Body, Mind & Spirit Articles and Latest News

Dysfunctions in understanding other minds in borderline personality disorder: a study using cartoon picture stories.

Psychother Res. 2010 Nov;20(6):657-67

Authors: Ghiassi V, Dimaggio G, Brune M

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are thought to be impaired in their ability to reflect on others’ mental states. Only a few empirical studies have explored the idea that impaired mentalizing in BPD is associated with poor quality of parental care or parental separation during early childhood. Fifty patients diagnosed with BPD were examined using a cartoon task. Quality of parental care was assessed using a self-report measure for recalled parental child-rearing style. Patients with BPD did not differ from controls in their mentalizing abilities. In BPD, however, mentalizing correlated inversely with maternal overprotection, lack of emotional availability, and rejection. Moreover, maternal punishment and rejection and parental separation at an early developmental age were significant predictors of poor mentalizing skills in BPD. These findings suggest that the quality of parental care during early childhood plays a role in the development of mentalizing skills in BPD.

PMID: 20737351 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Physician speciality and pain reduction in patients with depressive symptoms under treatment with venlafaxine.

Eur Psychiatry. 2010 Dec;25(8):455-60

Authors: Begré S, Traber M, Gerber M, von Känel R

Excessive pain perception may lead to unnecessary diagnostic testing or invasive procedures resulting in iatrogenic complications and prolonged disability. Naturalistic studies on patients with chronic pain and depressive symptoms investigating the impact of medical speciality on treatment outcome in a primary care setting are lacking.

PMID: 20427156 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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As a Mathematical Statistician (Biomedical Research), you will:

• Serve as an expert advisor to the NCCAM and to other governmental and non-governmental research groups in areas relating to the development and application of statistical techniques to research in the biological and medical sciences.
• Maintain current knowledge of relevant new developments in statistical research and computing.
• Take a leading role in research projects, often in collaboration with others, in the application or modifications of mathematical statistics required for data analysis or for statistical investigations.
• Provide consultation in the design and analysis of NCCAM intramural and extramural studies.

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Effects of response-set size on error-related brain activity.

Exp Brain Res. 2010 May;202(3):571-81

Authors: Maier ME, Steinhauser M, Hübner R

To study the effect of response-set size on action monitoring processes, the error-related negativity (Ne/ERN), the correct-related negativity (Nc/CRN), and behavioral indicators of action monitoring were compared across three groups of participants performing a two-choice, a four-choice, or an eight-choice version of the flanker task. After controlling for differential contribution of stimulus-related activity to response-locked averages resulting from large differences in response times across conditions, response-set size had strong effects on Ne/ERN and Nc/CRN. With increasing response-set size, the Ne/ERN amplitude decreased, but the Nc/CRN amplitude increased. Moreover, post-error behavioral adjustments were impaired with an increasing response-set size. These results suggest that action monitoring severely suffers when response-set size is increased. Implications of these findings for present theories of Ne/ERN and Nc/CRN are discussed.

PMID: 20094882 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Postural control and adaptation are influenced by preceding postural challenges.

Exp Brain Res. 2010 May;202(3):613-21

Authors: Tjernström F, Fransson PA, Patel M, Magnusson M

We investigated the possible consequences of two consecutive postural tasks on adaptation. Four groups (total number of 46 healthy subjects) were perturbed on two consecutive days with vibration stimulus to tibialis anterior or posterior calf muscles, or both in different orders. Postural movements were recorded with a force platform. There were three major results: (1) tibialis anterior vibration instigated postural adaptation during exposure to the vibration, but did not induce long-term adaptation from day to day, contrary to posterior calf vibration. (2) The long-term postural adaptation from day to day when the posterior calf was vibrated was not affected by prior or subsequent tibialis anterior vibration, which contrasts to other studies on motor learning. (3) Exposure to posterior calf vibration prior tibialis anterior vibration, led to changes of postural strategies and larger amount of torque variance, implying that postural strategies initiated by the gastrocnemius vibration were re-employed during the subsequent tibialis anterior stimulation. This may represent the formation of an internal model, used as feed-forward control of posture, possibly consisting of sensory reweighting. Postural perturbations need to be sufficiently difficult to withstand, in order to induce long-term learning, and postural strategies may be transferred between different postural challenges if they post different demands. Clinically, this suggests that exercises designed to rehabilitate patients should be sufficiently challenging to instigate learning processes, and spaced in order to avoid development of inappropriate postural strategies.

PMID: 20101395 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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L-dopa induces under-damped visually guided motor responses in Parkinson’s disease.

Exp Brain Res. 2010 May;202(3):553-9

Authors: Au WL, Lei N, Oishi MM, McKeown MJ

Parkinson’s disease preferentially affects internally generated movements, e.g., movements recalled from memory, while externally cued movements are relatively preserved. However, L-dopa may have effects on visually guided movements as well as error-related processing. Fourteen Parkinson’s disease (PD) subjects (on and off L-dopa medication) as well as ten normal controls performed a tracking task using a joystick. During discrete 30 s blocks, the visual feedback of the actual tracking errors were attenuated, amplified or unaltered. Second order dynamical system models, with the desired trajectory as the input and the actual motor performance as the output, were used to characterize the motor performance by the each subject under each condition. Although the overall root-mean-square tracking error did not significantly differ between groups, the nature of the motor performance differed significantly across groups. A clear dissociation was made between manipulations of error feedback–which altered the natural frequency of the models–and the effects of L-dopa, which affected damping. Compared to normal controls, PD subjects were significantly overdamped before medication and underdamped after medication. We interpret our results as being suggestive of L: -dopa normalization of compensatory overactive cerebellar activity in PD.

PMID: 20143051 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Correlation versus causation in multisensory perception.

Psychon Bull Rev. 2010 Jun;17(3):329-34

Authors: Mitterer H, Jesse A

Events are often perceived in multiple modalities. The co-occurring proximal visual and auditory stimuli events are mostly also causally linked to the distal event, which makes it difficult to evaluate whether learned correlation or perceived causation guides binding in multisensory perception. Piano tones are an interesting exception: They are associated with the act of the pianist striking keys, an event that is visible to the perceiver, but directly results from hammers hitting strings, an event that typically is not visible to the perceiver. We examined the influence of seeing the hammer or the keystroke on auditory temporal order judgments (TOJs). Participants judged the temporal order of a dog bark and a piano tone, while seeing the piano stroke shifted temporally relative to its audio signal. Visual lead increased “piano-first” responses in auditory TOJ, but more so if the associated keystroke was visible than if the sound-producing hammer was visible, even though both were equally visually salient. This provides evidence for a learning account of audiovisual perception.

PMID: 20551354 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Masked nonword repetition effects in yes/no and go/no-go lexical decision: a test of the evidence accumulation and deadline accounts.

Psychon Bull Rev. 2010 Jun;17(3):369-74

Authors: Perea M, Gómez P, Fraga I

The pattern of masked repetition priming effects for word and nonword targets differs across tasks: Masked-priming effects in lexical decision occur for positive responses (i.e., words), but not for negative responses (nonwords), whereas masked-priming effects in the cross-case same-different task occur for positive responses (same), but not for negative responses (different)–regardless of lexical status. Here, we examined whether masked nonword priming effects are greater when the task involves an active go response to nonwords than when it involves the standard yes/no procedure in lexical decision. The obtained masked repetition priming effect for nonwords was of similar size in yes/no and go/no-go tasks. This finding is compatible with accounts of nonword priming that posit that nonword responses are produced by actively accumulating evidence for the nonword alternative in yes/no and go/no-go procedures, whereas it is inconsistent with the assumption of a deadline for no responses in the yes/no task.

PMID: 20551360 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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Relationship between respiratory, endocrine, and cognitive-emotional factors in response to a pharmacological panicogen.

Depress Anxiety. 2010 Nov;27(11):1011-6

Authors: Lyubkin M, Giardino ND, Abelson JL

The cholecystokinin agonist pentagastrin has been used to study panic attacks in the laboratory and to investigate hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity. Its mechanism of panicogenesis remains unclear. Data from other models suggest that respiratory stimulation itself may induce panic, but pentagastrin’s effects on respiration are not well established. Data from another model also suggest links between respiratory and HPA axis reactivity and cognitive modulation of both. To further explore these phenomena, we added respiratory measures to a study of cognitive modulation of HPA and anxiety responses to pentagastrin.

PMID: 20721903 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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[Patients with chronic pain syndromes. Impact of an individual outpatient therapy program on pain and health-related quality of life].

Schmerz. 2010 Sep;24(5):459-67

Authors: Huge V, Müller E, Beyer A, Kraft E, Azad SC

The study was performed to reveal the effect of an individualized personal outpatient therapy program, based on a multidisciplinary assessment, on pain and health-related quality of life in patients with chronic pain.

PMID: 20821234 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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