1,720,983 research outputs found

    Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Covert vs. Overt Emotional Face Processing in Dysphoria

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    People at risk of developing clinical depression exhibit attentional biases for emotional faces. To clarify whether such effects occur at an early, automatic, or at a late, deliberate processing stage of emotional processing, the present study used high-density electroencephalography during both covert and overt processing of sad, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions in healthy participants with high dysphoria (n = 16) and with low dysphoria (n = 19). A state-of-the-art non-parametric permutation-based statistical approach was then used to explore the effects of emotion, attentional task demands, and group. Behaviorally, participants responded faster and more accurately when overtly categorizing happy faces and they were slower and less accurate when categorizing sad and fearful faces, independent of the dysphoria group. Electrophysiologically, in an early time-window (N170: 140–180 ms), there was a significant main effect for the dysphoria group, with greater negative voltage for the high vs. low dysphoria group over the left-sided temporo-occipital scalp. Furthermore, there was a significant group by emotional interaction, with the high dysphoria group displaying greater negative amplitude N170 for happy than fearful faces. Attentional task demands did not influence such early effects. In contrast, in an intermediate time-window (EPN: 200–400 ms) and in a late time-window (LPP: 500–750 ms) there were no significant main effects nor interactions involving the dysphoria Group. The LPP results paralleled the behavioral results, with greater LPP voltages for sad and fearful relative to happy faces only in the overt task, but similarly so in the two dysphoria groups. This study provides novel evidence that alterations in face processing in dysphoric individuals can be seen at the early stages of face perception, as indexed by the N170, although not in the form of a typical pattern of mood-congruent attentional bias. In contrast, intermediate (EPN) and late (LPP) stages of emotional face processing appear unaffected by dysphoria. Importantly, the early dysphoria effect appears to be independent of the top-down allocation of attention, further supporting the idea that dysphoria may influence a stage of automatic emotional appraisal. It is proposed that it may be a consequence of a shift from holistic to feature-based processing of facial expressions, or may be due to the influence of negative schemas acting as a negative context for emotional facial processing

    Electrophysiology of blunted emotional bias in psychopathic personality

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    Diminished emotional capacity is a core characteristic of psychopathic personality. We examined behavioral and electrophysiological differences in attentional bias to emotional material in 34 healthy individuals rated high or low in psychopathic traits using the short form of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (18 high-trait, 16 low-trait). While performing an emotional Stroop task, high-trait participants displayed reduced emotional modulation of the late positive potential (LPP, 400-600 ms), and early anterior positivity (EAP, 200-300 ms) amplitudes. Results suggest blunted bias to affective content in psychopathic personality, characterized by diminished early capture to emotional salience (EAP) and dampened cognitive emotional processing (LPP)

    EEG alpha band functional connectivity reveals distinct cortical dynamics for overt and covert emotional face processing

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    Abstract Current knowledge regarding how the focus of our attention during face processing influences neural responses largely comes from neuroimaging studies reporting on regional brain activations. The present study was designed to add novel insights to this research by studying how attention can differentially impact the way cortical regions interact during emotional face processing. High-density electroencephalogram was recorded in a sample of fifty-two healthy participants during an emotional face processing task. The task required participants to either attend to the expressions (i.e ., overt processing) or attend to a perceptual distractor, which rendered the expressions task-irrelevant (i.e., covert processing). Functional connectivity in the alpha band was estimated in source space and modeled using graph theory to quantify whole-brain integration and segregation. Results revealed that overt processing of facial expressions is linked to reduced cortical segregation and increased cortical integration, this latter specifically for negative expressions of fear and sadness. Furthermore, we observed increased communication efficiency during overt processing of negative expressions between the core and the extended face processing systems. Overall, these findings reveal that attention makes the interaction among the nodes involved in face processing more efficient, also uncovering a connectivity signature of the prioritized processing mechanism of negative expressions, that is an increased cross-communication within the nodes of the face processing network

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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