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This study investigates the extent to which participants with major depression differ from healthy comparison participants in the irregularities in affective information processing, characterized by deficits in facial expression recognition, intensity categorization, and reaction time to identifying emotionally salient and neutral information. Data on diagnoses, symptom severity, and affective information processing using a facial recognition task were collected from 66 participants, male and female between ages 18 and 54 years, grouped by major depressive disorder (N=37) or healthy non-psychiatric (N=29) status. Findings from MANCOVAs revealed that major depression was associated with a significantly longer reaction time to sad facial expressions compared with healthy status. Also, depressed participants demonstrated a negative bias towards interpreting neutral facial expressions as sad significantly more often than healthy participants. In turn, healthy participants interpreted neutral faces as happy significantly more often than depressed participants. No group differences were observed for facial expression recognition and intensity categorization. The observed effects suggest that depression has significant effects on the perception of the intensity of negative affective stimuli, delayed speed of processing sad affective information, and biases towards interpreting neutral faces as sad.

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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is marked by aggression and impulsive, often self-destructive behavior. Despite the severe risks associated with BPD, relatively little is known about the disorder’s etiology. Identification of genetic correlates (endophenotypes) of BPD would improve the prospects of targeted interventions for more homogeneous subsets of borderline patients characterized by specific genetic vulnerabilities. The current study evaluated behavioral measures of aggression and impulsivity as potential endophenotypes for BPD. Subjects with BPD (N = 127), a non cluster B personality disorder (OPD N = 122), or healthy volunteers (HV N = 112) completed self report and behavioral measures of aggression, motor impulsivity and cognitive impulsivity. Results showed that BPD subjects demonstrated more aggression and motor impulsivity than HV (but not OPD) subjects on behavioral tasks. In contrast, BPD subjects self-reported more impulsivity and aggression than either comparison group. Subsequent analyses showed that among BPD subjects behavioral aggression was associated with self-reported aggression, while behavioral and self-report impulsivity measures were more modestly associated. Overall, the results provide partial support for the use of behavioral measures of aggression and motor impulsivity as endophenotypes for BPD, with stronger support for behavioral aggression measures as an endophenotype for aggression within BPD samples.

Sixty combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder performed an emotional Stroop task under 1 of 4 contextual conditions designed to test theoretical explanations for an attentional bias suppression effect. Results revealed that when the emotional Stroop task was performed under conditions involving a future threat of either watching a combat video or giving a speech, attentional bias was inhibited. There was limited support for the prediction that the suppression effect was strongest when stressor content matched word content on the Stroop. In contrast to participants in the threat conditions, veterans who believed that they would receive additional compensation for speeded color naming or who believed that they would have no other experimental demands were slower when color naming combat-threat words. Potential theoretical explanations of the findings are discussed.

The graphemic representations that underlie spelling performance must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also the positions of the letters. This study investigates how letter position information is represented. We present evidence from two dysgraphic individuals, CM and LSS, who perseverate letters when spelling: that is, letters from previous spelling responses intrude into subsequent responses. The perseverated letters appear more often than expected by chance in the same position in the previous and subsequent responses. We used these errors to address the question of how letter position is represented in spelling. In a series of analyses we determined how often the perseveration errors produced maintain position as defined by a number of alternative theories of letter position encoding proposed in the literature. The analyses provide strong evidence that the grapheme representations used in spelling encode letter position such that position is represented in a graded manner based on distance from both edges of the word. Keywordsletter position coding; dysgraphia; spelling; letter perseveration errors; orthographic processing Many cognitive functions require the ability to represent and process sequences of items or events. Sequence information is essential, for example, in recalling a telephone number, reasoning about causes and effects, navigating a route through an environment, or producing a sentence. As Karl Lashley pointed out more than 50 years ago in The problem of serial order in behavior (Lashley, 1951), the question of how the brain represents and processes ordered sequences is far from trivial; and this question remains a central concern for research in a variety of cognitive domains (e.g., working memory: Henson, 1998; motor control: Bullock, 2004; reading: Grainger & Whitney, 2004; music performance: Palmer, 2005; spoken language production: Dell, Burger & Svec, 1997).This article addresses the serial order issue in the context of spelling. Spelling a word requires not only information about the identities of the letters in the word, but also information about the ordering of those letters. This ordering information could be encoded in a variety of ways. In the word PENCIL, for example, the letter E could be represented as the second letter in the word, the letter five positions from the end of the word, the letter in the nucleus of the first (orthographic) syllable, or the letter that follows P and precedes N. In each case the E's position * Corresponding author: Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, Tel: 410-516-7625, Fax: 410-516-8020, fischerbaum@cogsci.jhu.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form....

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