Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Feedback Processing

Patients with social axiety disorder (SAD) are very concerned for getting negative feedback from others (Voegler, Peterburs, Bellebaum, and Straube, 2019). SAD patients have the fear that their actions may be judged as abnormal or embarrasing. Learning from feedback is an important aspect for the succesful accomplishment of interactions with the environment, allowing contingency learning among actions and their effects and waiting for the consequences of particular behavior (Voegler et al., 2019).

The authors used a probabilistic feedback learning task while recording event related potentials and their interaction with the social context in patients with SAD and healthy control subjects. During the task feedback was given as wins or losses and were either rewarded or punished. Two conditions of the task consisted of either being obseved or as being not obseved by an observer (Voegler et al., 2019).

It was found that the patients with SAD were more unconfortable than healthy control subjects during the observation condition of the task. Furthermore, the patients with SAD did learn better from negative feedback compared to positive feedback during the no obsevation condition of the task, wheras the opposite did hold for the healthy control subjects. The ERP results showed that patients with SAD showed an enhanced feedback relativity (FRN) component amplitude during observation. The effect was more evident related to positive feedback. The results of the difference FRN and learning from negative feedback in the SAD patients was negativily associated with this component in the patients with SAD in the no obsevation condition, but not in the observation condition. In contrast, the opposite was found in healthy control subjects (Voegler et al., 2019). 

It is suggested that healthy control subjects are more relying on an avoidance-oriented strategy when they are being observed, such as social stress. The patients with SAD, however, are more implicated for negative information by default.

The results may opt for an inadequate information processing style in patients with SAD while they are being obseved with regard to the neural level. This might be due to a indefinite separation of reinforcement that is either negative or positive and as a result learning from negative feedback is impaired in these patients (Voegler et al., 2019).

Attentional Bias to Social Threat in PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is related to hypersensitive responses to potential threat (Klein, Schindler, Neuner, Rosner, Renneberg, Steil et al., 2019). These authors investigated the ERP correlates to processing of emotional words in a group of adolescents with PTSD with childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and childhood physical abuse (CPA) compared to healthy comparison subjects. The stimuli of the task consisted of nouns from different affective categories: neutral, positive, threatening, and social threatening.

The ERP results revealed an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) response in patients with PTSD. Concerning the P3 component, both groups showed reduced amplitude for positively valenced words. Patients with PTSD exhibited a differential enhanced response to social threatening stimuli as compared to physical threatening words, neutral words, and positive words.

It is suggested that patients with PTSD show a different pattern of information processing concerning negative social stimuli (Klein et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is argued that because of their specific traumatic experiences this group has an elaborated fear network after trauma, and these negative cues might be the most relevant for the patients with PTSD. There was found a blunted cardiac response in patients with PTSD compared to healthy comparison subjects for physical stimuli that were threatening. No differences were found in healthy comparison subjects (Klein et al., 2019).

Depression and Neural Sensitivity to Self-Referential Processing

In two experiments, patients with depression and healthy control subjects were required to read self-relevant stimuli while event related potentiald were recorded (Benau, Hill, Atchley, O'Hare, Gibson, Hajcak et al., 2019).

In the first experiment the processing of emotional words in both groups was applied in order to make a separation among self-relevant effects compared to valence effects. The results showed that patients with depression had a relatively normal modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) ERP component related with affect for high-arousal self-relevant words compared to normative emotional words. This was found to be in contrast to healthy control subjects, as they showed the same enhancement of the LPP amplitude for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, regardless of self-reliance. Patients with depression did only modulate stimuli when they were emotional and were personally relevant (Benau et al., 2019).

In the second experiment, self-evaluative linguistic processing was assessed by investigating the emotional reactivity to normative as compared to ideographic stimuli in patients with depression compared to healthy control subjects. The results of this second experiment revealed that patients suffering from depression were most likely to affirm negative self-referential statements as compared to positive self-referential statements.

Response times in the patient group were slower for both statements as compared to healthy control subjects. The response times for neutral stimuli did not differ among the groups. The ERP results revealed that the LPP was highest for self-referential sentences with a negative final word in the patients with depression. This effect was not found in the healthy control subjects (Benau et al., 2019).

Depression Symptoms and Reward and Loss Sensitivity

A dimensional approach was used in order to investigate the association among depression symptomatology and sustained reward responsiveness (Berry, Tanovic, Joormann, and Sanislow, 2019). ERPs were recorded to investigate how the early responses to rewards and losses do change over time. The doors task is a simple gambling task and was applied to elicit the reward positivity and the feedback related negativity. The subjects were given instructions for making a choice for the door that they thought was having a prize behind it. The remaining half of the doors consisted of losses.

During the gambling task, the authors found evidence of an association among depression symptomatology and responses to rewards and losses During the task. A sustained reward positivity and an increment in the feedback related negativity ERP components were found. Larger symptoms of depression were related to larger responses to both reward as well as losses.

According to the authors, higher depression symptomatology in the general population might be related to both reward and loss responses during the experimental task (Berry et al., 2019).

Risk Processing in Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder

Decision-associated versus feedback related aspects might probably contribute to decision making in patients with alcohol use disorder (Sehrig, Weiss, Miller, and Rockstroh, 2019). During the Ballon Analog Risk Task (BART) ERPs were recorded in patients and healthy comparison subjects. During the BART the participants could make a choice to inflate a visual balloon. The participants could also choose among pumping and "cash out".

Balloon pumping was revealed to be rewarding when not pumping, wheras popping the balloon resulted in a loss.

It was found that both subject groups did exhibit the same choice behavior, however, they did differ in the ERP results. Patients with alcohol use disorder showed an enhanced P3 amplitude which did not depend on the level of risk. In addition, patients showed a reduced feedback related negativity (FRN) which suggests that they have impaired responses during loss. There was found a larger N2-P3 complex in the patients, and the larger P3 in alcohol use disorder patients might be due to more heavily processing of the decision prompt related to outcome-expectancies due to learning. The reward prediction did not differ among both groups.

In the patients with alcohol use disorder, higher impulsivity was related to risk modulated decision P3, but not on the FRN. Based on these results, it is suggested that the decision as well as feedback-associated processes might have an impact on difficulties in the engagement of effective use of daily activities (Sehrig et al., 2019).

Hallucination-Proness, Intrisive Thoughts and Intentional Inhibition

Intentional cognitive inhibition is one way that has been found to be associated with susceptibility for auditory hallucinations (Anderson-Day, Smailes, Moffat, Mitrenga, Moseley, and Fernyhough, 2019). In a university sample, intentional inhibition capability, assessed with the Inhibition of Currently Irrelevant Memories (ICIM) task as well as a Directed Forgetting task was investigated. In addition, also source memory was investigated with a source memory task. The authors aim was to investigate in which way cognitive performance on the tasks was associated with auditory hallucination-proness and the susceptibility for thoughts that are intrusive.

The results revealed a signifacant association among auditory hullucination-proness and performance on the ICIM task. However, there was no relationship found for the Directed Forgetting task and the source memory task in these participants.

Intrusive thoughts were found to be mediating among intentional inhibition and auditory hallucination-proness. According to the authors, their data are suggestive of task such as the ICIM task pick out a tendence for experiencing cognitions that are intrusive and auditory hallucination-proness (Alderson-Day et al., 2019).

High-Risk Individuals for Psychosis show Grey-Matter Abnormalities

Abnormalities in grey-matter (GM) were investigated in a group of clinically high-risk individuals for psychosis and healthy control subjects. Furthermore, the association among psychosocial functioning and neurocognition was also investigated (Zikidi et al., in press).

The authors found no alterations in GM across the cortices, however, in clinically high-risk participants changes in a subgroup of these participants were found in the frontal lobe in addition to an association with lower psychotic symptoms in the occipital lobe.

A small correlation was found with alterations in the intensity of grey matter and impairments in neurocognitive function (Zikidi et al. in press).

Schizophrenia and Metaphor Comprehension

Deamer et al. (2019) investigated metaphor processing in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. The task consisted of spoken stories with a methaphor or were literally Based. Participants had to choose the correct picture that did match the spoken story. Participants performed also a first-order theory of mind task.

Eye-tracki notationg eye fixations of the participants was used when they did interpret the target sentences metaphorically, hyperbolically, and literally.

Patients with schizophrenia performed more worse than healthy control subjects on the task. When participants did choose a picture that was incorrect (did not match with the spoken sentence) in the task regarding metaphors, they almost always chose the literal picture. However, this result was found to be found significantly more pronounced in the patients with schizophrenia. Eye-tracking results revealed no differences among the groups which is according to the authors suggestive to be a result of inhibitory control impairments, due to giving more attention to litaral meanings in the patients with schizophrenia (Deamer et al., 2019).

Sustained Attention and Response Inhibition in ADHD

Hwang, Meffert, Parsley, Tyler, Erway, Botkin et al. (2019) investigated how ADHD symptom severity was related to an impaired usage of brain regions that are implicated in response inhibition or sustained attention. Three results were revealed.  treatmentHere was found a positive association among ADHD symptom severity related to the error rate of no-go trials that appeared infrequently. In addition, ADHD symptom severity exhibited a negative linear association with activation in the left insular cortex concerning no-go cues. Lastly, ADHD symptom severity revealed a quadratic association with activation in the left superior frontal cortex for low frequency trials.

Behavioral performance was also found to be impaired in ADHD, as reflected by enhanced error rates on low frequency no-go trials as well as shorter reaction times for go trials that were less frequent.

It is concluded that there are the same as well as separate neural impairments in response inhibition as found for the anterior insula as well as for sustained attention, found in the superior frontal cortex in ADHD patients (Hwang et al., 2019).

Pantomime Execution and Recognition in Autism

Children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing children were assessed in pantomime execution and two tasks on pantomime observation consisting of meaning and error-recognition (Fabbri-Destro, Gizzonio, Bazzini, Cevallos, Cheron, and Avanzini, 2019).

In typically developping children their motor performance keeps their capability to recognize the meaning of pantomimes of the task, as well as the recognition of correctly performed pantomimes in the task of error recognition. Compared to typically developing children the children with autism spectrum disorder showed more worse performance in both pantomime execution as well as recognition. There were a lot of spatial errors made in the autism spectrum disorder group during pantomime execution.

Compared to typically developing children, the autism spectrum disorder children had an impairment in the capability for the recognition of spatial errors, and are resulting in diminished performance in autism spectrum disorder patients as a primary contributor. The agreement among deficits in execution and recognition of pantomimes is supportive that in autism there is a disorganized motor aspect that is related to how someone sees actions made by some other.

As a final conclusion, it is suggested that the findings of this study are an indication that in autism spectrum disorder patients impairments in action observation are especially closely related. And this is also associated with symptom severity arguing that the motor impairments are one of the most important aspects of autistic symptomatology (Fabbri-Destro et al., 2019).

Visual Attention, Verbal Memory and Age-Related Route Learning Impairments

Grzeschik, Conroy-Dalton, Inners, Shanker, and Wiener (2019) investigated how aging affects an individuals' capability to attent to navigational information for the selection of special objects such as landmarks. A virtual environment with different routes was created and gaze behavior was assessed with eye-tracking.

Younger and older participant groups learned different short routes. The older subjects in the study did make more errors and did need more repetition before they did learn the route successfully as compared to younger subjects. Compared to younger subjects, the older subjects were performing equally when they had to disengage from salient, but unimportant landmark cues. The performance of route learning in the older subjects was related to verbal memory and episodic memory abilities (Grzeschik et al., 2019).

Huntington's Disease ans Spatial Memory and Perception

Perception and short-term spatial memory were investigated in patients with huntington's disease (HD), HD gene carriers, unilateral basal ganglia lesion patients and healthy control subjects (Harris, Armstrong, Swain, Erzindioglu, Das, Burgess et al., 2019).

Participants performed the Four Mountains Task, which is a test of spatial memory. Either simultaneously, concerning perception, or after a two second delay, concerning memory, the subjects were presented with an array of four landscapes and were required to depict the picture that did contain the right landscape from a point of view that was different from the original picture. Incorrect picture consisted of foils, these were a spatial foil, a configural foil, and an elemental foil. There were both spatial and non-spatial blocks given for perception trials and for memory trials.

It was found that patients with HD exhibited deficits in spatial perception and memory as assessed by the Four Mountains Task. The severity of the disease was positively correlated with these impairments. It is suggested that hippocampal dysfunction resulted in HD patients impairments (Harris et al., 2019).

Autism and different Frontoamygdala Connectivity

Age-associated differences in frontoamygdala connectivity was investigated in children, adolescents, and in young adults with autism spectrum disorders. In addition, the association among frontoamygdala functional connectivity and social impairment was also investigated (Odriozola, Dajani, Burrows, Gabard-Durnam, Goodman, Baez, et al., 2019). As compared to healthy control subjects, patients with autism spectrum disorders showed diminished frontoamygdala functional connectivity, which was only found in the right hemisphere basolateral amygdala and its functional connectivity with the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. According to the authors, these findings are supportive for the differences found in intrinsic amygdala functional connectivity in patients with autism spectrum disorders across the range (Odriozola et al., 2019). In contrast to hypothesized, there were no differences among the groups concerning the age-associated trajectory of frontoamygdala functional connectivity.

The authors did find nonlinear age-associated alterations in frontoamygdala functional connectivity among the basolateral amygdala and the subgenual cingulate cortex across the full sample studied, Controlling for diagnostic status. basolateral amygdala-subgenual cingulate functional connectivity showed a quadratic pattern concerning age, in which adolescents had diminished functional connectivity as compared to both the children and the adults (Odriozola et al., 2019). Social impairment was found to be not associated with the fMRI results.

It is suggested that these findings might have an impact on the literature concerning that the amygdala is an important area of dysfunction in patients with autism spectrum disorders and highlights the changes in the frontoamygdala circuitry, especially the moderation among the basolateral amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex. According to the authors, impairments in the intrinsic frontoamygdala functional connectivity might be implicated in social impairments in autism spectrum disorders (Odriozola et al., 2019).

Word Learning in Children and its Neural Correlates

Two groups of school-aged children before puberty and after puberty were trained on thirty novel japanese words consisting of new concepts, referring to unfamiliar objects in order to investigate the neural correlates of newly learned words and how these learned words might change over time (Takashima, Bakker-Marshall, van Hell, McQueen, and Janzen, 2019). The neural underpinnings were investigated with fMRI during the participants performed a lexical-decision task to reveal the word-form memory representations, either directly after the training or after a delay of one week. The behavioral outcomes of the participants were assessed as well concerning cued and free recall to test the meanings of the new words. By making use of a semantic priming task, the authors also investigated lexicalization integration effect, in which novel words that were learned were applied as primes for target words that were either semantically associated with the primes or not (Takashima et al., 2019).

The behavioral results reveiled that children had the capacity to learn new words in one training session as well as retaining those words in memory during one week. The lexicalization effect, which is indexed by semantic priming was not found in children, which was contrary to the expectations of the authors (Takashima et al., 2019).

The fMRI results revealed that the activation of the hippocampus did show a decrease over time. It was expected that their would be found enhanced activation in the posterior middle temporal gyrus with time, however this effect was not observed. It was found that there was a shift in the involvement from the right to the left hemisphere among primary school children and secondary school children. This is suggestive to be a result of the maturation of the language network (Takashima et al., 2019).

Childhood Action Obsevation and Execution, an fMRI Study

Brain development and brain areas that are associated with action execution and action observation as well as their overlap was investigated with fMRI in children and adults. Age-associated differences in brain activation were investigated by comparing those groups (Morales, Bowman, Velnoskey, Fox, and Redcay, 2019).

A network of areas of the brain that is active when persons perform an action as well as they are observing others performing the same or similar actions is called the mirror neuron system (MNS). The study investigated the neural regions that are implicated in the execution and observation of actions in addition to their overlap in children and adults. The participants had to perform, as well as to observe the same action of reaching-grasping, controlling for attentional shift during the condition in order to improve the specific brain activation that is related with observation and executing action that lays beyond the relationship with general attentional demands (Morales et al., 2019). According to the investigators, the study did allow them to make an identification of shared cortical areas among obseving and executing an action in addition to measuring age differences in those areas in order to better investigate the mirror neuron system activation during development.

During action observation and action execution the group of children showed comparable brain activation as compared to the adult group. There were, however, age related differences found during both action observation and action execution. During action execution the adults showed enhanced activity in the right superior parietal lobe as compared to the group of children (Morales et al., 2019).

This study found also support for the functional significance of the mirror neuron system as it is found by the overlap of action-observation and action-execution conditions during the task. The motor abilities and action representation skills of children were especially associated with the execution-obsevation overlap. There was found a probable dissociation among the mirror neuron system and the association among age and motor abilities and action representation related to the development of the mirror neuron system. It was found that motor abilities as well as action representation capabilities showed a direct execution-obsevation overlap and the motor ability improvements in children were more dedicated to age than by this execution-observation overlap. Accordingly, it is suggested that age might be a better indicator of fine motor ability development in childhood as compared to neural mirroring aspects. Finally, it is further suggested that the development of the mirror neuron system might be one of the aspects that underlies the changes in age associated action representations (Morales et al., 2019).

Social Exclusion and Working Memory in Adolescent Girls

Three female age groups were compared on a cyberball game an two working memory tasks in the study of Furmann, Casey, Speekenbrink, and Blakemore (2019). The three groups were girls in young adolescence, mid-adolescence and adults.

Social inclusion and social exclusion were created in a cyberball game. In the exclusion condition, the ball was not tossed to the participant. The authors wanted to know if social exclusion had detrimental effects on working memory performance. Two working memory tasks were given to the subjects. These were an n-back working memory task and a dot-matrix visuo-spatial working memory task. Participants had also to answer a mood questionnaire after ech cyberball condition.

It was found that mood was significantly lower in all three investigated groups after social exclusion, also on mood, no group differences were found.

There was found an age-dependend effect of social exclusion on cognitive performance of working memory. It was found that social exclusion affected only the young adolescent girls on the n-back working memory task, but not on the visuo-spatial working memory task. In the other two groups, performance was found to be not impaired.

It is suggestive that these results are indicative that some parts of the performance of the young adolescents' girls cognitive performance might be especially sensitive to social exclusion (Fuhrmann et al., 2019).

Visual and Linguistic Narrative Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders. ERP Evidence

Coderre, Cohn, Slipher, Cherneck, Ledoux, and Gordon (2018) investigated the comprehension of linguistic narratives with sentences and visual narrative with comic strips in adult patients with autism spectrum disorders and healthy control participants while recording event-related potentials. The authors were especially interested in the N400 ERP component, which is thought to be involved in language. The authors wanted to assess whether both linguistic as well as visual processing of narratives is impaired in autism spectrum disorders.

Adults with ASD and healthe comparison subjects were compared on this task. The N400 component was studied for this task in order to assess if the comprehension difficulties in ASD are only apparent in the linguistic domain, or also in the visual domain.

Comprehension impairments in patients with ASD were found in both the linguistic and visual domain, which is indicative of a more domain-general deficit. It is suggested that patients with ASD make more use of bottom-up processes for each part of a narrative episode. In the linguistic domain, as well as in the visual domain, patients with ASD exhibited smaller N400 ERP amplitedes as compared to healthy control subjects (Coderre et al., 2018).

Threat in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Inhibitory Control, and Dissociation

Malara, Ruglass, Fertuck, and Hien (2018) investigated the association among exposure to trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and inhibitory control in patients with PTSD, trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD, and healthy control subjects.

Participants performed on a temporal flanker paradigm in which they had to judje line orientations whilst ignoring lines that were not relevant to the task. Inhibitory control to threatening stimuli was also investigated during this task.

Event-related potentials were used during this task, focusing on the Rejection Positivity (RP). associations with the RP and dissociative symptoms were as well investigated.

As compared with trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD and healthy control subjects, patients with PTSD were less accurate on the task, reflected in more errors committed in making line decisions, which was particularly evident in the context of emotional stimuli that were threatening. In addition, the patients with PTSD showed also more distractor inhibition in blocks of threatening trials, as assessed by the RP. Furthermore, the strength of inhibitory control (RP) was related to more dissociative symptoms in patients with PTSD, especially concerning feelings of depersonalization.

Trauma-exposed individuals showed more inhibitory control (RP) that was related to less depersonalization (Melara et al., 2018).

Dipole source localization found the RP to be located in the posterior cingulate cortex in all three studied groups. In addition, another source was found to be in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in trauma-exposed individuals (Melara et al., 2018).

Motor Inhibition Impairments in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder and Neural Functions

Van Voorhuis, Kent, Kang, MacDonald III, and Sponheim (2019) investigated motor inhibition and neural processes using a Stop-Signal Task in patients with schizophrenia, relatives of patients with schizophrenia, patients with bipolar disorder and healthy control subjects while event-related potentials were recorded.

The behavioral results on the task revealed that only the patients with schizophrenia were deficient in reactive inhibition. Patients with bipolar disorder and first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients performed comparable to healthy control subjects (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019). In this study antipsychotic medication had an influence on the SSRT in the patients with schizophrenia, and they exhibited also longer reaction times as compared to controls, Which is suggestive of an information processing impairment (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

The ERP results showed that patients with schizophrenia as well as patients with bipolar disorder showed an enhanced stimulus locked lateralized readiness potential (S-LRP). There was found a significant positive correlation among S-LRP onset latency, RT, and SSRT, which is indicative of a common aspect that precedes the initiation of a common aspect that precedes the initiation of a response which contributes to slower response activation, a slower response completion as well as later motor inhibition. Accordingly, it is suggested that these findings are indicative of slowed processes preceding motor activation (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

Both patient groups did show abnormalities in the modulation of the P300 ERP component associated with the probability in case of inhibiting a response. Reduced amplitude of the P300 was related to reaction time as a function of Stop-Signal possibility.

Greater schizotypal symptoms in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients was related to diminished responsivity (P300) concerning changes in the probability to response inhibition. It is suggested that the association among schizotypal symptomatology and the modulation of the P300 might be due to a genetic liability for schizophrenia. 

Only the healthy control subjects were not impaired in adjusting time among initiation and completion associated with a stop-signal As measured with the response locked lateralized readiness potential.

An impairment in the modulation of neural processes associated with response inhibition probability as well as the slowing of the selection of a motor response are associated with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (Van Voorhuis et al., 2019).

Emotional Prosody and Verbal Memory in Bipolar Disorder

The impact of emotional prosody on verbal memory was studied in euthymic bipolar 1 disorder patients and healthy control subjects (Altamura, Santamaria, Elia, Angelini, Paladino, Altamura et al., 2019). There were three groups created in which the participants had to listen to either a story told with positive, negative, and neutral prosody. In addition, recognition memory was tested.

It was found that words were better remembered when they were delivered in a neutral context.

The recognition of positive prosody in bipolar disorder patients did differ from that of healthy control subjects, due to a more worse recognition for that prosody as compared to negative and neutral prosody.

The findings show that there is a significant advantage in memory for prosody of neutral content. The bias in recognition of prosody of positive valence in bipolar disorder might cause negative verbal memories as well as a deficient emotion regulation in these patients (Altamura et al., 2019).

Bipolar Disorder, Monetary Incentives, and the Brain

Usin fMRI, Johnson, Mehta, Ketter, Gotlib, and Knutson (2019) investigated anticipated and received monetary rewards in patients with bipolar 1 disorder and matched healthy control subjects. 

Neural and behavioral responses were investigated with the Monetary Incentive Delay Task (MID).

At the behavioral level, no differences among bipolar disorder patients and healthy control subjects were found. The fMRI results revealed that patients with bipolar disorder exhibited diminished activity in the ventral striatum, including hypoactivity of the nucleus accumbens while they were anticipating monetary gains as compared to healthy control subjects.

In the conditions of responses to anticipation or loss, the two groups did not differ in their neural responses.

A hypoactivation of the nucleus accumbens was also more evident in participants reporting more impulsive responsivity regarding positive emotion (Johnson et al., 2019).

Brain Activation in Child and Adolescent OCD and Symptom Provocation

Jaspers-Feyer, Lin, Chan, Ellwyn, Lim, Best, et al. (2019) Investigated obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adolescents between the ages of 9 and 18 years with fMRI during symptom provacation across the dimensions Contamination, Bad Thoughts, and Just Right symptoms.

The study also did include pictures of fear and neutral pictures for comparison. The authors wanted to investigate the neural correlates underlying symptom provocation in children and adolescents with OCD versus healthy control subjects. 

The symptom provocation task consisted of picture triads. These were 24 pictures of the five above mentioned conditions. Behavioral responses were assessed as how bothersome the picture was to the participant. The Just Right dimension, consisting of pictures associated with symmetry, ordering, and counting showed a differece among the group with OCD and healthy control subjects considering how bothersome they were, With OCD subjects scoring higher. The Contamination dimension did not differ between the two groups. Compared to healthy control subjects, the pictures of Bad Thoughts did also not differentiate them concerning bothersomness.

The fMRI results revealed that collapsing the dimensions of symptoms showed increased activation of the left temporal gyrus.

It is suggested that the involvement of the temporal poles are involved in pediatric symptom provocation (Jaspers-Feyer et al., 2019).

Emotion and Working Memory in Depression and its Neural Underpinnings

Depressed persons have problems in the processing of aspects of emotion as well as impairments in working memory (Goodin, Lamp, Hughes, Rossell, and Ciorcian, 2019).

Patients with depression and healthy control subjects performed a 3-n-back working memory task consisted of two different types of cues, facial affect and basic visual patterns while undergoing fMRI. The subjects were required to determine if the gender of the presented faces was either the same or different as the face that was presented three pictures ago.

Contrary to what was expected, there were no behavioral differences among the groups on the task. The fMRI results showed that patients with depression failed in the activation of emotional pictures of positive valence as compared to healthy control subjects in the dorsal striatum as well as in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex.

It is suggested that patients with depression have an impairment in the requirement of the dopaminergic dorsal striatum which might cause depressed mood by means of a diminishment in positive emotional stimuli while they are updating working memory (Goodin et al., 2019).

Brain responses to an Emotional Movie across Development from Childhood through Adolescence

An important question that needs to be answered is how biases in emotional information processing and related symptoms of depression occur during development (Gruskin, Rosenberg, and Holmes, in press).

In this study, brain activation assessed with fMRI related to emotional movie viewing and depressive symptoms in children and adolescence was investigated. The children and adolescents watched an emotional videoclip while undergoing fMRI.

It was found that higher depressive symptoms were related to atypical brain activity during the emotional film clip in the group of adolescents. This effect was not found in children.

The results show that there is a developmental aspect associated with brain function and emotional processes that did reflect the severity of symptoms of depression associated with the developping brain. Brain regions affected were for example the orbitofrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Gruskin et al., in press).

Depression, Pessimistic Thinking, and Hopelesness: an fMRI Study

A pessimistic thinking style about the future is one of the most prominent symptoms of major depressive disorder and is related to hopelesness (Katayama, Nakagawa, Umeda, Teresawa, Kurata, Tabuchi, et al., 2019).

fMRI was applied in participants in order to investigate task-associated brain activity concerning future-thinking. In addition, resting-state brain activation was measured in the medial fronto-polar cortex among patients with depression and healthy control subjects.

It was found that patients with depression exhibited an enhanced activation in the medial fronto-polar cortex bilaterally compared to healthy control subjects when they were thinking about the distant future (Katayama et al., 2019). This result was correlated with the pervasiveness of future-thinking in a pessimistic manner and with depression symptom severity.

It is suggested that patients with depression may already have a forethought in emotional affect related to pessimistic instances about future happenings, and have impairments in considering the distant future.  treatmentHis finding is suggested as a neuromarker for aid in the treatment of depression with for example cognitive behavioral therapy (Katayama et al., 2019).

Smoking and Learning from Punishment: an fMRI Study

The continuation of nicotine use might be associated with an attenuated processing of punishment feedback, which might cause a deficient adaptation encompassing no regard of the negative health outcomes of smoking and smokers may thus continue using nicotine (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019). The authors gave participants an associative learning task while they underwent fMRI. This task gave either monetary reward or monetary punishment in the performance of recall. It was found that in the group of smokers, the recall errors were corrected less than in the control participants. There was found also a diminished difference among high and low punishment conditions of the task.

The fMRI results revealed hyperactivation in the DLPFC in the group of smokers in conditions of recall and re-encoding. In the case when number-location associations were recalled in a faulty manner, the group of smokers showed reduced activation in the DLPFC as compared to control subjects.

It was suggested that the lower error-correction might be due to response inhibition demands in the DLPFC while reward was expected but lower demands when punishment was anticipated. The correction of high punishment and low punishment errors is suggestive of a reduced punishment sensitivity. This was also associated with the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex.

In conclusion, smokers are hypersensitive to reward and hyposensitive to punishment. As a result, they were more impaired in learning from errors (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019).

Neuropsychology in psychopaths

It is suggested that there are several executive function deficits in psychopatic individuals (Snowden, Gray, Pugh, and Atkinson, (2013). Participants scoring high on psychopathy in a student population were found to be deficient in OFC function tasks. They were impaired on the object alternation task, especially with respect to the Fearless Dominance Scale of the PPI-R. Furthermore, the scales of the PPI-revised were associated with both Fearless Dominance as well as with Self-Centered Impulsivity on the Porteus Maze task (Snowden et al., 2013).

Pham, Vanderstukken, Philippot, and Vanderlinden (2003) investigated whether criminal psychopatic individuals show impairments in selective attention and executive functions. Several tests were administered. The D-II  cancellation task assesses selective attention and scanning ability. The Porteus Maze Test assesses the capability to plan and to keep a pattern of responses in case participants are confronted with interference. The Tower of London Test measures the ability of planning. The Stroop Color Word Interference Test measures interference and maintainance of a response pattern. The Trail Making Test is a response alternation test. Finally, the Modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test assesses the capabilities and the flexibility of cognitive sets (Pham et al., 2003). On the D-II task the psychopatic individuals did commit more errors as compared to control subjects. In addition, they were deficient in their attentional maintenance. On the Porteus Maze Test, psychopatic individuals did not make more errors of quantitative origin than control subjects. But they made more quantitative errors and had more difficulty as compared to control subjects in maintaining their course. On the Tower of London Test, psychopaths had no longer initiation times and they did not exhibit more rule breaking as compared to control subjects. It is suggested that the findings on the Porteus Maze Test and Tower of London test are not indicative of a global planning deficit in psychopatic individuals (Pham et al., 2003). On the Stroop Test, the psychopaths did not make more errors to distracting cues as well as no inability in inhibiting interference. It is further argued that psychopatic individuals have an impairment in attentional control when they are exposed to stimuli that are distracting, as revealed by making more excessive movements when they were given a misleading situation on the Tower of London Test. It is concluded that psychopaths are especially deficient during tasks considering planning abilities that need behavioral inhibition. On the Trail Making Test and the Modified WCST psychopatic individuals did not differ from control subjects (Pham et al., 2003).

In another study, selective attention was investigated in psychopatic individuals with three different Stroop Tests. These were the standard Color Word Stroop Test, a picture word Stroop test and a color word Stroop test in which the color and word were separated spatially (Hiatt, Schmitt, and Newman, 2004). Psychopatic individuals were found to be not impaired on the standard Stroop Test. However, they showed impairments on both of the other Stroop Tests. It is suggested that psychopatic individuals are not deficient in the case when incongruent contextual information is given whithin their direct focus of attention. However they show impairments when not directly in their attentional focus as revealed by the other two Stroop tests (Hiatt et al., 2004).

Psychopatic individuals performed a CPT. Response latency was assessed after given feedback (Molto et al., 2007). Perseverative behavior in psychopatic individuals was only associated with factor 2 of the PCL-R, especially related to impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle aspects. Response perseveration was found to be associated with a lack of reflection after punishment as well as after reward feedback. All participants in the experiment played more cards what was found as evidence for response perseveration and the group collected as a result lower earnings. Both, after punishment and reward feedback on the CPT an association of shorter pauses between trials was found. It is suggested that response perseveration impairments found in psychopatic individuals might not be only related to the syndrome, rather it might generally be associated with externalizing behavior, which shows an overlap with social deviance in psychopathy (Molto et al., 2007).

Psychopatic and non-psychopatic inmates performed a simultaneously visual and auditory task under the condition of focussing their attention at the visual primary task. The psychopatic inmates did respond to distractor stimuli after targets with a higher intensity which is suggested to be the result of diminished attention payed to the peripheral dimension of two-dimensional stimuli (Kosson, 1996).

Inner Speech in Schizophrenia

It is hypothesized that impairments in the monitoring of one's own thoughts might result treatment in auditory verbal hallucinations (Simons, Tracy, Sanghera, O'Daly, Gilleen, Dominguez et al., 2010). Using fMRI patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects while measuring brain activation during internally generated speech and externally generated speecH. The subjects performed active task based on both internal and external speech as well as a baseline condition. The most important result was the interaction among the groups. It was found that healthy control subjects did activate the same in the left superior temporal cortex during the listening trials. This finding might be suggestive of schizophrenia patients to be unimpaired to sentenses that were spoken. While listening, the comparison subjects did show a larger deactivation during inner speech as compared to listening as compared to the schizophrenia patients. It was concluded that patients have an impairment in self-monitoring concerning inner speech. The unability for diminishing activation this region might be assigned to verbal cues which might then lead to auditory hallucinations (Simons et al., 2010).

Attentional Bias to Worry

Hirsch, MacLeod, Mathews, Sandheer, Siyani, and, Hayes (2011) investigated worry in participants with an attentional bias modification method in order to find an effect on group differences in participants on selective attention to meanings of threat. The participants that performed the attention induction process which was invented in order to make decrease the processing of the meanings of threats were slowere in the processing of semantic aspects of the word that were disigned as threat words as compared to as compared to words that exhibited no threat content comparing the subjects that were said to increase threat processing.

The findings showed that this effect was the same in case of the bias induction process that consisted as training that had its target for biasing attentional engagement with, or bias that did disengage from threat meanings. These concepts were effective in the same manner in the induction of altered selective attention meanings to threats, had altered effects on the following patters of worry. In case the attentional bias that was induced did encourage selective attention with the meanings of the threat, the multitude of thought intrusions that were negative on the task assessing worry was larger as compared to the process that was made for discouraging selective engagement with the meanings of the threats.

Performance accuracy on the task was similar in all participants, so these findings are not associated with it. However, the findings suggest that it is indicative that a variability in selective attentional engagement related to treat, but not the variability in attentional disengagement to threats, did have a causal impact on negative thought intrusions which is indicative of worry.

It is further argued that a bias in attentional engagement with threat has an effect on processes to worry, for instance, by the affect of the amount in which selective attention is associated to these negative situational circumstances of the situation that might result in triggering thoughts of negativity (Hirsch et al., 2011).

Sensation Seeking and Emotional Processing

Zheng, Xu, Jia, Tan, Chan, Zhou, et al. (2011) investigated emotional processing in high and low sensation seekers with an emotional oddball paradigm while event related potentials were recorded. high and low valence and arousal pictures were used. Behaviorally, both high and low sensation seekers did not differ. Low sensation seekers showed an enlarged N2 amplitude to emotional stimuli, wheras high sensation seekers exhibited an enhanced P3 to emotional stimuli.

Sensation Seeking and Reward Processing

Participants either scorin high or low on sensation seeking performed a two choice reward  decision making task durung event related potentials were recorded (Zheng and Liu, 2015). Participants scoring low on sensation seeking were found to be risk averse. In contrast, participants scoring high on sensation seeking exhibited a neutral decision making pattern. The SPN component was found to be enlarged while making risky decisions. This effect vanished in high sensation seekers in risk neutral trials as compared to the low scoring sensation seekers. The FRN appeared in low sensation seekers, but was reduced in high sensation seekers. There was also a diminished P300 component found in high sensation seekers.

Autism and Gambling

It was hypothesized that adult patients with autism would exhibit an abnormal risky decision making pattern on a gambling task in response to win or los rounds (Wu, White, Rees, and Burgess, 2018). A characteristic of autism is repetitiveness, and this was measured as well on the gambling task. The participants in this study had to make gambling decisions to possible gains or losses and were also asked if they choose the risky or secure option. The patients with autism did not differ from healthy control participants in their decision making, in fact, they chose the lose option more often than the win option. It was found that both groups made risky decisions in the same manner. However, the patients were more slower in responding than the healthy controls.

It is hypothesized that this finding might be associated with demands on cognitive flexibility or with psychomotor speed (Wu et al., 2018). In the win trials, all participants responded in the same manner concerning repetitiveness. It was further found that in the patient group with autism, making more consistent gambling decisions during the win rounds As compared to the healthy controls. It is suggested by the authors that in autism the highly consistent manner of responding in these rounds might be due to the win-stay lose shift strategy, however the patients with autism did respond in a more repetitive way as compared to healthy control participants in the equally expected gambling rounds. The consistent response of the group was not enhanced affecting risky decisions, rather in the absense of risky decisions (Wu et al., 2018). In addition, it is argued that this pattern of responding is an exploit decision preference contrary to an explore decision preference (Wu et al., 2018).

Psychopathy and Social Cognition

Several studies have found that psychopatic individuals have a diminished sensitivity to how other people feel (Deming et al., 2018). These authors investigated the neural underpinnings of self versus other in criminal offenders by way of fMRI. The participants made a trait judgment task consisting of three conditions, self, other, and case. Thus self-focussed versus other-focused was assed in psychopatic individuals. Diminished neural activations were found for self-judgments as compared to other judgments in the PCC as well as in the TPJ. These findings were especially associated with impulsivity.

Fear conditioning in Psychopaths

Psychopathic (n 11) men were given an aversive conditioning task while theie ERP's and skin conduction was measured (Rothemund et al., 2012). In the experiment there was a painful cue that was the unconditional stimulus, whereas neutral faces were used as the conditional stimulus. The findings of the experiment showed that psychopatic individuals are impaired in fear conditioning. These psychopatic individuals showed no startle reflecs as well as no difference in skin conductance (Rothemund et al., 2012). The P100 ERP component was found to be attenuated.

R statistics Question

I have a question, does someone know some datasets to practice rstats? I am really struggling with the program.

Sensaton Seeking and the Amygdala

For persons who score high on the dimension of sensation seeking, they persu ovolty despite of the cost of self-harm (Mujica-Parodi, Carlson, Cha, and Rubin, 2014). During fMRI participants performed the anticipation of aversive events task in which the aversive stimuli consisted of a 100 dB white noise and the good stimuli gave 55dB noise. It was found that highly trait anxious particpants exhibited prefrontal-limbic meso circuitry assymetry. 

Sensation Seeking and the Neurophysiology of Risk Processing

The personality trait of sensation seeking is a good predictor of risk-taking behaviors (Zheng and Liu, 2015). The processing of reward was investigated in individuals that were high sensation seekers and low sensation seekers during a two choice simple gambling task with low penalty outcomes and high penalty outcomes, while event-related potentials were recorded. It was found that sensation seeking was a modulating predictor of the effect of risk on the behavioral chosen option, in which participants that were low sensation seekers were more risk-averse than high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015). Furthermore, high sensation seekers did not show differences in the high and low risk conditions of the task. 
The SPN ERP component was found in low sensation seekers, but not in high sensation seekers. Concerning the feedback related negativity (FRN) low sensation seekers showed an enhanced amplitude of this ERP component following high risks as compared to low risks. This effect was not found to be evident in high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015). The P300 amplitude to gains and losses was found to be diminished in high sensation seekers as compared to low sensation seekers, which might indicate that sensation seeking had an effect on the in-depth processing of both positive and negative rewards. The authors hypothesize that these results might reflect an underarousal in high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015).

Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease is a genetically autosomal-dominant inherited neurodegenerative disease (Perandones, Radrizzani, and Micheli, 2010). Its phenotype encompasses chorea, coordination difficulties, cognitive deficits as well as behavioral problems. The genetic defect is caused by a CAG repeat expansion for coding of the HD gene huntingtin (htt). Huntington's disease is a disease that becomes apparent around the age of fourty years, but the disease can in sporadic cases also emerge in a wider age range (e.g. early onset). Huntington's disease is also known for personality changes in the patients, such as anger outburst. The most important neuropathology is associated with dysfunction in the basal ganglia.

Clinical correlates of huntington's disease include as mentioned earlier chorea. In the greek language chorea means "dance". Choreatic movements of the afflicted patient are involuntary and slow and presents it at random. The muscles that are associated with this symptom are all voluntary muscle groups.

In the early course of huntington's disease these choreatic movements may be mild, however with the progression of the disease these movements interfere with daily activities (Perandones et al., 2010). At the end stage of the disease these movements might diminish and are replaced by rigidity and dystonia. Other movement impairments found in huntington's disease are bradykinesia.

Huntington's disease is also associated with cognitive impairments, including executive function deficits, impairments in short-term and visuospatial skills (Perandones et al., 2010). First, these impairments are rather mild, however as the disease advances more global subcortical dementia may emerge. The areas of the brain that are first implicated are the striatum and neocortex. Neurodegeneration affects first the caudate nucleus and then the putamen. Disruption in the basal ganglia is associated with medium spiny neurons becoming dysfunctional in patients with parkinson's disease (Perandones et al., 2010).

In more advanced stages of huntington's disease, also other brain areas are affected, such as the hippocampus, hypothalamus, the cerebellum, the amygdala as well as some nuclea. The neurons that are mostly affected in huntington's disease are the striatal projection neurons (Perandones et al., 2010). A different neurogenesis may also relate to the disease.

Epilepsy is found to be more apparent in the juvinile case of huntington's disease.

In addition, mood and anxiety disorders are frequently seen in huntington's disease. Also, at later stages of the disease, psychosis is not uncommon.

In the early parts of the disease, cognitive deficits, such as attention problems, working memory impairments, and poor decision making can be seen.

Later in the course, deficits in everyday capabilities become evident, because of more severe motor disfunctions, such as postural instability (Perandones et al., 2010).

I am still working on this post. More information is underway

Implicit Effects of Emotional Contexts

It was investigated if ERP differences are dependend of explicit item recognition by comparing ERP's caused by test items that were either encoded as negatively emotional or neutral study contexts and the question of whether items were classified in a correct manner or misclassified as new (Jaeger and Rugg, 2012). The pictures that were used were 300 emotionally neutral, which were the critical items, and there were also 200 emotional background contexts differing in valence and arousal. During the phase when participants had to encode, the 200 contexts were given and they were associated with 200 critical items. The other 100 items were used as "new" items in the test. After the phase of encoding, the test phase was conducted twentyfour hours afterwards. The task of the participants was to press a button when the test item was seen in the phase of encoding, and another button when participants thought that the test item was new. During this test phase ERP's were recorded.

The findings of the behavioral data showed that the participants were more correct in the rejection of new test items rather than endorsing old test items that they studied in the negative and neutral situations in a correct manner.

The ERP analysis was done in three parts. First, differences in ERP amplitude were compared for correctly classified old test items and rejected new items based on the emotional status of the old item. The second stage contrasted the studied items that were incorrectly classified as new for the ability to find emotional memory effects while explicit recognition was absent. The last analysis consisted of contrasting emotionally related hits as compared to misses in order to find possible disparities among explicit and implicit item retrieval.

The results of the event related potentials showed that there was an old-new effect in which correctly recognized items had more positive ERP's as compared to successfully rejected items. These old-new effects were already seen as soon as 200 milliseconds after the onset of the stimulus. Furthermore, it became evident that an analysis that was for the 300-500 ms and 500-800 ms range were apparent in both emotional as well as neutral hits. The authers interpret these findings as instances of the midfrontal and parietal old-new effects (Jaeger and Rugg, 2012). A direct comparison among emotional and neutral hits revealed differences in retrieval associated latencies of 200-300 ms and 800-1,100 ms.

Semantic Priming in Schizotypy

A semantic priming effect happens when there is an enhancement in reaction times as well as in the accuracy when a targed word has been primed with a semantically related word (Johnston, Rossell, and Gleeson, 2008). These researchers assessed direct and indirect semantic priming to see whether there are particular impairments concerning controlled and automatic processing associated with schizotypy. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was as well manipulated in this experiment. Direct and indirect priming with short and long SOA's consisting of mostly real words and also a portion of non words. Associated and unassociated word pairs were created. The accuracy as measured for the percent correct responses and reaction times to correct responses only were assessed for associated, unassociated, word and non word and the short and long SOA's. Thus there were in total four priming conditions: direct priming with short SOA, direct priming with long SOA, indirect priming with short SOA, and indirect priming with a long SOA.

The results showed that there was a positive association between cognitive disorganization and indirect priming with a short SOA. In this experiment there were only associations between indirect priming and schizotypy. Cognitive disorganization was found not to be associated with direct priming. It is hypothesized that deficits in semantic priming might have a direct relationship with delusional beliefs and accordingly this is why a part of semantic information is proccessed faulthy and other semantic information processing is not abnormal (Johnston et al., 2008).

Schizotypy and Attention

Schizotypal personality traits are traits that are on a continuum and that are similar as aspects that can be seen in schizophrenia (Steel, Hemsley, and Pickering, 2007). Participants scoring either high or low on traits performed a cued letter-comparison task. The participants were confronted with targed cues consisting of two letters and by pressing "yes" or "no" keys when they were identical or different. The targed stimuli were preceded by different cues. There were three conditions in this task: neutral, expected, and unexpected. Participants were instructed to respond as fast as possible as well as to keep errors to a minimum. The results revealed that positive schizotypy was being influenced of context cues on reaction time. Disorganized schizotypy was related to the facilitation of reaction times during the task. It is suggested that the inhibition and facilitation of reaction times are interacting for a part at different cognitive processes (Steel et al., 2007).

Sensation Seeking and Scary Movies: Neural Correlates

Straube, Preissler, Lipka, Hewig, Mentzel, and Miltner (2010) studied the neural correlates in participants while watching scary movies and its association with the personality trait sensation seeking. Patients underwent during this task fMRI. The fMRI findings showed that while watching threatening video clips as compared to neutral video clips, there was a strong activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, as well as in the visual regions of the brain. The finding of strong activation of the visual areas is suggestive of enhanced visual processing while watching the threatening video clips (Straube et al., 2010). There was a positive correlation found between experienced anxiety and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. It is suggested that this area might be implicated in the subjective experience of being afraid. Participants that scored high on sensation seeking exhibited large activation in the visual brain areas. In addition, there were also found large activations in sensation seekers in the right thalamus and the right anterior insula. Besides, in both of these areas the positive correlation that was found among high sensation seekers and the activity between threat and neutral vidio clips was related to smaller activity in high compared to low sensation seekers while they were watching the neutral video clips. It is argued that the finding of thalamus activation is indicative of high sensation seekers is coupled with activity in sub-cortical brain regions.  

In low scoring sensation seekers, higher activation in the insula while having less stimulation may give a danger signal and therefore diminishes the look for more challenge (Straube et al., 2010). The diminished activity in the insula in high sensation seekers may be below the just right homeostatic mean of interoceptive sensation in these subjects (Straube et al., 2010).

Word Comprehension and Second Language

Midgley, Holcomb, and Grainger (2011) investigated modalities of the processing of cognate and noncognate words in second language learners in the first (L1) and second (L2) language. Participants were native english speakers learning as their second language french. The subjects required to read lists of words and what their meaning was and making button presses when there were probes from a particular semantic category. During the task, ERP's were recorded. Cognates were 160 items that were chosen for the two languages and the same amount of noncognates were also chosen. There were made two lists of words, an english one, and a french one. The ERP N400 component was affected by the cognate states in the case of both languages. For noncognates, the N400 was even larger than for cognates. In both L1 and L2 there was reduced amplitude of the N400 concerning cognate words as compared to noncognate words in both L1 and L2. It was suggested that the principal finding of this investigation was related to the influence of cognate status upon the recognition of words in the first language (Midgley et al., 2011).

Affect and Recognition Memory, an ERP study

Affect and recognition memory interactions were investigated by use of the International Affective Picture System with either high or low arousal as well as positive and negative valence. The task presented these pictures and the participants had to give an indication whether the picture was seen previously. Event related potentials during task performance were recorded (Kaestner and Polich, 2011). The behavioral results revealed that recognition memory was affected by arousal as well as the valence content of the stimuli. Images that were pleasant were not recognized well, however, they were associated with shorter reaction times as compared to the unpleasant images. High-arousal, unpleasant stimuli showed the longest reaction times. Concerning the ERP components, the amplitudes were higher for high than low arousal stimuli. It was found that the late positive component, the P300 amplitude was the most enhanced concerning high-arousal images that were unpleasant. According to the authors, a quick focus on unpleasant images might be due to the stimulus characteristics that indicate a threat and therefore enhances memory (Kaestner and Polich, 2011).

Reward System Functioning in Depression, an fMRI study

Brain region activations were measured in patients with depression and healthy control participants concerning selection of reward, reward anticipation, and feedback (Smoski, Felder, Bizzell, Green, Ernst, Lynch et al., 2009). More concrete, it was measured if patients with depression hyporesponsivity in the striatal brain areas and hyperresponsivity in the cortical brain areas while performing the wheel of fortune conflict monitoring task. As compared to healthy control subjects, the patients with depression displayed lower activation in the caudate, a region that has been associated with reward prediction. It is concluded by the authors that this is support for the hypothesized hyporesponsivity in the mesolimbic reward system. There was no support found for the hypothesis of altered conflict monitoring Because the patients displayed diminished activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex while they were anticipating reward. This region is associated with conflict monitoring (Smoski et al., 2009).

Depression, Affect and Cognitive Control

Dichter, Felder, and Smoski (2009) investigated limbic-prefrontal interactions in patients with major depressive disorder who were unmedicated by using a target detection task while they underwent fMRI scanning. There were seven fMRI runs, in which the first five runs consisted of a forced-choice target detection task (oddball task) in which in rare cases a target cue did appear that was embedded between changing blocks of neutral and sad pictures. The subjects were given the instruction to press a button with their right hand to all emerging stimuli as quickly as they could for every non target stimulus and with the other for a target stimulus. Behavioral performance was not different among patients and healthy control subjects.The imaging findings revealed that when both conditions were combined, there was no evidence of prefrontal hypo-activation in patients with depression. In contrast, differences among the groups were found related to target events that were embedded in sad or neutral blocks. In the neutral condition, the healthy control subjects exhibited more midfrontal and anterior cingulate cortex activation. In the patients with depression, more prefrontal activity was found in the case of sad embedded stimuli. It is suggested that prefrontal dysfunction in patients with depression might lead to an altered way in sad contexts than in either neutral or baseline contexts. The passive viewing runs showed that patients with depression had larger activation of the left amygdala. This is argued to be supportive of hyperactivity of the amygdala in patients with depression associated with sad pictures causes enhanced prefrontal activation to the target stimuli. Furthermore, the authors state that depressed patients need more cognitive effort to disengage from the sad pictures when responding to target cues (Dichter et al., 2009).

Depression and Error Detection

Major depressive disorder has been related to abnormalities in error processing, in which they show an enhanced sensitivity to cues of negative environmental valence (Chiu and Deldin, 2007). The two error associated components of the ERP, the ERN and Pe were investigated in depressed patients and healthy control participants while they performed a flanker task with reinforcement. Participants got rewards for correct responses and a monetary loss when they did make an incorrect response. There were two conditions in the flanker task. One neutral condition and one incentive condition. The behavioral results showed that both participant groups performed comparable in the neutral condition. The reaction times between the groups were also equally. As well as the latences of the responses in which they were shorter on trials that were correct. In the incentive condition, both groups showed the same accurateness for the punishment and reward conditions. The event related potential results showed that patients with depression exhibited larger ERN amplitudes then healthy control subjects In the neutral condition. In the incentive conditions, patients with depression had an especially enhanced ERN in the punishment condition. In the healthy control subjects, the ERN was almost significantly greater in the reward condition as compared to the punishment condition. Furthermore symptoms were not associated with the error related negativity. Concerning the error positivity, no differences between the groups in amplitude were found in the neutral condition. Patients had a larger Pe in the reward condition than in the punishment condition. According to these authors, the enlarged amplitude of the error related negativity found in the patients with depression may mistakenly give wrong signals that errors are great and very important, which might result in the behavioral, cognitive and affective expressions of patients with depression (Chiu and Deldin, 2007).

Error-Monitoring and Affect in Young Children

Brooker, Buss, and Dennis (2011) investigated error-monitoring ERP components in association with affect and attentional control in children between 4 and 8 years of age. The most research on error-monitoring has been done in adult samples and they want to see if there are some similarities or differences. The children underwent two experiments. The first one was interacting with a stranger, and the second task was a computerized version of The Attention Network Test, child version. During the ANT ERP's were recorded. It was found that the age of the child was positively related to the number of correct responses that were made. In this group of young children clear components as the event related negativity (ERN) as well as the error positivity (Pe) were apparent. A regression analysis revealed that concerning the ERN there was no significant effect of age. There was a gender effect found in which girls showed a larfer difference amplitude of the ERN, which is the relation among correct and incorrect trials. This result was not found in the boys. The Pe showed no difference among the age and gender of the child. The ERN and Pe were both associated with the childrens affective behavior. It is stated that these two ERP components can already be seen at a very young age as well as differences in affective behaviors (Brooker et al., 2011).

Schizophrenia, Emotion, and Working Memory: AN fMRI study

Negative and non emotional interference effects on visual working memory was assessed in patients with schizophrenia while concurrently they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and it was further tested whether they have an impairment in the capability of filtering emotonal distractors that are aversive (Anticevic, Repovs, Corlett, and Barch, 2011). Participants performed the delayed match-to-sample visual working memory task. Patients with schizophrenia had an enhanced response to distractors as compared to healthy control participants and this effect was held irrespective of the kind of distractor. Consistent with what was hypothesized,  the patients had diminished BOLD activity in prefrontal regions of the cortex, which is to be suggested to be associated with filtering. At more posterior areas, compared to healthy control subjects, the patients with schizophrenia exhibited enhanced activity related to nonemotional distractors (Anticevic et al., 2011).

N-back Task in Schizophrenia

One of the most salient impairments in schizophrenia are in the realm of neurocognition (Zanello, Curtis, Ba, and Merlo, 2009). Working memory impairments in schizophrenia was investigated with the N-back task in first-episode and chronic schizophrenia patients to measure its evolution over time. The participants had to press a key on the N-back task in case of the current stimulus was identical to the one two digits back. According to the results, both patient groups performed worse than a healthy control group on the N-back working memory task. Reaction times in both patient groups were also slower arguing for a slowing of information processing (Zanello et al., 2009). In addition, it was found that both groups of schizophrenia patients had a worse accuracy of responses, both to target and non-targed cues. There were no working memory differences between both patient groups. According to the authors, based on these findings, working memory problems are already evident at the beginning of the disease.

Face Recognition Memory: ERP study

Face recognition was investigated whether the participant was foreign or native and how the language that we use comes in (Baus, Bas, Calabria, and Costa, 2017).  treatmentHe experimental paradigm that was applied was the old/new paradigm,  consisting of an encoding and recognition part. In the experiment, pictures of faces were presented along with an auditatory presentation of sentenses.  treatmentHe results revealed that recognition of faces paired with sentences in the native language of the participant were recognized better then in the foreign language. Turning to the ERP's, the encoding of faces was related to higher amplitudes for the P200 and LPC (late positive component). This was evident for the native language as compared to the foreign language (Baus et al., 2017). According to the authors, their findings suggest that the language in which we have an interaction with impacts face processing.

Facial Action and Emotional Language, an ERP study

Davis, Winkielman, and Coulson (2015) studied the association among embodiment and the comprehension of languague and how facial action has an effect on the real- time responses of emotional language in the brain. Event related potentials as well as electromyography were recorded while participants were reading sentences of either positive or negative emotional content.  iT is stated that facial activation might have an effect on perception as well as on the recognition of emotional faces. Smiling did not interfere with the ERP's to valence words, but a larger amplitude of the N400 was found in the ends of sentences consisting positive events.  treatmentHe N400 is associated with brain activation related to semantic memory processes. When participants were instructed to inhibit their smiling, it had an effect on the real-time processing of sentences and the last word of a sentence showed an enhanced amplitude of the ERP component N400.

Depersonalization, Emotion, and Memory Fragmentation

It is often said that in patients with depersonalization, when confronted with an emotion, the show inhibition in its processing (Giesbrecht, Merckelbach, van Oorsouw, and Simeon, 2010). In addition it is suggested that this leads to memory fragmentation. in the study of Griesbrecht et al. (2010) it was investigated whether there was an association among the temporal aspects of autonomic responses to cues of emotional content and impairments of subjective as well as objective memory formation. The experiment consisted of viewing a long emotional video part in patients and healthy control subjects. In all participants skin conductance was measured. The results showed that in healthy participants, while watching the emotional video clip they exhibited both peritraumatic as well as anxiety enhancement. Patients with depersonalization disorder were both inferior on the subjective as well as the objective memory task. Maximum amplitude of skinn conductance was more pronounced in patients that were more severely affected (Giesbrecht et al., 2010). Compared to healthy control participants, patients with depersonalization disorder displayed an impairment of higher learning of contextual cues in the emotional task. It is suggested by the authors that the absense of good encodement of contextual stimuli might be the result of their lower performance on the memory fragmentation tasks ( Giesbrecht et al., 2010).

Depersonilization Disorder, Emotion

Michal, Koechel, Canterino, Adler, Reiner, Vossel et al. (2013) investigated autonomic responses for emotional stimuli as well as its cognitive evaluations in patients with depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder can be charachterized by the experience that things are unreal, but with a normal reality testing. Emotional stimuli consisted of sounds with an endurance of six seconds. Skin conductance level was assessed while processing. It was found that early emotion proccessing was unimpaired in these patients. However patients with depersonalization disorder did respond more strong to emotions. It was further argued that cognitive evaluation has been disconnected from bodily autonomic responses, because these patients showed a different scenario to negative auditory presented stimuli in the way that they made negative ones more neutral.

Schizophrenia and Cognitive Distortion

There is now evidence that cognitive distortions are seen in patients with schizophrenia  which are associated with the psychotic symptoms (Moritz, Ramdani, Klass, Andreou, Jungclaussen, Englisch, et al., 2014). Patients show often overconfidence in their errors and underconfidence in correct responses. Moritz et al. (2014) investigated if schizophrenia patients would show overconfidence on a perceptual judgment task. The patient group was compared with patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and healthy control participants. It was found that overconfidence to errors was not related to either memory or social cognition, rather it was related to perception.

Biological Motion and Social Cognition

It is often said that the perception of biological motion is of support to social cognition, which might be relying on embodiment and biological motion (Miller and Saygin, 2013). Direction discrimination assignments were applied with point like walkers. The results of the experiments revealed that there are differences among individual capabilities in the use of form and motion stimuli in the biological motion tasks. Social perception was found to be related to stimuli for processing of biological motion. It was suggested that the association that was found among social perception and biological motion might be a special aspect of a visual form mechanism.

Metaphors and Word Learning

When we speak about ideas with either positive or negative emotional valence, we havily make use of metaphors (Casasanto and de Bruin, 2019). After learning vocabulary flashcards positioned at specific locations, it aids students in learning the facts of new words with either positive or negative emotional valence. This finding was found in the authors' first experiment in which 'alien' words had strong valence. Their second experiment aimed to assess the strategic usage of mental metaphors to a larger sample of words. In this experiment, the 'alien' words were not emotionally laden but they were neutral. Consistent with the first experiment, the definitions of words were better remembered when they were assigned to metaphor-congruent locations. The final experiment aimed to study whether metaphor words were of the same magnitude as motor actions. There were two conditions, a good is up condition and a good is down condition. It was found that in the case of the words up and down motor actions, the metaphor congruency effect vanished (Casasanto and de Bruin, 2019). However, metaphor-congruent motor behaviors improved the learning of words.

Event-Related Potentials (ERP's)

What exactly are event-related potentials (ERP's)? In this post I will give an overview of the ERP techniques. Because the high temporal resulution of the electrophysiology of ERP it is a technique that is well suited for studying attention and perception (Woodward, 2010). ERP's have a temporal resolution that can assess upon to the millisecond. However, unlike fMRI, the spatial resolution is low. The electrophysical recordings provide a direct measurement of the brain processes that we can study, for example in the domain of perception and attention. ERP's are for the most part generated by the post-synaptic potentials associated with pyramidal cells. Because the specific neural generator in our brains we have the possibility to make a prediction of the way of voltage that can be seen across the head. ERP's gives us the possibility to asses the cognitive operations already before a stimulus is given.

Perception and Somatosensory Receptors

Sensory receptors are all over our body and encompass the hair and skin. The tightness of the sensory receptors in the skin, muscles, tendons, and in the joints show high variability, which is the reason why some areas of our body are more or less receptive to stimulation. Our hands, feet, lips, as well as our eyes are very sensitive to stimulation. The sensitivity of the skin regarding touch stimuli is often measured with the two-point sensitivity test (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p.369-371). The somatosensory receptors are classically ordered into three different groups. These are nocioception, hapsis, and proprioception.

Autism, Uncertainty Monitoring and Mindreading

There is an important question which states the association among metacognition and mindreading (theory of mind). Nicholson, Williams, Grainger, Lind, and Carruthers (2019) investigated implicit non-verbal as well as explicit verbal uncertainty monitoring in autism and healthy control uncertainty. The study of Nichols et al. (2019) studied a classic judgment of confidence task, the opt out version of the uncertainty monitoring task in patients with autism and healthy control subjects. In such a kind of judgment of confidence task the subjects have to make a perceptual or cognitive discrimination and have to say if their judgment was correct. The first question of the study was whether metacognition is not deficient in autism. The second aim of the study was if the meta-representation of the self was related to the meta-representation of other persons, as assessed with the mindreading task.

It was found that patients with autism had impairments that were related to meta-representation of the self and that of others (Nichols et al., 2019). Metacognition was thus impaired in autism subjects. It is argued that deficient metacognition is might be the result of metarepresentational resources that are shared by metacognition as well as by mindreading (Nichols et al., 2019).

Schizophrenia, Social Cognition, and Social Judgment

Impaired social functioning in schizophrenia is often seen. This might be associated with impairments of theory of mind ToM, which is the capacity of the individual to infer the mental states from others (Langdon, Connors, and Connaughton, 2014).

The Measurement of Sleep

How is sleep measured? This is an important question. The events of sleep are measured by way of the electroencephalogram (EEG). In addition, muscular activation is assessed with the use of an electromyogram (EMG). Finally, eye movements are investigated with the use of the electrooculogram (EOG). A normal night of sleeping is divided in four different stages. For instance, during REM sleep the EEG does show a pattern that resembles the pattern of the waking state, In which the sleeping person produces rapid eye movements. Other stages, non-REM sleep display slower rhythms in the EEG. There are fout to five times alternations among REM sleep and non-REM sleep (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p. 479).

Metacognition and Motivation in Schizophrenia

Metacognition is the capability to construct complex aspecs about the self, the world, and about others (Luther, Bonfils, Fisher, Johnson-Kwochka, and Salyers, 2019). It was investigated if metacognition was a moderating variable between self-reported and clinically-reported motivation in disorders of the schizophrenia spectrum. Furthermore, clinical insight and neurocognition were also assessed. As hypothesized, metacognition was found to be a moderator among both self-rated as well as clinically-rated motivation (Luther et al., 2019). When metacognitive abilities were low, no such relationship was found.

Disruptions in Task Performance in Schizotypy

Shifts in interruptions in performance of a task is called intermittent degradation (Roche, Silverstein, and Lenzenweger, 2015). This aspect is very often been seen in performance data of schizophrenia patients. In schizotypy, it was investigated if there is a relationship with intermittent degradation (ID). It was found that their was a positively association among schizotypy, as measured with several common questionnaires and times of ID. Odd speech, and odd eccentric behavior factors were related to this. Other measures, such as mood, depression and state an trait anxiety were to be found unrelated to ID (Roche et al., 2015).

Schizophrenia: Jumping to Conclusions

The forming and remaining of delusions is associated with the jumping to conclusions bias (Takeda, Nakataki, Ohta, Hamatani, Matsuura, and Ohmori, 2018). The bias of jumping to conclusions is often assessed with a probabilistic learning task. Takeda et al. (2018) investigated the association among JTC bias and neurocognition, confidence in decisions, and social cognition.

The authors concluded that JTC bias and confidence in decisions may be associated with different aspects of cognitive functioning. It was found that the jumping to conclusions bias was associated with neurocognition. In addition, the confidence in decisions was to be found to be associated with social cognition in schizophrenia patients (Takeda et al., 2018). The authors conclude finally that neurocognition and social cognition are two different aspects for schizophrenia vulnerability (Takeda et al., 2018).

Schizophrenia, Emotion, Empathy, and Metacognition

Patients with schizophrenia are impaired in emotion recognition, especially in the recognition of facial affect (Bonfils, Haas, and Salyers, in press). The investigators assessed emotion associated performance and its relationship with metacognition with three different task. The first task was emotion recognition, the second was emotional perspective-taking, and the last task concerned affective responsiveness. The results revealed that the performance differed among the three empathy tasks. The emotion of happiness was best identified while patients performed on the emotion recognition task. In addition, the patients with schizophrenia performed also the best on the emotion of happiness during the other two tasks. However, the emotion of anger was performed the worst, which might indicate that this emotion may be a specific difficulty in the range of these higher-order empathy tasks. Concerning metacognition, an unexpected finding was found in which patients with schizophrenia in which they reflected on their selves was especially related. Further, it was found that self reflection in the patients was related in a positive way to every specific emotion (Bonfils et al., in press). Lastly, it was stated that metacognition of self reflection may have an important part in proccesses of social cognitive origin.

Antipsychotic Drugs

The incidence of schizophrenia is rather high, one in hundred will develop the disorder. To treat schizophrenia, which is associated for instance with hallucinations and delusions, antipsychotic drugs lowered institutional care in this disorder. Antipsychotic drugs are sometimes also called major tranquilizers, The action of this drug is not very well understood, however after immediate administration, patients experience reduced motor activity, which is also one of the most listed side-effects, also called parkinsonism. After a while the drugs alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Schizophrenia and altered Emotion Regulation

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted in patients with schizophrenia to asses the neural correlates of emotion processing and associative memory (Luck, Joober, Malla, and Lepage, 2016). These researchers hypothesized that in patients with schizophrenia an impairment would be found in emotion modulation as well as in associative memory. Behaviorally, it was found that first episode patients with schizophrenia were impaired in associative recognition memory. In addition, the patients were also impaired in associative memory and emotionally functions. The results showed that in healthy control subjects their performance was better in emotionally related conditions compared to neutral conditions. The reverse was found in patients (Luck et al., 2016). The fMRI results revealed that patients with schizophrenia had lower activity in medial temporal lobe areas. But they exhibited higher activity in the parahippocampal gyrus. It was concluded that in schizophrenia there might be a deficit in the cerebral parts related to encoding strategies (Luck et al., 2016).

Brain Plasticity

Durung development, the brain is highly plastic in that it has the capacity to be adapted by experiences, especially at the microscopic niveau.  iT is both plastic to internal events as well as to external events, which might be due to specific consequences of hormones, injury, faulty genes as well as drugs. When during critical periods of brain development, and when they are not normal, the development of the brain is also imperfect. These abnormalities might cause for instance developmental disorders or even schizophrenia (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Schizophrenia and Reward and Selective Attention Unimpaired

Bansal, Robinson, Geng, Leonard, Hahn, Luck, and Gold (2018) Investigated the effects of learning on selective attention in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. Two different kinds of learning were investigated. The first was the capability of the value of a reward that was associated with a particular color, and the second was the patients' capability to relate a target stimulus with a particular location. It was found that both kinds of control of attention were generally not impaired in patients with schizophrenia. According to the authors, patients with schizophrenia can both use the associations of reward as well as spatial probability to make their reaction time speed quicker. Thus reward related attentional control was found intact in schizophrenia (Bansal et al., 2018).

Error Awareness in Attention Deficit Disorder

For adaptive control it is needed that we have the ability for the detection and correction of our errors (O'Connell, Bellgrove, Dockree, Lau, Hester, Garavan et al., 2009). In recent time there is a lot of electrophysical research done on error monitoring as well as error awareness. It is argued that the human error processing system consists of pre-consciouss and conscious aspects as indicated by event-related potentials (ERP's). One ERP component is the ERN, or the error-related negativity. Another important ERP component is the error positivity, or Pe. Adults with ADHD were given an error awareness task, the so called Go/No-Go response inhibition task. The subjects were instructed to respond to a single Go trial and withold the other options. The block included 225 stimuli in which there were 200 Go stimuli and 25 No/Go stimuli. ERP's were recorded meanwhile from the participants scalp. The results of the experiment revealed that ADHD adults were less aware of their errors. In addition, their behavioral performance differed also from healthy control subjects associated with errors of commission. There was also a correlation found among diminished error awareness and the severity of the patients symptomalogy. Furthermore, error awareness rates in the patients were also related to errors of omission. It is argued that these kind of errors might be associated with patients' misidentification and off-task behavior (O'Connell et al., 2009). Also the results of the event-related potentials show abnormalities in adult patients with ADHD as compared to healthy control subjects. The both groups did however not differ in ERN amplitede, they did differ in the error positivity, the Pe. It is concluded from this experiment, based on the results, that adult patients with ADHD have a lack of error awareness.

Neurotransmission in the CNS

There are four neurotransmitters that are tiny molecules. These are acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These small molecule neurotransmitters play a role on its neural activation system that regulates huge parts in the brain (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p. 168-169). The cholinergic system uses acetylcholine as a transmitter and is involved in the electroencephalographic maintenance while awake. It is suggested that it plays part in memory by the way of neuron exitability. Impairments of cholinergic neurons is suggested to play a role in Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative memory disorder.

The dopaminergic system uses dopamine as a neurotransmitter. It has a role in nigostriatal as well as mesolimbic pathways. In the nigrostriatal pathway it has a role in normal motor behavior and diminished dopamine in this path has been associated with Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by rigidity of the muscles and dyskinesias.

The noradrenergic system uses norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter and plays a role in emotion. Decreases and increases to this system are associated with depression and mania, respectively.

The seotonergic system uses serotonin as a neurotransmitter. Like acetylcholine it is also involved in the electroencelographic awake state. Serotonin activity alterations have been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, vocal/motor tics. In addition it is thought to play also a role in schizophrenia. Serotonin decrements are associated with depression.

Neurotransmission

The basic communication among neurons in mammals is a chemical one (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006). In the case when an action potential is released of the presynaptic membrane it comes into the synaptic cleft, In which it diffuses accross it and it is then bend to receptors of the post synaptic membrane. After that, there is deactivation of the transmitter. 

ADHD and the visual oddball task

Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have impairments in the control of attentional aspects which might be due to enhanced distraction to other stimuli (Marzinzik, Wahl, Kruger, Gentschow, Colla, and Klosterman, 2012). Patients with ADHD and healthy control participants performed on the visual oddball task, which measures novelty processing. During the task ERP's were recorded from the scalp. The behavior task, in which familiar and non-familiar stimuly were assesed did not differ among the both groups. However, it was found that healthy control participants had different frontal event-related potentials to familiar versus unfamiliar stimuli, which was found to be not evident in the patients with ADHD. The novelty event-related potential is called the P3, occuring about 300ms post-stimulus. It is argued by the authors that in patients with ADHD the recall of automatically semantic information on stimuli is impaired (Marzinzik et al., 2012).

Electrical Activity in the Brain

There are three ways to investigate the electrical activity in the brain. These are single cell recordings, which measures electrical activity of the single neuron, the electroencephalogram (EEG) in which differtent aspects of brain waves are measured, which can as well be linked to specific behaviors, and finally Event-Related Potentials (ERP's), which are short alterations in the EEG that can be linked to specific presented stimuli to the participant. For example, to a flash or a specific tone that is presented. With ERP's investigaters have the possibility to find in which areas of the brain the proccessing is taken place, as well in which temporal order. Often in the range of milliseconds. (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage was a rail construction worker and had an accident in which an axplosion dropped an iron bar through his head iN 1848 (Glenn and Raine, 2014, p. 87-90). Gage suffered from exhaustive damage to his prefrontal cortex and afterward his personality changed, despite preserved intelligence, movement, speech, memory, and learning. The exact location was to be found in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be associated with decision making, associative learning, and the proccessing of feedback on reward and punishment. Patients with such lesions often exhibit psychopatic traits, and so the term "aquired sociopathy" was invented. Gage became irrevent and capriciously.

Frontal Lobe Patients

Patients with frontal lobe lesions have several difficulties. The are impaired in planning upcoming events out of several possibilities. They are ignorant of external cues where the stick to a current task. They also have difficulties in tracing were they went and for instance which purchases they made in stores (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). For the accomplishment of these tasks they do need good temporal organization of their behavior. These tasks are functions of the frontal lobe. These kind of tasks, such as planning are now popular under the name "executive functions".

Learning Disabilities

A learning disability is apparent in children with normal intelligence, but despite that they are not successful in the aquisition of school based abilities. There are different types of learning disabilities, such as problems with reading, spatial orientation, math and social skills.

Spatial Disorientation

There are five different kinds of spatial disorientation. These are all traceble to the cortex as well as the limbic system. Egocentric disorientation results from posterior parietal lesions and is associated with the inability in representing the locations of objects as associated with the person. Heading disorientation is characterized by the impairment of direction concerning the environment and is associated with lesions in the posterior cingulate cortex. In landmark agnosia the lesion is to be found in the lingual gyrus. This syndrome is characterized by the inability to the representation of important landmarks. Anterograde disorientation is associated with lesions of the parahippocampal gyrus and the patient in this condition is impaired in the aquisition of new facts about information of the environment. Finally, spatial mapping impairments is associated with hippocampal lesions and is associated with both anterograde and reterograde amne sia for enriched details in especially the spatial area (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008).

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome

The Kluver-Bucy syndrome has been found in several neurological diseases. The most prominent symptom of this syndrome is a lack of affect (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). In the case of animals, the do not exhibit fear When there are serious threads to them. This behavioral syndrome was experimentally studied in monkeys following bilateral anterior temporal lobectomy. The symptoms are loss of fear and unexitement, a choose of diet that they formerly rejected as a result of indifference, increased (same) sex drive including for objects, very reactive to all visual signs, studying objects with the mouth and finally visual agnosia. The syndrome is as well found in humans and is the result of bilateral amygdala and inferior cortex removal.

Language

Only human beings have the unique ability of language. It gives us the possibility to organize inputs from sensation associated with information. Due to this, we can make categorization and conceptualizations of objects as well as speaking to ourselves related to the present, past, and future. Motor aspects, such as syllables as well as grammatica has an increment on the system. Language is haused in different part of the human cortex and it is suggested to represent neural webs (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). Disorders of language are for example aphasia and aquired dyslexia. About these disorders I will spent a separate post.