Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

Narcissus reflected: Grey and white matter features joint contribution to the default mode network in predicting narcissistic personality traits.

Despite the clinical significance of narcissistic personality, its neural bases have not been clarified yet, primarily because of methodological limitations of the previous studies, such as the low sample size, the use of univariate techniques and the focus on only one brain modality. In this study, we employed for the first time a combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, to identify the joint contributions of grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) to narcissistic personality traits (NPT). After preprocessing, the brain scans of 135 participants were decomposed into eight independent networks of covarying GM and WM via parallel ICA. Subsequently, stepwise regression and Random Forest were used to predict NPT. We hypothesized that a fronto-temporo parietal network, mainly related to the default mode network, may be involved in NPT and associated WM regions. Results demonstrated a distributed network that included GM alterations in fronto-temporal regions, the insula and the cingulate cortex, along with WM alterations in cerebellar and thalamic regions. To assess the specificity of our findings, we also examined whether the brain network predicting narcissism could also predict other personality traits (i.e., histrionic, paranoid and avoidant personalities). Notably, this network did not predict such personality traits. Additionally, a supervised machine learning model (Random Forest) was used to extract a predictive model for generalization to new cases. Results confirmed that the same network could predict new cases. These findings hold promise for advancing our understanding of personality traits and potentially uncovering brain biomarkers associated with narcissism.

Predicting narcissistic personality traits from brain and psychological features: A supervised machine learning approach.

Narcissism is a multifaceted construct often linked to pathological conditions whose neural correlates are still poorly understood. Previous studies have reported inconsistent findings related to the neural underpinnings of narcissism, probably due to methodological limitations such as the low number of participants or the use of mass univariate methods. The present study aimed to overcome the previous methodological limitations and to build a predictive model of narcissistic traits based on neural and psychological features. In this respect, two machine learning-based methods (Kernel Ridge Regression and Support Vector Regression) were used to predict narcissistic traits from brain structural organization and from other relevant normal and abnormal personality features. Results showed that a circuit including the lateral and middle frontal gyri, the angular gyrus, Rolandic operculum, and Heschl's gyrus successfully predicted narcissistic personality traits (p < 0.003). Moreover, narcissistic traits were predicted by normal (openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness) and abnormal (borderline, antisocial, insecure, addicted, negativistic, machiavellianism) personality traits. This study is the first to predict narcissistic personality traits via a supervised machine learning approach. As such, these results may expand the possibility of deriving personality traits from neural and psychological features.

Redefining the decisional components of motor responses: Evidence from lexical and object decision tasks.

Models of decision making focusing on two-alternative choices have classically described motor-response execution as a nondecisional stage that serially follows the termination of decision processes. Recent evidence, however, points toward a more continuous transition between decision and motor processes. We investigated this transition in two lexical decisions and one object decision task. By recording the electromyographic (EMG) signal associated with the muscle responsible for the manual responses (i.e., button press), we partitioned single-trial reaction times into premotor (the time elapsing from stimulus onset until the onset of the EMG burst) and motor times (the time elapsing from the onset of the EMG burst and the button press), with the latter measuring response execution. Responses were slower for pseudowords and pseudo-objects compared to words and real objects. Importantly, these effects were reliable even at the level of motor time measures. Differently, despite the reliable effect at the level of reaction times and premotor times, there was no difference in motor times between high- and low-frequency words. Although these results, in line with recent evidence, challenge a purely noncognitive characterization of motor-response execution, they further suggest that motor times may selectively capture specific decisional components, which we identify with late-occurring verification and/or control mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Neural Signatures of Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis on Functional Neuroimaging Studies.

Self-conscious emotions, such as shame and guilt, play a fundamental role in regulating moral behaviour and in promoting the welfare of society. Despite their relevance, the neural bases of these emotions are uncertain. In the present meta-analysis, we performed a systematic literature review in order to single out functional neuroimaging studies on healthy individuals specifically investigating the neural substrates of shame, embarrassment, and guilt. Seventeen studies investigating the neural correlates of shame/embarrassment and seventeen studies investigating guilt brain representation met our inclusion criteria. The analyses revealed that both guilt and shame/embarrassment were associated with the activation of the left anterior insula, involved in emotional awareness processing and arousal. Guilt-specific areas were located within the left temporo-parietal junction, which is thought to be involved in social cognitive processes. Moreover, specific activations for shame/embarrassment involved areas related to social pain (dorsal anterior cingulate and thalamus) and behavioural inhibition (premotor cortex) networks. This pattern of results might reflect the distinct action tendencies associated with the two emotions.

Improper weapons are a neglected category of harmful objects.

According to legislation, objects are typically classified as weapons if they are offensive per se (referred to here as proper) and if they are adapted for use as weapons or carried with the intent of causing injury (referred to here as improper), with specific regulations on their usage and possession in public spaces. However, little evidence exists on the validity of this distinction in psychology, despite a widespread recognition of the importance of psychological states and subjective perceptions in risk assessment. We conducted an online survey to evaluate hazard perceptions in relation to three dimensions (dangerousness, frequency of events, controllability) of three object categories: proper weapons, improper weapons, and everyday objects. The data from our 300 respondents reveal that the three categories of objects differ from one another on the three dimensions. Moreover, hazard perceptions differ between males and females for improper weapons but less so for proper weapons. These findings suggest that proper and improper weapons are two psychologically distinct categories, albeit with fuzzy boundaries. Investigations into their differential properties may thus help improve risk assessment in security contexts.

Built to last: Theta and delta changes in resting-state EEG activity after regulating emotions.

BACKGROUND: Over the past years, electroencephalography (EEG) studies focused on task-related activity to characterize cortical responses associated with emotion regulation (ER), without exploring the possibility that regulating emotions can leave a trace in the brain by affecting its oscillatory activity. Demonstrating whether the effect of regulation alters the brain activity after the session and whether this reflects an increased cognitive regulatory ability has great relevance. METHODS: To address this issue, 5 min of electrical brain activity at rest were recorded before and after (1) one session in which participants perceived and regulated (through distancing) their emotions (regulation session, ReS), and (2) another session in which they only perceived emotions (attend session, AtS). One hundred and sixty visual stimuli were presented, and subjective ratings of valence and arousal of stimuli were recorded. RESULTS: Behavioral results showed the efficacy of the regulation strategy in modulating both arousal and valence. A cluster-based permutation test on EEG data at rest revealed a significant increase in theta and delta activity after the ReS compared to the AtS, suggesting that regulating emotions can alter brain activity after the session. CONCLUSIONS: These results allowed us to outline a comprehensive view of the neurophysiological mechanisms associated with ER, as well as some possible implications in psychotherapy.

The interaction of central and peripheral processes in typing and handwriting: A direct comparison.

This study aimed to investigate the interaction between linguistic and peripheral-motor processes in written production. Past research has focused on this topic by analyzing how handwriting and, more recently, typing execution were influenced by lexical and sublexical variables. We took a step further in this study by directly comparing handwriting and typing, examining if different motor executions allow for different flows of linguistic processing. Participants typed and handwrote a set of Italian stimuli in which we manipulated lexicality (words vs. pseudowords), orthographic complexity (stimuli with vs. without multiletter graphemes), and length (short vs. long stimuli). We measured and analyzed latency (response times [RTs]), the difference between RTs and the acoustic duration (AD) of the stimuli (RT-AD), mean length of interletter intervals (ILIs), and whole response duration (WRD). We further explored the effects of the position of the orthographic complexity on RTs, RT-AD, ILIs, and WRD. Results suggested a cascaded, continuous processing flow for handwriting and a mixed mechanism involving both serial and parallel modes of processing for typing. The differences in linguistic processing during handwriting and typing suggest different mechanisms in segmenting, maintaining, and retrieving the orthographic representation during motor execution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Different types of semantic interference, same lapses of attention: Evidence from Stroop tasks.

This research investigated the possibility that semantic control mechanisms are recruited only when the interfering semantic information does not overlap with task-relevant semantic dimensions. To reach this goal, we investigated two semantic types of Stroop interference-the semantic and the taboo Stroop effects-and used delta-plots to investigate the role of attentional and semantic control in these two interference phenomena. The semantic Stroop effect, where interference stems from the task-relevant color-related information, was absent in faster responses, whereas it steeply increased in the slowest ones. Contrary to our predictions, the same pattern was detected even for the taboo Stroop interference, with no trace of selective suppression of the interfering semantic connotation, despite its dissociation from any task-relevant semantic dimension. Further, there was a significant correlation between the increase of the two effects in the slowest responses, pointing towards a common underlying processing dynamic. We identified such common background with lapses of executive attention in maintaining task goals and schema, which in turn make the participants performance more prone to interference phenomena. Finally, the absence of any interference effects in the fastest responses suggests that an effective filtering of the distracting word stimuli can be implemented in the context of Stroop paradigms.

Prepotent task-irrelevant semantic information is dampened by domain-specific control mechanisms during visual word recognition.

We investigated whether semantic interference occurring during visual word recognition is resolved using domain-general control mechanisms or using more specific mechanisms related to semantic processing. We asked participants to perform a lexical decision task with taboo stimuli, which induce semantic interference, as well as a semantic Stroop task and a Simon task, intended as benchmarks of linguistic-semantic and non-linguistic interference, respectively. Using a correlational approach, we investigated potential similarities between effects produced in the three tasks, both at the level of overall means and as a function of response speed (delta-plot analysis). Correlations selectively surfaced between the lexical decision and the semantic Stroop task. These findings suggest that, during visual word recognition, semantic interference is controlled by semantic-specific mechanisms, which intervene to face prepotent but task-irrelevant semantic information interfering with the accomplishment of the task's goal.

Selective suppression of taboo information in visual word recognition: Evidence for cognitive control on semantics.

The present study investigated the role of cognitive control on semantic information during visual word recognition by exploiting taboo stimuli in a lexical-decision task. We relied on delta plots and electromyography (EMG) to assess different hypothetical mechanisms of cognitive control. Previous research suggests that taboo stimuli slow down the performance across a variety of tasks due to their attention-grabbing nature. One possibility is that cognitive control counteracts the detrimental effects of taboo connotation by actively dampening such prepotent yet task-irrelevant information. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found a reversal of taboo interference effect in slowest responses, signaling the deployment of a selective suppression mechanism that needs time to fully accrue. For electromyographic data, we focused on partial errors (trials showing a subthreshold activation of the incorrect response hand) to index response-monitoring processes intervening to prevent and correct errors. We found no modulation of the likelihood of partial errors and, more generally, of response accuracy as a function of taboo connotation. Taken together, the results suggest that cognitive control may intervene to selectively suppress fast-acting and distracting taboo information, indicating a controlled semantic processing that optimizes activation to match task-relevant goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with autism spectrum disorder.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies found that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform well on pragmatic inference tests that require the use of the linguistic scale . The present study extends previous research by testing two types of implicature: scalar implicatures, based on lexical scales, and ad-hoc implicatures, based on contextual scales. METHODS: We tested 26 children with ASD aged 4-10 years (mean age 7.1) and 26 typically developing (TD) children - matched on chronological age and with a similar performance in non-verbal IQ and vocabulary - by means of a picture selection task for scalar and ad-hoc implicatures. We also investigated the effect of children's scores in standardized tests measuring non-verbal intelligence, lexical, and morphosyntactic abilities and Theory-of-Mind skills on their performance in the implicature tasks. RESULTS: Although more than half of the children with ASD performed above chance on both kinds of implicatures, their performance as a group was significantly lower than the performance of their TD peers. General cognitive abilities were found to affect the performance of children with ASD on both kinds of implicatures, and Theory-of-Mind reasoning skills were found to be linked to their performance on scalar, but not ad-hoc implicatures. CONCLUSIONS: We show that children with ASD have difficulty with both kinds of implicatures. These findings may have implications for explanatory theories of pragmatics as well as for clinical work with children with ASD.

Do anger perception and the experience of anger share common neural mechanisms? Coordinate-based meta-analytic evidence of similar and different mechanisms from functional neuroimaging studies.

The neural bases of anger are still a matter of debate. In particular we do not know whether anger perception and anger experience rely on similar or different neural mechanisms. To study this topic, we performed activation-likelihood-estimation meta-analyses of human neuroimaging studies on 61 previous studies on anger perception and experience. Anger perception analysis resulted in significant activation in the amygdala, the right superior temporal gyrus, the right fusiform gyrus and the right IFG, thus revealing the role of perceptual temporal areas for perceiving angry stimuli. Anger experience analysis resulted in the bilateral activations of the insula and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, thus revealing a role for these areas in the subjective experience of anger and, possibly, in a subsequent evaluation of the situation. Conjunction analyses revealed a common area localized in the right inferior frontal gyrus, probably involved in the conceptualization of anger for both perception and experience. Altogether these results provide new insights on the functional architecture underlying the neural processing of anger that involves separate and joint mechanisms. According to our tentative model, angry stimuli are processed by temporal areas, such as the superior temporal gyrus, the fusiform gyrus and the amygdala; on the other hand, the subjective experience of anger mainly relies on the anterior insula; finally, this pattern of activations converges in the right IFG. This region seems to play a key role in the elaboration of a general meaning of this emotion, when anger is perceived or experienced.

The impact of emotional content on pseudoword recognition.

The present study investigates the influence of emotional information on language processing. To this aim, we measured behavioral responses and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during four Italian lexical decision experiments in which we used emotionally intense and neutral pseudowords-i.e., pseudowords derived from changing one letter in a word (e.g., cammelto, derived from cammello 'camel' vs. copezzolo, from capezzolo 'nipple')-as stimuli. In Experiment 1 and 2, half of the pseudowords were emotionally intense and half were neutral, and were mixed with neutral words. In Experiment 3, the list composition was manipulated, with » of the pseudowords being derived from emotionally intense words and ¾ derived from neutral words. Experiment 4 was identical to Experiment 1, but ERPs were recorded. Emotionally intense pseudowords were categorized more slowly than neutral pseudowords, with the difference emerging both in the mean and at the leading edge of the response times distribution. Moreover, emotionally intense pseudowords elicited smaller N170 and N400 than neutral pseudowords. These results speak in favor of a fast and multi-level infiltration of the emotional information into the linguistic process of word recognition.

Tune in to the right frequency: Theta changes when distancing from emotions elicited by unpleasant images and words.

Emotion regulation allows humans to successfully modulate their reactions to life events. Whether regulation strategies may alter brain oscillatory activity and how they are influenced by format and emotional dimensions is still under debate. We investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during the implementation of the strategy of Distancing and during the regulation of the emotions elicited by neutral and unpleasant pictures and, for the first time, words. When implementing the strategy, an early increase in theta band in posterior regions was observed (Effect of Strategy). We interpret this effect as a marker of emotion regulation, and we suggest an integrative framework of the role of theta on regulatory processes. When regulating the emotional impact elicited by stimuli, a decrease in the theta and beta bands in posterior regions for pictures, but not for words, was observed (Effect of Regulation). Behaviorally, the Effect of Regulation was evident for both pictures and words and more pronounced for Valence than for Arousal. These results contribute to better understand the neural and behavioral features of Distancing (both Effect of Strategy and of Regulation), and open up the possibility to clarify which strategy works better to modulate specific stimulus types and emotional dimensions.

The Role of Amygdala in Self-Conscious Emotions in a Patient With Acquired Bilateral Damage.

Shame plays a fundamental role in the regulation of our social behavior. One intriguing question is whether amygdala might play a role in processing this emotion. In the present single-case study, we tested a patient with acquired damage of bilateral amygdalae and surrounding areas as well as healthy controls on shame processing and other social cognitive tasks. Results revealed that the patient's subjective experience of shame, but not of guilt, was more reduced than in controls, only when social standards were violated, while it was not different than controls in case of moral violations. The impairment in discriminating between normal social situations and violations also emerged. Taken together, these findings suggest that the role of the amygdala in processing shame might reflect its relevance in resolving ambiguity and uncertainty, in order to correctly detect social violations and to generate shame feelings.

On the Boundaries between Decision and Action: Effector-selective Lateralization of Beta-frequency Power Is Modulated by the Lexical Frequency of Printed Words.

Current computational and neuroscientific models of decision-making posit a discrete, serial processing distinction between upstream decisional stages and downstream processes of motor-response implementation. We investigated this framework in the context of two-alternative forced-choice tasks on linguistic stimuli, words and pseudowords. In two experiments, we assessed the impact of lexical frequency and action semantics on two effector-selective EEG indexes of motor-response activation: the lateralized readiness potential and the lateralization of beta-frequency power. This allowed us to track potentially continuous streams of processing progressively mapping the evaluation of linguistic stimuli onto corresponding response channels. Whereas action semantics showed no influence on EEG indexes of motor-response activation, lexical frequency affected the lateralization of response-locked beta-frequency power. We argue that these observations point toward a continuity between linguistic processing of word input stimuli and implementation of corresponding choice in terms of motor behavior. This interpretation challenges the commonly held assumption of a discrete processing distinction between decisional and motor-response processes in the context of decisions based on symbolic stimuli.

The relationship of domain-general serial order memory and reading ability in school children with and without dyslexia.

Recent evidence suggests that reading development when learning alphabetic languages is related to the underlying cognitive ability to maintain the serial order of information in short-term memory (STM). However, it remains unclear at which time point in reading development serial order STM is most important. Here, we established a crucial link between the reading development of primary school children and their serial order STM performance for both verbal and nonverbal materials. In a large cohort study of 113 Italian-speaking elementary school children in Grades 1-4, we investigated this relationship by implementing a novel double-probe design. In Experiment 1, we found that serial order STM performance was related to children's reading abilities, especially in Grades 2 and 3, corresponding to the training phase of grapheme-phoneme decoding skills. In Experiment 2, we assessed children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and found that their serial order STM performance was significantly lower than that of chronological age-matched controls (CA). It also differed from that of reading age-matched controls when accounting for individual reading performance. Furthermore, the CA group displayed an implicit serial order facilitation for item memory, whereas this implicit recruitment of serial order abilities was completely absent in children with DD. Our results suggest that the domain-general cognitive ability to maintain the serial order of information interacts with the development of reading competency, especially during a middle training phase of word reading, and this particular relationship is markedly impaired in children with DD.