Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Fear generalization is a phenomenon that conditioned fear responses extended to safe stimuli which shares perceptual similarity with threat stimuli. Moderate fear generalization is beneficial for human survival, but excessive fear generalization leads to maladaptation to environment. Rules that underlie fear generalization have been investigated by related researches based on perception, and been widely applied to studies in various domains. This paper reviews the study of the generalization of fear based on perception. Here, we begin with Pavlovian fear conditioning and the gradient of fear generalization, which lays the foundation for theoretical approaches used today. Then we review the research of fear generalization based on perception in multiple sensory channels (i.e., visual, auditory, context). Third, we summarize the neural circuits of fear generalization which involve hippocampus, amygdala, insula, and prefrontal cortex. Last but not least, we briefly clarify the difference between perception-based and concept-based fear generalization which receive increased interests. Further studies should extend this work in many ways, such as combining concepts-based fear generalization, using Just-Noticeable-Difference Threshold to ensure that the generalization stimuli can actually be discriminated, increasing the explicitness and divisity of stimuli, as well as applping hormonesand multi-modal data analysis methods.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： The ability of recognizing ambiguous expressions is proposed to be a generally used social skill, which plays a crucial role in human social interaction. Emotion context information as a main factor which affects ambiguous expression recognition, including text description, emotional expression, color background, olfactory signal and personality factors, were reviewed in this paper. We aim to reveal the mechanisms underlying the process of ambiguous expression which was influenced by emotion context information. In the future research, the following topics should be considered: highlighting the dominant research status of ambiguous expression, defining emotional context information clearly, exploring new research paradigms and identifying brain regions that affect the transfer of valance, in order to broaden the research field of ambiguous expression recognition.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Researches on deficits in emotion regulation of depression have mainly focused on the selection and application of emotion-regulation strategies; however, it remains unclear whether it is also related to emotion-regulation goals, i.e., the direction of emotion regulation. Situation selection is an antecedent-focused regulation strategy that is worked before the emotional reactions occur and it can be used as an index of emotional-regulation goals.In our current study, the event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the emotion-regulation goals of young adults with depression inclination. Participants were asked to freely select the emotion-inducing scenes in which they want to put themselves and to report their emotional preferences。ERP results revealed that the amplitudes of Late Positive Potential (LPP) were significantly decreased when viewing the sadness scene in young adults with depression inclination, and they selected to view sadness scene more frequently than healthy young adults. In addition, the ratings of sadness preferences were significantly higher among subjects with depression inclination, while the happiness preferences were lower.The current results suggest that, compared to the control group, the individuals with depression inclination are more willing to use situation selection to maintain or enhance their sadness rather than weaken it or enhance their happiness. These findings further indicate that emotion regulation goals of depressive subjects may be related to their motivations for selecting emotional stimulus, and provide a new perspective for exploring the causes and mechanisms of emotion regulation deficits in depressive disorders.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-05-23
Abstract： Testosterone is an androgen synthesized and secreted by the Leydig cells of the testes in men, the thecal cells of the ovaries and placenta of women. It can mediate various physiological, morphological, and behavioral processes, and is vital to human survival and reproduction. A large number of studies have shown that there is a bidirectional relationship between testosterone and social behavior. Testosterone can regulate various social behaviors, which in turn feedback and affect the testosterone level. Early research showed that individuals with high testosterone level are more aggressive. According to the challenge hypothesis and the biosocial status model, recent studies have revealed that testosterone is highly responsive to competitive interactions. In addition, by reviewing these studies, we suggest that changes in testosterone can affect aggressive behavior by enhancing the reactivity of the amygdala or reducing PFC-amygdala functional coupling. Future research could consider the potential role of other hormones (such as cortisol) and personality traits in regulating the relationship between testosterone and human aggressive behavior, as well as related biological mechanisms.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2020-02-12
Abstract： Moral cognition focuses on the processing of information underlying the moral behavior. Recently, researchers have begun to apply computational modelling to moral cognition as to explore how moral cognition is represented in the brain. However, the research on the computational modeling of moral cognition is still at its infancy. The application of computational modelling (the Drift Diffusion Models, Utility Models, Reinforcement Learning Models and Hierarchical Gaussian Filter) in the behavioral and physiological studies of moral cognition quantified the cognitive processes and neural mechanisms underlying moral decision-making, moral judgment, and moral inference. In addition, this new approach could help to understand antisocial behavior and mental disorders. Finally, the computational modeling needs to be improved and future research need to pay attention to the potential limitations. "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Other Disciplines of Psychology submitted time 2019-08-26
Abstract： Depression, a complex and heterogeneous mental disorder, leads to great global burdens of disease. Although diagnosis based on nosology is broadly used in several domains, it is still unable to direct the exploration of pathological mechanism of depression. In addition, several treatments developed by this diagnosis have poor outcomes due to its low prediction validity. Computational approaches to psychiatry remedy those limitations and help to improve understanding, prediction and treatment for depression by two complementary approaches: data-driven and theory-driven. Theory-driven approaches apply models to multiple levels of analysis from the prior knowledge or hypothesis of depression. Data-driven approaches, however, adopt machine-learning methods to analyze high-dimensional data to improve the diagnostic and predictive accuracies of depression, and eventually, promote the treatment effects. With the development and combination of these two approaches as well as the integration of resources, it is promising to cure depression and prevent it from occurrence.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2018-12-27
Abstract： There is mounting evidence in psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics to support the notion that human behavior is governed by dual-learning systems, namely, reflective, “cognitive” or reflexive, “habitual” system. The former one is performed automatically, responds quickly and does not consume cognitive resources. The latter one responds slowly and consumes more cognitive resources, but it is also more flexible and sensitive to the changes in the external environment. Both of these learning systems exist in parallel and compete with each other to jointly influence individual's mind and behavior. A widely concerned question in recent years is which system exerts dominant control over specific behavior and what factors determine whether reflective or reflexive system governs behavior. Over the past decades, researchers used navigation learning task, probabilistic classification learning or instrumental learning task and associated computational models to explore the changes of multiple learning systems under acute and chronic stress at both behavioral and neural levels. By reviewing these studies, we summarize the psychophysiological mechanism underlying the stress-induced bias toward habitual behavior, and reinterpret the causal relationship between this shift and drug addiction. Existing research shows that noradrenaline and glucocorticoids act through mineralocorticoid receptors and exert interactive impact on brain regions that subserve dual-learning systems, which is orchestrated by the amygdala. Future studies need to focus on the modulatory role of genetic differences in the effects of stress on learning, and use a variety of technical methods to elucidate its neuroendocrine basis.
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