Biased memory retrieval in the service of shared reality with an audience: The role of cognitive accessibility.

After communicators have tuned a message about a target person's behaviors to their audience's attitude, their recall of the target's behaviors is often evaluatively consistent with their audience's attitude. This audience-congruent recall bias has been explained as the result of the communicators' creation of a shared reality with the audience, which helps communicators to achieve epistemic needs for confident judgments and knowledge. Drawing on the "Relevance Of A Representation" (ROAR) model of cognitive accessibility from motivational truth relevance, we argue that shared reality increases the accessibility of information consistent (vs.

Benefits of collaborative remembering in older and younger couples: the role of conversation dynamics and gender.

We experimentally explored whether and how conversation dynamics would benefit collaborative remembering in intimate couples over time. To this end, we ran a study with a three-factor mixed design with relationship type (couples vs. strangers) and age (older adults vs.

Socially induced false memories in the absence of misinformation.

Ample evidence shows that post-encoding misinformation from others can induce false memories. Here, we demonstrate in two experiments a new, tacit form of socially generated false memories, resulting from interpersonal co-monitoring at encoding without communication of misinformation. Pairs of participants jointly viewed semantically coherent word lists, presented successively in blue, green, or red letters.

Psychotherapy motivation in refugees: The role of alexithymia, stigmatization, self-esteem, and psychotherapy expectations.

Objective: Despite elevated mental health problems, refugees tend to hold more negative attitudes toward psychological help seeking than residents of receiving countries. Therefore, we examined variables expected to be related to different aspects of psychotherapy motivation (psychological distress, knowledge about therapy, and denial of psychological helplessness) in 202 German residents and 200 refugees in Germany.

Method: Participants completed measures of psychotherapy motivation, together with alexithymia, stigmatization toward help seeking, self-esteem, and expectations of therapy as variables with an expected relationship with psychotherapy motivation.

A Generalizable Multivariate Brain Pattern for Interpersonal Guilt.

Feeling guilty when we have wronged another is a crucial aspect of prosociality, but its neurobiological bases are elusive. Although multivariate patterns of brain activity show promise for developing brain measures linked to specific emotions, it is less clear whether brain activity can be trained to detect more complex social emotional states such as guilt. Here, we identified a distributed guilt-related brain signature (GRBS) across two independent neuroimaging datasets that used interpersonal interactions to evoke guilt.

When Does Oxytocin Affect Human Memory Encoding? The Role of Social Context and Individual Attachment Style.

The neuropeptide oxytocin plays an essential role in regulating social behavior and has been implicated in a variety of human cognitive processes in the social domain, including memory processes. The present study investigates the influence of oxytocin on human memory encoding, taking into account social context and personality, which have previously been neglected as moderators for how oxytocin affects memory encoding. To examine the role of social context of encoding, we employed an established experimental paradigm in which participants perform a word-categorization task in either a joint (social) or individual (non-social) setting.

The Joint Action Effect on Memory as a Social Phenomenon: The Role of Cued Attention and Psychological Distance.

In contrast to individual tasks, a specific social setting is created when two partners work together on a task. How does such a social setting affect memory for task-related information? We addressed this issue in a distributed joint-action paradigm, where two team partners respond to different types of information within the same task. Previous work has shown that joint action in such a task enhances memory for items that are relevant to the partner's task but not to the own task.

The relationship between trait empathy and memory formation for social vs. non-social information.

Background: To navigate successfully through their complex social environment, humans need both empathic and mnemonic skills. Little is known on how these two types of psychological abilities relate to each other in humans. Although initial clinical findings suggest a positive association, systematic investigations in healthy subject samples have not yet been performed.

Beautiful friendship: Social sharing of emotions improves subjective feelings and activates the neural reward circuitry.

Humans have a strong tendency to affiliate with other people, especially in emotional situations. Here, we suggest that a critical mechanism underlying this tendency is that socially sharing emotional experiences is in itself perceived as hedonically positive and thereby contributes to the regulation of individual emotions. We investigated the effect of social sharing of emotions on subjective feelings and neural activity by having pairs of friends view emotional (negative and positive) and neutral pictures either alone or with the friend.

Common and differential neural networks of emotion regulation by Detachment, Reinterpretation, Distraction, and Expressive Suppression: a comparative fMRI investigation.

Emotions are an indispensable part of our mental life. The term emotion regulation refers to those processes that influence the generation, the experience and the expression of emotions. There is a great variety of strategies to regulate emotions efficiently, which are used in daily life and that have been investigated by cognitive neuroscience.

Sleep improves prospective remembering by facilitating spontaneous-associative retrieval processes.

Memories are of the past but for the future, enabling individuals to implement intended plans and actions at the appropriate time. Prospective memory is the specific ability to remember and execute an intended behavior at some designated point in the future. Although sleep is well-known to benefit the consolidation of memories for past events, its role for prospective memory is still not well understood.

Sleep to implement an intention.

Study Objectives: Sleep supports the consolidation of new memories. However, this effect has mainly been shown for memories of past events. Here we investigated the role of sleep for the implementation of intentions for the future.

Insights into sleep's role for insight: Studies with the number reduction task.

In recent years, vibrant research has developed on "consolidation" during sleep: To what extent are newly experienced impressions reprocessed or even restructured during sleep? We used the number reduction task (NRT) to study if and how sleep does not only reiterate new experiences but may even lead to new insights. In the NRT, covert regularities may speed responses. This implicit acquisition of regularities may become explicitly conscious at some point, leading to a qualitative change in behavior which reflects this insight.

An Experimental Decision-Making Paradigm to Distinguish Guilt and Regret and Their Self-Regulating Function via Loss Averse Choice Behavior.

Both guilt and regret typically result from counterfactual evaluations of personal choices that caused a negative outcome and are thought to regulate human decisions by people's motivation to avoid these emotions. Despite these similarities, studies asking people to describe typical situations of guilt and regret identified the social dimension as a fundamental distinguishing factor, showing that guilt but not regret specifically occurs for choices in interpersonal (social) contexts. However, an experimental paradigm to investigate this distinction systematically by inducing emotions of guilt and regret online is still missing.

Increased alpha (8-12 Hz) activity during slow wave sleep as a marker for the transition from implicit knowledge to explicit insight.

The number reduction task (NRT) allows us to study the transition from implicit knowledge of hidden task regularities to explicit insight into these regularities. To identify sleep-associated neurophysiological indicators of this restructuring of knowledge representations, we measured frequency-specific power of EEG while participants slept during the night between two sessions of the NRT. Alpha (8-12 Hz) EEG power during slow wave sleep (SWS) emerged as a specific marker of the transformation of presleep implicit knowledge to postsleep explicit knowledge (ExK).

Opposite effects of cortisol on consolidation of temporal sequence memory during waking and sleep.

Memory functions involve three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Modulating effects of glucocorticoids (GCs) have been consistently observed for declarative memory with GCs enhancing encoding and impairing retrieval, but surprisingly, little is known on how GCs affect memory consolidation. Studies in rats suggest a beneficial effect of GCs that were administered during postlearning wake periods, whereas in humans, cortisol impaired memory consolidation when administered during postlearning sleep.

Guilt-specific processing in the prefrontal cortex.

Guilt is a central moral emotion due to its inherent link to norm violations, thereby affecting both individuals and society. Furthermore, the nature and specificity of guilt is still debated in psychology and philosophy, particularly with regard to the differential involvement of self-referential representations in guilt relative to shame. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy volunteers, we identified specific brain regions associated with guilt by comparison with the 2 most closely related emotions, shame and sadness.

Sleep effects on slow-brain-potential reflections of associative learning.

Previous research has indicated that information acquired before sleep gets consolidated during sleep. This process of consolidation might be reflected after sleep in changed extent and topography of cortical activation during retrieval of information. Here, we designed an experiment to measure those changes by means of slow event-related EEG potentials (SPs).

Neural precursors of delayed insight.

The solution of a problem left unresolved in the evening can sometimes pop into mind as a sudden insight after a night of sleep in the following morning. Although favorable effects of sleep on insightful behavior have been experimentally confirmed, the neural mechanisms determining this delayed insight remain unknown. Here, using fMRI, we characterize the neural precursors of delayed insight in the number reduction task (NRT), in which a hidden task structure can be learned implicitly, but can also be recognized explicitly in an insightful process, allowing immediate qualitative improvement in task performance.

Elevated cortisol at retrieval suppresses false memories in parallel with correct memories.

Retrieving a memory is a reconstructive process in which encoded representations can be changed and distorted. This process sometimes leads to the generation of "false memories," that is, when people remember events that, in fact, never happened. Such false memories typically represent a kind of "gist" being extracted from single encountered events.

Differential associations of early- and late-night sleep with functional brain states promoting insight to abstract task regularity.

Background: Solving a task with insight has been associated with occipital and right-hemisphere activations. The present study tested the hypothesis if sleep-related alterations in functional activation states modulate the probability of insight into a hidden abstract regularity of a task.

Methodology: State-dependent functional activation was measured by beta and alpha electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and spatial synchronization.

Sleep enhances false memories depending on general memory performance.

Memory is subject to dynamic changes, sometimes giving rise to the formation of false memories due to biased processes of consolidation or retrieval. Sleep is known to benefit memory consolidation through an active reorganization of representations whereas acute sleep deprivation impairs retrieval functions. Here, we investigated whether sleep after learning and sleep deprivation at retrieval enhance the generation of false memories in a free recall test.

Sleep, hormones, and memory.

Nocturnal sleep is characterized by a unique pattern of endocrine activity, which comprises reciprocal influences on the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and the somatotropic system. During early sleep, when slow wave sleep (SWS) prevails, HPA secretory activity is suppressed whereas growth hormone (GH) release reaches a maximum; this pattern is reversed during late sleep when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep predominates. SWS benefits the consolidation of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories, whereas REM sleep improves amygdala-dependent emotional memories and procedural skill memories involving striato-cortical circuitry.

Covert reorganization of implicit task representations by slow wave sleep.

Background: There is evidence that slow wave sleep (SWS) promotes the consolidation of memories that are subserved by mediotemporal- and hippocampo-cortical neural networks. In contrast to implicit memories, explicit memories are accompanied by conscious (attentive and controlled) processing. Awareness at pre-sleep encoding has been recognized as critical for the off-line memory consolidation.

Sleep loss produces false memories.

People sometimes claim with high confidence to remember events that in fact never happened, typically due to strong semantic associations with actually encoded events. Sleep is known to provide optimal neurobiological conditions for consolidation of memories for long-term storage, whereas sleep deprivation acutely impairs retrieval of stored memories. Here, focusing on the role of sleep-related memory processes, we tested whether false memories can be created (a) as enduring memory representations due to a consolidation-associated reorganization of new memory representations during post-learning sleep and/or (b) as an acute retrieval-related phenomenon induced by sleep deprivation at memory testing.