Correction: Psychological impact of mass violence depends on affective tone of media content.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Physiological indices of challenge and threat: A data-driven investigation of autonomic nervous system reactivity during an active coping stressor task.

We utilized a data-driven, unsupervised machine learning approach to examine patterns of peripheral physiological responses during a motivated performance context across two large, independent data sets, each with multiple peripheral physiological measures. Results revealed that patterns of cardiovascular response commonly associated with challenge and threat states emerged as two of the predominant patterns of peripheral physiological responding within both samples, with these two patterns best differentiated by reactivity in cardiac output, pre-ejection period, interbeat interval, and total peripheral resistance. However, we also identified a third, relatively large group of apparent physiological nonresponders who exhibited minimal reactivity across all physiological measures in the motivated performance context.

Targeting separate specific learning parameters underlying cognitive behavioral therapy can improve perceptual judgments of anger.

Background And Objectives: Anxiety disorders are characterized by biased perceptual judgment. An experimental model using simple verbal instruction to target specific decision parameters that influence perceptual judgment was developed to test if it could influence anger perception, and to examine differences between individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) relative to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or non-psychiatric controls.

Methods: Anger perception was decomposed into three decision parameters (perceptual similarity of angry vs.

Neutral face and complex object neurophysiological processing deficits in long-term schizophrenia and in first hospitalized schizophrenia-spectrum individuals.

Background: Face processing is impaired in long-term schizophrenia as indexed by a reduced face-related N170 event-related potential (ERP) that corresponds with volumetric decreases in right fusiform gyrus. Impairment in face processing may constitute an object-specific deficit in schizophrenia that relates to social impairment and misattribution of social signs in the disease, or the face deficit may be part of a more general deficit in complex visual processing. Further, it is not clear the degree to which face and complex object processing deficits are present early in disease course.

Psychological impact of mass violence depends on affective tone of media content.

Exposure to media coverage of mass violence has been shown to predict poorer mental health symptomology. However, it is unknown whether such media coverage can have ubiquitous effects on average community members, extending to biological and perceptual processes that underlie everyday decision making and behavior. Here, we used a repeated-measures design over the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings to track participants' self-reported distress, their eye blink startle reactivity while viewing images of the bombings, and their ability to perceptually distinguish armed from unarmed individuals in a behavioral shooting task.

Associations between feelings of social anxiety and emotion perception.

Background: Abnormally biased perceptual judgment is a feature of many psychiatric disorders. Thus, individuals with social anxiety disorder are biased to recall or interpret social events negatively. Cognitive behavioral therapy addresses such bias by teaching patients, via verbal instruction, to become aware of and change pathological misjudgment.

Working memory capacity is associated with optimal adaptation of response bias to perceptual sensitivity in emotion perception.

Emotion perception, inferring the emotional state of another person, is a frequent judgment made under perceptual uncertainty (e.g., a scowling facial expression can indicate anger or concentration) and behavioral risk (e.

Decision making from economic and signal detection perspectives: development of an integrated framework.

Behavior is comprised of decisions made from moment to moment (i.e., to respond one way or another).

Threat perception after the Boston Marathon bombings: The effects of personal relevance and conceptual framing.

We examined how the Boston Marathon bombings affected threat perception in the Boston community. In a threat perception task, participants attempted to "shoot" armed targets and avoid shooting unarmed targets. Participants viewing images of the bombings accompanied by affectively negative music and text (e.

"Utilizing" signal detection theory.

What do inferring what a person is thinking or feeling, judging a defendant's guilt, and navigating a dimly lit room have in common? They involve perceptual uncertainty (e.g., a scowling face might indicate anger or concentration, for which different responses are appropriate) and behavioral risk (e.

Gender differences in oxytocin-associated disruption of decision bias during emotion perception.

Oxytocin is associated with differences in the perception of and response to socially mediated information, such as facial expressions. Across studies, however, oxytocin׳s effect on emotion perception has been inconsistent. Outside the laboratory, emotion perception involves interpretation of perceptual uncertainty and assessment of behavioral risk.

Affective state influences perception by affecting decision parameters underlying bias and sensitivity.

Studies of the effect of affect on perception often show consistent directional effects of a person's affective state on perception. Unpleasant emotions have been associated with a "locally focused" style of stimulus evaluation, and positive emotions with a "globally focused" style. Typically, however, studies of affect and perception have not been conducted under the conditions of perceptual uncertainty and behavioral risk inherent to perceptual judgments outside the laboratory.

Behavioral effects of clozapine: involvement of trace amine pathways in C. elegans and M. musculus.

Clozapine is an antipsychotic medication with superior efficacy in treatment refractory schizophrenia. The molecular basis of clozapine's therapeutic profile is not well understood. We studied behavioral effects of clozapine in Caenorhabditis elegans to identify novel pathways that modulate clozapine's biological effects.

Normal thermoregulatory responses to 3-iodothyronamine, trace amines and amphetamine-like psychostimulants in trace amine associated receptor 1 knockout mice.

3-Iodothyronamine (T1AM) is a metabolite of thyroid hormone. It is an agonist at trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1), a recently identified receptor involved in monoaminergic regulation and a potential novel therapeutic target. Here, T1AM was studied using rhesus monkey TAAR1 and/or human dopamine transporter (DAT) co-transfected cells, and wild-type (WT) and TAAR1 knock-out (KO) mice.

Neurophysiological correlates of comprehending emotional meaning in context.

Although the neurocognitive mechanisms of nonaffective language comprehension have been studied extensively, relatively less is known about how the emotional meaning of language is processed. In this study, electrophysiological responses to affectively positive, negative, and neutral words, presented within nonconstraining, neutral contexts, were evaluated under conditions of explicit evaluation of emotional content (Experiment 1) and passive reading (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a widely distributed Late Positivity was found to be larger to negative than to positive words (a "negativity bias").

Cognition and evolution: learning and the evolution of sex traits.

The evolution of gender characteristics is an outcome of mate choice, which has been assumed to be genetically mediated. Recent research suggests that learning also has a role to play as an agent of sexual selection.

Peak shift discrimination learning as a mechanism of signal evolution.

"Peak shift" is a behavioral response bias arising from discrimination learning in which animals display a directional, but limited, preference for or avoidance of unusual stimuli. Its hypothesized evolutionary relevance has been primarily in the realm of aposematic coloration and limited sexual dimorphism. Here, we develop a novel functional approach to peak shift, based on signal detection theory, which characterizes the response bias as arising from uncertainty about stimulus appearance, frequency, and quality.