Does attentional focus modulate affective information processing in male violent offenders with psychopathic traits?

Antisocial and psychopathic individuals are characterized by a reduced responsivity to affective information. Yet, the role of attentional processes as possible modulator of these deficits is poorly understood. The current study investigated early and late processing of emotional stimuli in a sample of incarcerated offenders while manipulating the attentional focus. Twenty-seven male violent offenders with psychopathic traits and 27 healthy controls completed two experimental tasks while electroencephalography (EEG) data were collected. Task 1 assessed indirect processing of emotional or neutral distractors during a perceptual judgment task, while Task 2 measured direct processing of the emotional or neutral stimuli and required participants to rate the stimuli regarding valence and arousal. EEG data indicated no differences in early stage processing (early posterior negativity) between the experimental groups. However, we found significant group differences with regard to the late processing stage (late positive potential, LPP). Controls showed increased LPP amplitudes in Task 2 as compared to Task 1, indicating that task demands (i.e., attentional focus) had an effect on the processing of the emotional stimuli. In contrast, LPP amplitudes in the violent offender group were largely unaffected by task demands, suggesting specific late alterations in the neural processing of emotional stimuli. In sum, this study provides new evidence for a modulatory impact of attention on affective information processing in male violent offenders with psychopathic traits.

Consensus on the reporting and experimental design of clinical and cognitive-behavioural neurofeedback studies (CRED-nf checklist).

Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards in the field.

Interpretation of ambiguous facial affect in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

In addition to impairments in cognitive functioning, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with deficits in interpersonal functioning as well which are assumed to stem from a distorted perception or interpretation of affective information. While previous research suggests that the decoding of negatively valenced facial stimuli is impaired, less is known about the potential interpretation biases in ADHD which are linked to other externalizing psychopathologies. The present study investigated interpretation biases in adults with ADHD (N = 65) and controls (N = 49) using ambiguous facial stimuli (angry/happy, angry/fearful, fearful/happy blends) with different proportions of each emotion. Participants indicated the dominant emotion and rated the perceived intensity of each image. While impaired processing of fearful expressions was evident in the ADHD group, the results of the current study do not provide support for an interpretation bias in adults with ADHD. These findings suggest that interpretation biases may be restricted to aggressive psychopathology and cannot be generalized to individuals with ADHD.

Behavioral and electrophysiological responses to fairness norm violations in antisocial offenders.

Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a stable, lifelong pattern of disregard for and violation of others' rights. Disruptions in the representation of fairness norms may represent a key mechanism in the development and maintenance of this disorder. Here, we investigated fairness norm considerations and reactions to their violations. To examine electrophysiological correlates, we assessed the medial frontal negativity (MFN), an event-related potential previously linked to violations of social expectancy and norms. Incarcerated antisocial violent offenders (AVOs, n = 25) and healthy controls (CTLs, n = 24) acted as proposers in the dictator game (DG) and ultimatum game (UG) and received fair vs. unfair UG offers from either another human (social context) or a computer (non-social context). Results showed that AVOs made lower offers in the DG but not the UG, indicating more rational and strategic behavior. Most importantly, when acting as recipients in the UG, acceptance rates were modulated by social context in CTLs, while AVOs generally accepted more offers. Correspondingly, ERP data indicated pronounced MFN amplitudes following human offers in CTLs, whereas MFN amplitudes in AVOs were generally reduced. The current data suggest intact fairness norm representations but altered reactions to their violation in antisocial personality disorder.

Does Social Exclusion Alter Sensory and Pain Thresholds in Children and Adolescents with Functional Abdominal Pain? - Results from a Preliminary Study.

OBJECTIVE: Functional abdominal pain (AP) is a prevalent issue in childhood and adolescence. The contribution of psychosocial factors in the development and maintenance of this health problem is rather unclear, and experimental studies about underlying mechanisms are lacking. This study investigates whether experimentally induced social exclusion decreases sensory and pain thresholds in children suffering from AP. SUBJECTS: Twenty children/adolescents with AP and 22 healthy controls. METHODS: Children/adolescents participated in the Cyberball paradigm, which affects an experience of social exclusion. Thermal sensory and pain thresholds were measured before and after Cyberball. RESULTS: Children/adolescents with AP showed a divergent reaction regarding their sensory threshold after social exclusion: The control group exhibited a tendency toward a decreased sensory threshold whereas the AP group remained stable. Concerning the pain threshold, no effect of social exclusion could be identified. The increase of both thresholds ("numbing") after Cyberball was positively correlated with symptoms of mental health issues. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study to investigate changes in sensory and pain thresholds following painful social interactions in a sample of children/adolescents with a chronic pain condition. Results suggest that AP and control children differ in their reaction of sensory thresholds, which might indicate an altered processing of social exclusion. Replication and further methodological improvements are needed.

Binocular rivalry transitions predict inattention symptom severity in adult ADHD.

Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent childhood disorder that is often maintained throughout the development and persists into adulthood. Established etiology models suggest that deficient inhibition underlies the core ADHD symptoms. While experimental evidence for impaired motor inhibition is overwhelming, little is known about the sensory inhibition processes, their changes throughout the development, and the relationship to ADHD symptoms. Here, we used the well-established binocular rivalry (BR) paradigm to investigate for the very first time the inhibitory processes related to visual perception in adults with ADHD. In BR, perception alternates between two dichoptically presented images throughout the viewing period, with shorter dominant percept durations and longer transition periods indicating poorer suppression/inhibition. Healthy controls (N = 28) and patients with ADHD (N = 32) were presented with two dissimilar images (orthogonal gratings) separately to each eye through a mirror stereoscope and asked to report their perceptual experiences. There were no differences between groups in any of the BR markers. However, an association between transition durations and symptom severity emerged in the ADHD group. Importantly, an exploratory multiple regression analysis revealed that inattention symptoms were the sole predictor for the duration of transition periods. The lack of impairments to sensory inhibition in adult, but not pediatric ADHD may reflect compensatory changes associated with development, while a correlation between inhibition and inattention symptoms may reveal an invariant core of the disorder.

Impaired social cognition in violent offenders: perceptual deficit or cognitive bias?

Aggressive behavior is assumed to be associated with certain patterns of social information processing. While some theories link aggression to a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as hostile (i.e., enhanced sensitivity to anger), others assume an insufficient ability to perceive emotional expressions, particularly fear. Despite compelling evidence to support both theories, no previous study has directly investigated the predictions made by these two accounts in aggressive populations. The aim of the current study was to test processing patterns for angry and fearful facial expressions in violent offenders (VOs) and healthy controls (CTLs) and their association with self-reported aggression and psychopathy scores. In Experiment 1, we assessed perceptual sensitivity to neutral-emotional (angry, fearful, happy) blends in a task which did not require categorization, but an indication whether the stimulus is neutral or emotional. In Experiment 2, we assessed categorization performance for ambiguous fearful-happy and angry-happy blends. No group differences were revealed in Experiment 1, while Experiment 2 indicated a deficit in the categorization of ambiguous fearful blends in the VO group. Importantly, this deficit was associated with both self-reported psychopathy and aggression in the VO, but not the CTL group. The current study provides evidence for a deficient categorization of fearful expressions and its association with self-reported aggression and psychopathy in VOs, but no support for heightened sensitivity to anger. Furthermore, the current findings indicate that the deficit is tied to categorization but not detection stages of social information processing.

Smooth criminal: convicted rule-breakers show reduced cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations.

Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators. In the current study, we validate these findings by showing that convicted criminals, i.e., individuals with a history of habitual and severe forms of rule violations, can free themselves from such cognitive conflict in a similarly controlled laboratory task. These findings support an emerging view that aims at understanding rule violations from the perspective of the violating agent rather than from the perspective of outside observer.

Theory of mind abilities in patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

BACKGROUND: Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) have been frequently linked to deficits in affect regulation and altered processing of emotionally salient information. However, less is known about how patients suffering from PNES actually process and interpret affective social stimuli. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate basal facial affect recognition as well as mind-reading skills in a sample of patients with PNES and matched control subjects. METHODS: Patients with PNES (N=15) and healthy controls (N=15) completed self-report questionnaires that measured alexithymia and perceived stress vulnerability. Affect perception was tested using a series of computerized movies of models whose facial expressions slowly change from neutral to full-blown emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise), allowing for a fine-grained assessment of facial emotion recognition impairments. Further, all participants were presented with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, a well-validated video-based test for the evaluation of subtle mind-reading deficits. RESULTS: Data analyses revealed increased alexithymic traits and, impaired mentalizing skills in individuals with PNES, while basal facial expression recognition was not compromised. DISCUSSION: The present findings are the first to demonstrate that patients with PNES exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people's mental states. Patients with PNES may benefit from psychotherapeutic interventions that focus on disturbed affect regulation and aim to enhance emotional awareness.

Investigation of the hostile attribution bias toward ambiguous facial cues in antisocial violent offenders.

Aggressive individuals exhibit a strong tendency to attribute hostile intent to the behavior of others, which may lead to provocation and aggravation of socially inappropriate reactions. Limited research has investigated the hostile attribution bias in the perception of facial affect. This study examined a hostile response bias to emotionally ambiguous faces in a population of 55 incarcerated antisocial violent offenders as compared to matched control subjects. Results suggest that aggression is associated with a strong preference to interpret ambiguous stimuli containing proportions of an angry expression as hostile, while there was no evidence for a generally biased interpretation of distress cues under conditions of uncertainty. Thus, the tendency to misinterpret nonverbal cues in social interactions may at least partly underlie aggressive-impulsive behavior in susceptible individuals.

Depression, posttraumatic stress, and risk factors following spinal cord injury.

BACKGROUND: Chronic depression and posttraumatic stress have been frequently observed in populations of accident victims with spinal cord injuries. Studies suggest that various risk factors contribute to the development and maintenance of these symptoms. PURPOSE: This study assessed psychopathology around 4 years post-discharge in a German sample of 102 participants with spinal cord injuries. METHODS: A wide range of sociodemographic, clinical, and psychological variables was investigated with regard to their association with psychopathology. RESULTS: Approximately half of the patients (46.1 %) retrospectively reported clinically relevant depressive symptoms immediately post-discharge and 12.7 % exhibited scores indicative of a present depressive disorder. In addition, 8.8 % retrospectively reported clinically relevant symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after discharge from the hospital and 2 % were currently identified with chronic PTSD symptomatology. Time since injury and negative trauma-related appraisals of the self were strongly related to current psychopathology. CONCLUSION: Depressive reactions and posttraumatic distress may commonly occur after spinal injuries but will usually improve over time. It might be useful to routinely arrange follow-up contacts post-discharge in order to timely identify patients who are at risk of developing chronic psychopathology and require intervention.

Dynamic facial emotion recognition and affective prosody recognition are associated in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.

Deficits in facial emotion recognition have frequently been established in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). However, static, rather than dynamic emotion recognition paradigms have been applied. Affective prosody has been insufficiently studied in TLE, and there is a lack of studies investigating associations between auditory and visual emotion recognition. We wished to investigate potential deficits in a dynamic morph task of facial emotion recognition and in an affective prosody recognition task, as well as associations between both tasks. 25 patients with TLE and 24 healthy controls (CG) performed a morph task with faces continuously changing in their emotional intensity. They had to press a button, as soon as they were able to recognize the emotion expressed, and label it accordingly. In the auditory task, subjects listened to neutral sentences spoken in varying emotional tones, and labeled the emotions. Correlation analyses were conducted across both tasks. TLE patients showed significantly reduced prosody recognition compared to CG, and in the morph task, there was a statistical trend towards significantly reduced performance for TLE. Recognition rates in both tasks were significantly associated. TLE patients show deficits in affective prosody recognition, and they may also be impaired in a morph task with dynamically changing facial expressions. Impairments in basic social-cognitive tasks in TLE seem to be modality-independent.

Specificity of jumping to conclusions and attributional biases: a comparison between patients with schizophrenia, depression, and anorexia nervosa.

INTRODUCTION: The knowledge of the specificity of cognitive biases in psychiatric disorders is important in order to develop disorder-specific cognitive models and therapies. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the specificity of jumping to conclusions (JTC) and attributional biases (AB) for patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: Twenty patients with paranoid schizophrenia were compared with patients with depression (n=20) and with anorexia nervosa (n=15) and nonclinical controls (n=55). All participants were administered a modified version of the beads task (JTC), a revised German version of the Internal, Personal, and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (AB), and several symptom and neurocognitive measures. RESULTS: The proportion of patients with JTC bias in the schizophrenia group was, at the descriptive level, higher than in the depression and the anorexia groups. Regarding AB, the schizophrenia group showed a significantly stronger externalising but not personalising bias than the clinical control groups. Neither JTC nor attributional biases were significantly associated with delusions in general or persecutory delusion. CONCLUSIONS: We found evidence for the specificity of an externalising bias for paranoid schizophrenia. Concerning JTC bias the evidence was less clear. Whether the modification of those biases through psychological interventions would have an effect on psychopathology should be investigated in the context of clinical trials.

Intact prioritization of fearful faces during continuous flash suppression in psychopathy.

Affective state recognition and in particular the identification of fear is known to be impaired in psychopathy. It is unclear, however, whether this reflects a deficit in basic perception ('fear blindness') or a deficit in later cognitive processing. To test for a perceptual deficit, 63 male incarcerated offenders, assessed with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), detected fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression (CFS). Fearful faces were detected faster than neutral and happy faces. There was no reduction of the fear advantage in the 20 offenders diagnosed with psychopathy according to the PCL-R, and there was no correlation between the fear advantage and PCL-R scores. Deficits in the processing of fearful facial expressions in psychopathy may thus not reflect fear blindness, but impairments at later postperceptual processing stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Affective Empathy, Theory of Mind and Social Functioning in Patients With Focal Epilepsy.

Objective: Social cognition comprises basic and more complex functions, such as theory of mind (ToM) and affective empathy. Although everyday social interactions may be impaired if such higher-order social cognitive functions are compromised, associations between social functioning and social cognition in people with focal epilepsy (PWFE) are still poorly understood. We used a novel, naturalistic approach to investigate ToM in PWFE by applying the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). Furthermore, we studied affective empathy, the relationship between social cognitive parameters and measures of social functioning, as well as between epilepsy focus and ToM. Methods: Thirty patients with either temporal (TLE) or frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) were compared to 29 healthy control subjects (HC). In addition to the MASC, we applied questionnaire measures assessing empathy and everyday social functioning. Results: PWFE, especially with FLE, performed significantly worse than HC on the MASC. Perceived social integration and social activities, but not affective empathy, were reduced in PWFE. Regression analyses revealed associations between perceived social integration, clinical group status, affective empathy and ToM. Conclusion: PWFE displayed ToM deficits during a naturalistic task, whereas affective empathy was unimpaired. FLE may be associated with especially compromised ToM performance. Social cognition and social functioning appear to be interrelated in PWFE, whose self-perceived levels of social integration and social activities are lower than those of HC. More research into the association between social cognition and social functioning in PWFE is needed, in order to develop tailored intervention programs for these patients.

Eye-movement patterns during emotion recognition in focal epilepsy: An exploratory investigation.

BACKGROUND: Eye-movement patterns during facial emotion recognition are under-researched in patients with focal epilepsy (PWFE). Previous studies including other neurological patients indicate that bilateral mesiotemporal damage could be associated with impaired emotion recognition and abnormal eye-movement patterns. AIMS: The current study addresses the question whether PWFE, in whom fronto-(mesio-)temporal networks are often disturbed, also show abnormal eye-movement patterns during facial emotion recognition. METHOD: 24 PWFE and a group of 29 healthy controls (HC) performed a facial emotion recognition task and a gender recognition task while eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker. For this purpose, Areas of Interest (AOI) were defined in the presented faces: the eye region and the mouth region. In addition to the proportion of correctly recognized emotions, the following eye-tracking parameters were recorded: Relative fixation duration (FD)/fixation count (FC) in the mouth region/eye region (relative to the FD/FC on the entire screen). RESULTS: PFWE showed an emotion recognition deficit compared to HC, whereas gender recognition performance did not differ between groups. In addition, PWFE showed significantly fewer and shorter fixations in the mouth region than HC, in both the emotion recognition task and the gender recognition task. CONCLUSIONS: When looking at faces, PFWE show eye-movement patterns different from those of healthy controls. Behaviorally, PWFE are only impaired in emotion recognition. Hence, PWFE possibly scan facial regions that are relevant to successful emotion recognition more diffusely and less efficiently than healthy control subjects. Future studies should investigate the etiology of such abnormal eye-movement patterns in PWFE.

Early predictors of posttraumatic stress in accident victims.

This study investigated the predictive value of pretraumatic and peritraumatic variables and early PTSD-like symptoms (within 48 h post-event) in determining the severity of posttraumatic stress in accident victims. Symptom development appears to be related to initial PTSD-like reactions, while demographic variables play a role in predicting symptom severity 6 months post-event.

Effects of group affiliation on neural signatures of fairness norm violations in antisocial violent offenders.

While norm-violating behavior in antisocial individuals has been widely studied, little is known about how these people react to unfair behavior directed towards them. Previous research yields inconclusive results with some evidence for rational and strategic behavior in antisocial individuals. Electrophysiological correlates as well as socio-contextual factors such as group affiliation that may inform decision making on fairness considerations have not been investigated in previous studies. This study compared fairness considerations of antisocial violent offenders (N = 25) and controls (N = 26) by using the Ultimatum Game where one player proposes a split of resources and the other player has to respond by accepting or declining the offer. Group affiliation of the proposer (in- vs. out-group) and fairness of offers (fair vs. unfair) were manipulated. We found no difference between groups regarding decision behavior. However, healthy participants showed an electrophysiological response to group affiliation, which was attenuated in the violent offender group. This data suggests intact understanding of social norms in antisocial violent offenders while electrophysiological response pattern may be linked to impaired emotional reactions to expectancy violations.

Attention orienting to the eyes in violent female and male offenders: An eye-tracking study.

Attention to the eyes and eye contact form an important basis for the development of empathy and social competences including prosocial behavior. Thus, impairments in attention to the eyes of an interaction partner might play a role in the etiology of antisocial behavior and violence. For the first time, the present study extends investigations of eye gaze to a large sample (N = 173) including not only male but also female violent offenders and a control group. We assessed viewing patterns during the categorization of emotional faces via eye tracking. Our results indicate a reduced frequency of initial attention shifts to the eyes in female and male offenders compared to controls, while there were no general group differences in overall attention to the eye region (i.e., relative dwell time). Thus, we conclude that violent offenders might be able to compensate for deficits in spontaneous attention orienting during later stages of information processing.

Believing is achieving - On the role of treatment expectation in neurofeedback applications.

In neurofeedback applications, neural activity is recorded, processed in real-time and fed back to the user in order to facilitate self-regulation of the putative neural mechanisms that underlie cognition and behavior. Numerous studies suggest that neurofeedback interventions are an efficacious treatment particularly for patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In recent years, however, findings of several well-controlled studies raised doubts concerning the proposed mechanism of action behind the behavioral effect of neurofeedback. This study investigated the impact of expectation on the efficacy of a sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) training. In a within-subjects design 30 blinded volunteers with ADHD symptoms received a standard SMR training session after inducing no (no-expectancy condition), positive (placebo condition), and negative (nocebo condition) expectations regarding the effectiveness of neurofeedback (by telling them that they would train a specific frequency band that was previously shown to be either unrelated to attention, should improve attention, or interfere with attentional processes). After each training, participants were presented with a cognitive test and subsequently requested to rate their performance on it. We could show that participants were able to successfully modify their EEG signal during training. Further, we found an effect over trainings on objective attentional performance. Most importantly, we found that the expectancy of positive or negative treatment effects considerably changed participants' perception of neurofeedback's efficacy even in the absence of any objective evidence. This study presents strong first evidence for a substantial effect of self-confirming response expectancies as one factor underlying the efficacy of neurofeedback. Future research has to carefully consider the impact of such psychosocial mechanisms when evaluating the (specific) efficacy of neuromodulatory treatments.