by the TBI survivor and a significant other (SO), and to compare the models generated from the two different sources of information.

Methods: Individuals with and without TBI and an SO were interviewed separately about their current personality. The SOs were also interviewed about the personality of the TBI survivor before the injury.

Subjective experience and the attentional lapse: task engagement and disengagement during sustained attention.

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience (thought probes and questionnaires) to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance (reaction time and errors) and psycho-physiological measures (heart rate and galvanic skin response). This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART, Robertson, Manly, Adrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997).

Task unrelated thought whilst encoding information.

Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation, for example a daydream. Three experiments were conducted on healthy participants, with two broad aims. First, to contrast distributed and encapsulated views of cognition by comparing the encoding of categorical and random lists of words (Experiments One and Two).

Patient and clinician agreement on personality using the SWAP-200.

The Shedler Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP-200; Westen & Shedler, 1999a) is a clinician-rated assessment providing descriptions of personality disorder prototypes using a Q-sort procedure. This study aims to investigate the degree to which there is agreement between patients' and clinicians' accounts of personality pathology on a modified version of the SWAP-200 using Bland Altman analysis with the data from 23 clinician-patient pairs. Poor agreement was found between clinicians and patients on personality prototypes.

Task unrelated thought: the role of distributed processing.

Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation; for example, a day dream. Encapsulated models of cognition propose that qualitative changes in consciousness, i.e.

Performance on tests of frontal lobe function reflect general intellectual ability.

Recent studies have indicated that performance on tests of frontal lobe function are highly associated with general intellectual ability (g). Some authors have even claimed that the available evidence does not support a more specific account of frontal lobe function than to provide a general intellectual function for the performance of goal directed tasks. We examined the relationship between performance on the WAIS-R (as a measure of g) and performance on standard tests of frontal lobe function in 123 healthy individuals.

Performance on the Modified Card Sorting Test by normal, healthy individuals: relationship to general intellectual ability and demographic variables.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for the Modified Card Sorting Test (MCST), and to examine the relationship between performance on this task, general intellectual ability and demographic variables.

Design: A sample of 146 healthy individuals was tested with a demographic distribution (age, sex, socioeconomic class) similar to that of the British population.

Methods: The MCST and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales--Revised were administered to 146 people aged between 16 and 75 years.

Frontal lobe impairment in schizophrenia: relationship to intellectual functioning.

Schizophrenic subjects (N = 48) and individually matched healthy controls were administered the Verbal Scale of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (VIQ) and a test of verbal fluency. The verbal fluency and VIQ scores of the schizophrenic subjects were significantly lower than the scores of the control subjects. An additional sample of healthy subjects (N = 144) was used to generate a regression equation for the prediction of verbal fluency scores from Verbal IQ and age.

Severe permanent encephalopathy in acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

As survival rates for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia have increased, concerns over improved quality-of-life have also increased. Although 3-10% of children may experience acute transient neurotoxicity during induction chemotherapy, they are felt to be at low risk for late sequelae. We report three previously healthy boys with newly-diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia who presented with obtundation and severe seizures during late induction with a standard four drug chemotherapy regimen.

Brain tumors in children and adolescents--III. Effects of radiation and hormone status on intelligence and on working, associative and serial-order memory.

The effects on intelligence and memory of two post-surgical conditions (radiation treatment, hormone deficiency and supplementation) were explored in 46 children and adolescents with tumors in a variety of brain sites. Verbal intelligence, but not non-verbal intelligence, varied positively with age at radiation treatment. Memory for word meanings was unrelated to either radiation history or to hormone status.

Bovine neurophysin-II stimulates prolactin release without involvement of dopaminergic prolactin-release inhibiting factor receptor in the estradiol-primed male rat.

Neurophysins have been considered to be physiologically inert carrier proteins for the neurohypophysial hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin. We have observed that bovine neurophysin-II indirectly stimulates prolactin release in estradiol-primed male rats. The release of prolactin is regulated by a dual hypothalamic control system, the prolactin-release-inhibiting factor and the prolactin-releasing factor.

Regulation of pituitary alpha-subunit, beta-luteinizing hormone and prolactin messenger ribonucleic acid by gonadotropin-releasing hormone and estradiol in hypogonadal mice.

We have investigated the effects of three different GnRH injection regimens and the effects of estradiol benzoate (EB) on expression of the common alpha-subunit, beta-LH, and PRL genes in male and female hpg mice. GnRH was injected once daily (100 ng), every 2 h (100 ng) or every 30 min (25 ng), and EB (10 micrograms) was injected once daily. The effects of continuous exposure to the superactive agonist D-Trp6-GnRH released from microcapsules were also studied.

Morphine can stimulate prolactin release independent of a dopaminergic mechanism.

Prolactin release is controlled by prolactin-release inhibiting factor (PIF), possibly dopamine, and an unidentified putative hypothalamic prolactin-releasing factor (PRF). Morphine and related opioids may indirectly stimulate prolactin release by inhibiting PIF release and (or) by stimulating putative PRF release. In the present study, we have completely blocked the dopaminergic receptors in normal male rats by pretreatment with a large dose of pimozide (3 mg/kg) to demonstrate if putative PRF has a role in morphine-induced prolactin release.

Bovine 'neurophysin II' stimulates growth hormone release in the estradiol-primed male rat.

Basal plasma concentrations of growth hormone (GH) were monitored in both normal and estradiol-primed male rats by the collection of sequential blood samples from freely moving rats, via chronic intraatrial cannulae. Blood was sampled every 2 min for a period of 80 min and plasma GH levels determined by radioimmunoassay. The normal male rats displayed a pulsatile release of GH, while the estradiol-primed male rats exhibited a relatively steady level of plasma GH concentration.

Current status of the rat prolactin releasing factor.

The release of prolactin is governed by both inhibiting and releasing factors. Basal plasma concentration of prolactin is controlled mainly through inhibition by a prolactin release-inhibiting factor (PIF), while acute stimulation of prolactin release is believed to be caused by a prolactin-releasing factor (PRF). It is the general consensus that PIF is dopamine.

Pulsatile release of immunoreactive luteinizing hormone (irLH) in hypophysectomized male rats.

The concentration of plasma luteinizing hormone (LH) was monitored every minute by radioimmunoassay in male rats that were either hypophysectomized, or castrated and hypophysectomized. Castrated rats showed a pulsatile fluctuation of plasma immunoreactive LH (irLH) concentration with an elevated basal level, confirming previous work. The hypophysectomized and castrated hypophysectomized rats also showed pulsatile changes in plasma irLH concentration.