Individual differences in the development of sensation seeking and impulsivity during adolescence: further evidence for a dual systems model.

Consistent with social neuroscience perspectives on adolescent development, previous cross-sectional research has found diverging mean age-related trends for sensation seeking and impulsivity during adolescence. The present study uses longitudinal data on 7,640 youth from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth Children and Young Adults, a nationally representative sample assessed biennially from 1994 to 2006. Latent growth curve models were used to investigate mean age-related changes in self-reports of impulsivity and sensation seeking from ages 12 to 24 years, as well individual differences in these changes.

Unpacking the neural associations of emotion and judgment in emotion-congruent judgment.

The current study takes a new approach to understand the neural systems that support emotion-congruent judgment. The bulk of previous neural research has inferred emotional influences on judgment from disadvantageous judgments or non-random individual differences. The current study manipulated the influence of emotional information on judgments of stimuli that were equivocally composed of positive and negative attributes.

Collegiate heavy drinking prospectively predicts change in sensation seeking and impulsivity.

Recent models of alcohol use in youth and young adulthood have incorporated personality change and maturation as causal factors underlying variability in developmental changes in heavy drinking. Whereas these models assume that personality affects alcohol use, the current prospective study tested the converse relation. That is, we tested whether, after accounting for the effect of traits on drinking, collegiate heavy drinking in turn predicted individual differences in change in alcohol-related aspects of personality.

Faces differing in attractiveness elicit corresponding affective responses.

We examined whether faces differing in attractiveness elicit positive and negative affect in 7- to 10-year-old children (N=66) and adults (N=73). Facial electromyography measured affective response. Less attractive faces evoked significantly more levator labii superioris responses in adults and children.

Mesolimbic effects of the antidepressant fluoxetine in Holtzman rats, a genetic strain with increased vulnerability to stress.

This is the first metabolic mapping study of the effects of fluoxetine after learned helplessness training. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications, but the regions underlying treatment effects in affectively disordered brains are poorly understood. We hypothesized the antidepressant action of fluoxetine would produce adaptations in mesolimbic regions after 2 weeks of treatment.

Stimulus range and discontinuity effects on information-integration category learning and generalization.

Two studies are reported that support the hypothesis that categories that require a multiple-unit, as opposed to a single-unit, representation lead to worse initial acquisition but better generalization. On the basis of the constraints imposed by the procedural-based learning system thought to mediate information-integration categorization, we argue that the need to train multiple units during initial category acquisition slows the procedural-based category learning process and adversely affects learning performance. However, we speculate that better generalization occurs because of the increased likelihood that a novel stimulus will activate at least one of the multiple units needed to represent the category.

Sexual orientation and the auditory system.

The auditory system exhibits differences by sex and by sexual orientation, and the implication is that relevant auditory structures are altered during prenatal development, possibly by exposure to androgens. The otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) of newborn male infants are weaker than those of newborn females, and these sex differences persist through the lifespan. The OAEs of nonheterosexual females also are weaker than those of heterosexual females, suggesting an atypically strong exposure to androgens some time early in development.

There are at least two kinds of probability matching: evidence from a secondary task.

Probability matching is a suboptimal behavior that often plagues human decision-making in simple repeated choice tasks. Despite decades of research, recent studies cannot find agreement on what choice strategies lead to probability matching. We propose a solution, showing that two distinct local choice strategies-which make different demands on executive resources-both result in probability-matching behavior on a global level.

Effects of maternal separation, early handling, and gonadal sex on regional metabolic capacity of the preweanling rat brain.

This is the first study to assess the effects of mother-infant separation on regional metabolic capacity in the preweanling rat brain. Mother-infant separation is generally known to be stressful for rat pups. Holtzman adolescent rats show a depressive-like behavioral phenotype after maternal separation during the preweanling period.

Overshoot using very short signal delays.

The detectability of a 10-ms tone masked by a 400-ms wideband noise was measured as a function of the delay in the onset of the tone compared to the onset of the noise burst. Unlike most studies like this on auditory overshoot, special attention was given to signal delays between 0 and 45 ms. Nine well-practiced subjects were tested using an adaptive psychophysical procedure in which the level of the masking noise was adjusted to estimate 79% correct detections.

Perceived norms for drinking in the transition from high school to college and beyond.

Objective: We evaluated selection and socialization processes associated with perceived descriptive norms and drinking from high school through the first 2 years of college.

Method: Participants (n = 2,247; 61.6% female) completed measures of high school drinking and descriptive drinking norms for their social group and the typical student at the university they were entering, as well as alcohol use and social-group norms through their sophomore year of college.

Assessing the concreteness of relational representation.

Research has shown that people's ability to transfer abstract relational knowledge across situations can be heavily influenced by the concrete objects that fill relational roles. This article provides evidence that the concreteness of the relations themselves also affects performance. In 3 experiments, participants viewed simple relational patterns of visual objects and then identified these same patterns under a variety of physical transformations.

Novelty-evoked activity in open field predicts susceptibility to helpless behavior.

Learned helplessness in animals has been used to model disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but there is a lack of knowledge concerning which individual behavioral characteristics at baseline can predict helpless behavior after exposure to inescapable stress. The first aim of this study was to determine behavioral predictors of helplessness using the novel and familiar open-field tests, sucrose consumption, and passive harm-avoidance tasks before learned helplessness training and testing. Individual differences in physiologic responses to restraint stress were also assessed.

Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children's causal explanatory reasoning.

What events trigger causal explanatory reasoning in young children? Children's explanations could be triggered by either consistent events (suggesting that explanations serve a confirmatory function) or inconsistent events (suggesting that they promote discovery of new information). In 2 studies with preschool children (N = 80), events that were consistent with children's prior knowledge were simultaneously contrasted with events that were inconsistent with prior knowledge, and children were invited to explain either outcome (or both). Results demonstrate that inconsistent outcomes are an especially powerful trigger for children's explanations and that the explanations children provide for inconsistent outcomes refer to internal causal properties, overriding perceptual appearances.

Psychological distance and priming: when do semantic primes impact social evaluations?

Semantic primes influence the impressions and evaluations people form of others. According to construal level theory (CLT), as stimuli get closer psychologically (e.g.

Memory for category information is idealized through contrast with competing options.

We suggest that human category formation relies on contrastive learning mechanisms that seek to reduce prediction error. In keeping with this view, manipulating category contrast leads to systematic distortions in people's memory for category information. Simply by changing the basis of comparison (i.

Does religious involvement protect against early drinking? A behavior genetic approach.

Background: Adolescent involvement in religious organizations has been hypothesized to protect against early age at first drink. However, the correlation between adolescent religiosity and later age at first drink may be confounded by environmental or genetic differences between families. This study tests whether, after controlling for shared environmental and genetic confounds using a behavior genetic design, the association between individual levels of religiosity and earlier age at first drink is still evident.

Is there an active gene-environment correlation in adolescent drinking behavior?

A scale based on alcohol-related behaviors and an item on shared friends from the National Merit Twin Study were used in an attempt to confirm the finding of Cleveland et al. (1995, J Genet Psychol 166:153-169) of gene-environment correlation in adolescents' drinking behavior, a correlation based on the differential selection of peers. Results from samples of 490 MZ and 336 same-sex DZ pairs were consistent in direction with the hypothesis, although quantitatively modest.

Properties of a nonlinear version of the stimulus-frequency otoacoustic emission.

A procedure for extracting the nonlinear component of the stimulus-frequency otoacoustic emission (SFOAE) is described. This nSFOAE measures the amount by which the cochlear response deviates from linear additivity when the input stimulus is doubled in amplitude. When a 4.

A longitudinal investigation of heavy drinking and physical dating violence in men and women.

Examinations of heavy drinking and dating violence have typically focused on either female victimization or male perpetration; yet recent findings indicate that mutual aggression is the most common pattern of dating violence. The current study investigated the relation between heavy drinking and dating violence for both men and women. Participants (N=2247) completed surveys that assessed their heavy drinking and dating violence frequency across the first three years of college.

Neural mechanisms of the testosterone-aggression relation: the role of orbitofrontal cortex.

Testosterone plays a role in aggressive behavior, but the mechanisms remain unclear. The present study tested the hypothesis that testosterone influences aggression through the OFC, a region implicated in self-regulation and impulse control. In a decision-making paradigm in which people chose between aggression and monetary reward (the ultimatum game), testosterone was associated with increased aggression following social provocation (rejecting unfair offers).

Roles of medial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in self-evaluation.

Empirical investigations of the relation of frontal lobe function to self-evaluation have mostly examined the evaluation of abstract qualities in relation to self versus other people. The present research furthers our understanding of frontal lobe involvement in self-evaluation by examining two processes that have not been widely studied by neuroscientists: on-line self-evaluations and correction of systematic judgment errors that influence self-evaluation. Although people evaluate their abstract qualities, it is equally important that perform on-line evaluations to assess the success of their behavior in a particular situation.

Salivary testosterone, cortisol, and progesterone: two-week stability, interhormone correlations, and effects of time of day, menstrual cycle, and oral contraceptive use on steroid hormone levels.

With salivary assessment of steroid hormones increasing, more work is needed to address fundamental properties of steroid hormone levels in humans. Using a test-retest design and radioimmunoassay assessment of salivary steroids, we tested the reliability of testosterone, cortisol, and progesterone levels across two weeks, as well as the effects of oral contraceptives, menstrual cycle phase, and time of day on steroid hormone levels. Testosterone and cortisol were found to be highly reliable in both sexes.

Strain, sex, and open-field behavior: factors underlying the genetic susceptibility to helplessness.

Learned helplessness represents a failure to escape after exposure to inescapable stress and may model human psychiatric disorders related to stress. Previous work has demonstrated individual differences in susceptibility to learned helplessness. In this study, we assessed different factors associated with this susceptibility, including strain, sex, and open-field behavior.

Anticipatory emotions in decision tasks: covert markers of value or attentional processes?

Anticipatory emotions precede behavioral outcomes and provide a means to infer interactions between emotional and cognitive processes. A number of theories hold that anticipatory emotions serve as inputs to the decision process and code the value or risk associated with a stimulus. We argue that current data do not unequivocally support this theory.