Cognitive flexibility and religious disbelief.

Cognitive flexibility is operationalized in the neuropsychological literature as the ability to shift between modes of thinking and adapt to novel or changing environments. Religious belief systems consist of strict rules and rituals that offer adherents certainty, consistency, and stability. Consequently, we hypothesized that religious adherence and practice of repetitive religious rituals may be related to the persistence versus flexibility of one's cognition.

Rumination impairs the control of stimulus-induced retrieval of irrelevant information, but not attention, control, or response selection in general.

The aim of the study was to throw more light on the relationship between rumination and cognitive-control processes. Seventy-eight adults were assessed with respect to rumination tendencies by means of the LEIDS-r before performing a Stroop task, an event-file task assessing the automatic retrieval of irrelevant information, an attentional set-shifting task, and the Attentional Network Task, which provided scores for alerting, orienting, and executive control functioning. The size of the Stroop effect and irrelevant retrieval in the event-five task were positively correlated with the tendency to ruminate, while all other scores did not correlate with any rumination scale.

Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) modulates flow experience.

Flow has been defined as a pleasant psychological state that people experience when completely absorbed in an activity. Previous correlative evidence showed that the vagal tone (as indexed by heart rate variability) is a reliable marker of flow. So far, it has not yet been demonstrated that the vagus nerve plays a causal role in flow.

The effect of gamma-enhancing binaural beats on the control of feature bindings.

Binaural beats represent the auditory experience of an oscillating sound that occurs when two sounds with neighboring frequencies are presented to one's left and right ear separately. Binaural beats have been shown to impact information processing via their putative role in increasing neural synchronization. Recent studies of feature-repetition effects demonstrated interactions between perceptual features and action-related features: repeating only some, but not all features of a perception-action episode hinders performance.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex affects stimulus conflict but not response conflict.

When the human brain encounters a conflict, performance is often impaired. Two tasks that are widely used to induce and measure conflict-related interference are the Eriksen flanker task, whereby the visual target stimulus is flanked by congruent or incongruent distractors, and the Simon task, where the location of the required spatial response is either congruent or incongruent with the location of the target stimulus. Interestingly, both tasks share the characteristic of inducing response conflict but only the flanker task induces stimulus conflict.

Zapping the gap: Reducing the multisensory temporal binding window by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Synchrony among the senses lies at the heart of our possession of a unified conscious perception of the world. However, due to discrepancies in physical and neural information processing from different senses, the brain accommodates a limited range of temporal asynchronies between sensory inputs, i.e.

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: evidence for concurrent activation models.

Nine-month-olds start to perform sequential actions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how they acquire and control such actions. We studied infants' sequential-action control by employing a novel gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm.

From outcome prediction to action selection: developmental change in the role of action-effect bindings.

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month-olds (and adults) can use acquired action-effect bindings to predict action outcomes but only 12-month-olds (and adults) showed evidence for employing action-effects to select actions.

Explicit learning of arbitrary and non-arbitrary action-effect relations in adults and 4-year-olds.

Ideomotor theories claim that carrying out a movement that produces a perceivable effect creates a bidirectional association between the two, which can then be used by action control processes to retrieve the associated action by anticipating its outcome. Previous implicit-learning studies have shown that practice renders novel but action-contingent stimuli effective retrieval cues of the action they used to follow, suggesting that experiencing sequences of actions and effects creates bidirectional action-effect associations. We investigated whether action-effect associations are also acquired under explicit learning conditions and whether familiar action-effect relations (such as between a trumpet and a trumpet sound) are learned the same way as novel, arbitrary relations are.

The role of cognition in school refusal: an investigation of automatic thoughts and cognitive errors.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to investigate the cognitions of anxious school refusers. The cognitive constructs under investigation included negative cognition commonly linked to youth anxiety (i.e.

A daily diary study on the independent and interactive effects of headache and self-regulatory factors on daily affect among adolescents.

Objective: The relationship between recurrent headache and reduced psychological well-being among adolescents has been well documented. Evidence also suggests that headache is associated with greater impediment to successful goal pursuits, which in turn is related to reduced well-being. The aim of this study was to investigate both the independent and interactive effects of headache and self-regulatory processes on daily positive and negative affect.

The role of the noradrenergic system in the exploration-exploitation trade-off: a psychopharmacological study.

Animal research and computational modeling have indicated an important role for the neuromodulatory locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system in the control of behavior. According to the adaptive gain theory, the LC-NE system is critical for optimizing behavioral performance by regulating the balance between exploitative and exploratory control states. However, crucial direct empirical tests of this theory in human subjects have been lacking.

Facing freeze: social threat induces bodily freeze in humans.

Freezing is a common defensive response in animals threatened by predators. It is characterized by reduced body motion and decreased heart rate (bradycardia). However, despite the relevance of animal defense models in human stress research, studies have not shown whether social threat cues elicit similar freeze-like responses in humans.

Conscious and unconscious perseverative cognition: is a large part of prolonged physiological activity due to unconscious stress?

Prolonged physiological activity is believed to be a key factor mediating between stress and later disease outcomes. Few studies, however, have investigated the crucial psychological factors that cause prolonged activity. This article proposes that conscious as well as unconscious perseverative cognition are the critical factors.

"What did you say, and who do you think you are?" How Power Differences Affect Emotional Reactions to Prejudice.

Three studies examine how power differences between targets and sources of prejudice affect targets' emotional reactions to prejudice. Study 1 first demonstrates that people do not expect powerful others to be prejudiced. Studies 2 and 3 then examine what happens when targets encounter prejudice, as a function of the source's power.

How object-specific are object files? Evidence for integration by location.

Given the distributed representation of visual features in the human brain, binding mechanisms are necessary to integrate visual information about the same perceptual event. It has been assumed that feature codes are bound into object files--pointers to the neural codes of the features of a given event. The present study investigated the perceptual criteria underlying integration into an object file.

Differences in changes in health-related anxiety between Western and non-Western participants in a trauma-focused study.

Disaster victims from ethnic minorities manifest more health complaints and concerns than others following a medical investigation. The authors aimed at analyzing ethnicity as a proxy for risk factors predictive of changes in health-related anxiety, and mediators that explain ethnic group differences after participating in a medical investigation. Western (n = 406) and non-Western participants (n = 379) were assessed at baseline and 12-week follow-up.

On Association Coefficients for 2x2 Tables and Properties That Do Not Depend on the Marginal Distributions.

We discuss properties that association coefficients may have in general, e.g., zero value under statistical independence, and we examine coefficients for 2x2 tables with respect to these properties.

Ideal Point Discriminant Analysis Revisited with a Special Emphasis on Visualization.

Ideal point discriminant analysis is a classification tool which uses highly intuitive multidimensional scaling procedures. However, in the last paper, Takane wrote about it. He concludes that the interpretation is rather intricate and calls that a weakness of the model.

Gaze direction differentially affects avoidance tendencies to happy and angry faces in socially anxious individuals.

Increasing evidence indicates that eye gaze direction affects the processing of emotional faces in anxious individuals. However, the effects of eye gaze direction on the behavioral responses elicited by emotional faces, such as avoidance behavior, remain largely unexplored. We administered an Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) in high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals.

Detection of speech errors in the speech of others: an ERP study.

The current event-related brain potential study examined the processing of observed speech errors. Participants were asked to detect errors in the speech of others while listening to the description of a visual network. Networks consisted of colored drawings of objects connected by straight or curved lines.

Cortisol administration acutely reduces threat-selective spatial attention in healthy young men.

There is mounting evidence that single administrations of glucocorticoids may acutely reduce human fear. We previously reported that administration of cortisol acutely reduced non-spatial selective attention to fearful faces and likewise reduced preferential processing of fearful faces in a spatial working memory task. Here we report the acute effects of 40 mg cortisol (administered in a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design) on a different experimental task for measuring threat-selective attention.

Psychophysiological evidence for cortisol-induced reduction in early bias for implicit social threat in social phobia.

The stress hormone cortisol is important for the regulation of social motivational processes. High cortisol levels have been associated with social fear and avoidance, which play an important role in social anxiety disorder (SAD), as does hypervigilant processing of social threat. However, causal effects of cortisol on threat processing in SAD remain unclear.