Evidence suggests that asymmetry in frontal electrical activity predicts responses to aversive experiences, such that higher left-sided activity might dampen responses to trauma reminders. We measured frontal asymmetry at rest and during viewing of a trauma film, and assessed startle responses to film-reminder images. To explore potential moderators, we compared two films (Study 1; N = 64) and modulated reappraisal (Study 2; N = 72). As expected, left frontal activation during film viewing predicted dampened responses in individuals who viewed a staged road accident. However, this effect tended to be reversed when a genocide documentary was used. In Study 2, all participants viewed the genocide film. Left frontal activity at rest again predicted higher startle responses, while reappraisal did not moderate the effects. Thus, the type of trauma film plays a crucial role in the effects of frontal asymmetry, which warrants further critical investigation.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12230 | DOI Listing |
J Fish Biol
January 2025
Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) & Université de Toulouse (UPS), Toulouse, France.
Escape waves in animal groups, such as bird flocks and fish schools, have attracted a lot of attention, as they provide the opportunity to better understand how information can efficiently propagate in moving groups, and how individuals can coordinate their actions under the threat of predators. There is a lack of appropriate experimental protocols to study escape waves in highly social fish, in which the number of individuals initiating the escape and the identity of the initiators are controlled. Indeed, highly social fish or obligate schoolers have a tendency to not respond well or to freeze when tested in experimental setups designed for single individuals.
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January 2025
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Departments of Neuroscience, Psychiatry; Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Anxiety disorders are one of the top contributors to psychiatric burden worldwide. Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in the potential anxiolytic properties ascribed to cannabidiol (CBD), a non-intoxicating constituent of the Cannabis Sativa plant. This has led to several clinical trials underway to examine the therapeutic potential of CBD for anxiety disorders.
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January 2025
Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Background: Self-regulation often is disrupted in depression and is characterized by negative affect and inflexible parasympathetic responses. Yet, our understanding of brain mechanisms of self-regulatory processes largely has been limited to laboratory contexts. Measuring individual differences in self-regulatory processes in everyday life - and their neural correlates - could inform our understanding of depression phenotypes and reveal novel intervention targets that impact everyday functioning.
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March 2025
Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Contagious crying in infants has been considered an early marker of their sensitivity to others' emotions, a form of emotional contagion, and an early basis for empathy. However, it remains unclear whether infant distress in response to peer distress is due to the emotional content of crying or acoustically aversive properties of crying. Additionally, research remains severely biased towards samples from Europe and North America.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConditioned suppression is a useful paradigm for measuring learned avoidance. In most conditioned suppression studies, forward conditioning is used where a cue predicts an aversive stimulus. However, backward conditioning, in which an aversive stimulus predicts a cue, provides unique insights into learned avoidance due to its influence on both conditioned excitation and inhibition.
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