Activation levels of plausible alternatives in conversational negation.

Negation is often used to contradict or correct (e.g. There is no dog here.). While rejecting some state of affairs that is presumed to hold for the recipient (e.g. There is a dog here.), the speaker might implicitly suggest a set of plausible alternatives (e.g. There is a wolf instead.). Prior work indicates that alternatives are highly relevant to the comprehension of sentences involving focus: in priming studies, listeners infer plausible alternatives to focused items even when they are not contextually available. So far it is unclear whether negation similarly activates an automatic search for plausible alternatives. The current study was designed to investigate this question, by looking at the activation levels of nouns after negative and affirmative sentences. In a series of priming experiments, subjects were presented with negative and affirmative sentences (e.g. There is an/no apple.), followed by a lexical decision task with targets including plausible alternatives (e.g. pear), as well as semantically related but implausible alternatives (e.g. seed). An interaction of Sentence Polarity and Prime-Target Relation was expected, with negation facilitating responses to plausible alternatives. Results of the first experiment were numerically in line with the hypothesis but the interaction just missed significance level. A post hoc analysis revealed the expected significant interaction. Possible roles of sentential context and goodness of alternatives are discussed. A further experiment confirms that the goodness of alternatives is in fact critical in modulating the effect.

Neural correlates of mindful emotion regulation in high and low ruminators.

Depressive rumination is considered a prominent risk factor for the occurrence, severity, and duration of depressive episodes. A variety of treatment options have been developed to treat depressive rumination of which mindfulness based programs are especially promising. In the current study, we investigated the neural underpinnings of a short mindfulness intervention and mindful emotion regulation in high and low trait ruminators in an ecologically valid environment using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness instruction (MT) group or an instructed thinking (IT) group. Participants in the MT group were trained to either focus their attention mindfully on their breath or their emotions, while the IT group focused their attention on the past or future. Afterwards, all participants underwent an emotion regulation paradigm in which they either watched negative or neutral movie clips. During both paradigms cortical hemodynamic changes were assessed by means of fNIRS. Participants in the MT group showed lower activity in the cognitive control network (CCN) during the focus on breath condition in comparison to the focus on emotion condition. Additionally, oxygenated hemoglobin in the MT group tended to be lower than in the IT group. Further, self-reports of emotional distress during the instruction paradigm were reduced in the MT group. During the emotion regulation paradigm, we observed reduced emotional reactivity in terms of emotional distress and avoidance in the MT group in comparison to the IT group. Furthermore, on a neural level, we observed higher CCN activity in the MT group in comparison to the IT group. We did not find any effect of rumination, neither on the intervention nor on the emotion regulation task. The results of this pilot study are discussed in light of the present literature on the neural correlates of mindfulness based interventions in rumination and emphasize the use of fNIRS to track neural changes in situ over the course of therapy.