Mental imagery has a powerful impact on emotion and cognitive processing in adults, and is implicated in emotional disorders. Research suggests the perspective adopted in mental imagery modulates its emotional impact. However, little is known about the impact of mental imagery in adolescence, despite adolescence being the key time for the onset of emotional dysfunction. We administered computerised positive versus mixed valence picture-word mental imagery training to male adolescent participants (N = 60, aged 11–16 years) across separate field and observer perspective sessions. Positive mood increased more following positive than mixed imagery; pleasantness ratings of ambiguous pictures increased following positive versus mixed imagery generated from field but not observer perspective; negative interpretation bias on a novel scrambled sentences task was smaller following positive than mixed imagery particularly when imagery was generated from field perspective. These findings suggest positive mental imagery generation alters mood and cognition in male adolescents, with the latter moderated by imagery perspective. Identifying key components of such training, such as imagery perspective, extends understanding of the relationship between mental imagery, mood, and cognition in adolescence.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10608-016-9795-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
The perception of simultaneity between auditory and vestibular information is crucially important for maintaining a coherent representation of the acoustic environment whenever the head moves. It has been recently reported, however, that despite having similar transduction latencies, vestibular stimuli are perceived significantly later than auditory stimuli when simultaneously generated. This suggests that perceptual latency of a head movement is longer than a co-occurring sound. However, these studies paired a vestibular stimulation of long duration (~1 s) and of a continuously changing temporal envelope with a brief (10–50 ms) sound pulse. In the present study, the stimuli were matched for temporal envelope duration and shape. Participants judged the temporal order of the two stimuli, the onset of an active head movement and the onset of brief (50 ms) or long (1,400 ms) sounds with a square- or raised-cosine-shaped envelope. Consistent with previous reports, head movement onset had to precede the onset of a brief sound by about 73 ms in order for the stimuli to be perceived as simultaneous. Head movements paired with long square sounds (~100 ms) were not significantly different than brief sounds. Surprisingly, head movements paired with long raised-cosine sound (~115 ms) had to be presented even earlier than brief stimuli. This additional lead time could not be accounted for by differences in the comparison stimulus characteristics (temporal envelope duration and shape). Rather, differences between sound conditions were found to be attributable to variability in the time for head movement to reach peak velocity: the head moved faster when paired with a brief sound. The persistent lead time required for vestibular stimulation provides further evidence that the perceptual latency of vestibular stimulation is greater than the other senses.
Common and persistent fears may emerge through learning mechanisms such as fear conditioning and generalisation. Although there have been extensive studies of these learning processes in healthy but also psychiatric samples, many of the tasks used to produce conditioning and assess generalisation either use painful and aversive stimuli as the unconditioned stimuli (UCS), or suffer from poor belongingness between the conditioned stimuli and the UCS. Here, we present novel data from a paradigm designed to examine fear conditioning and generalisation in healthy individuals. Two female faces served as conditioned threat cue (CS+) and conditioned safety cue (CS-) respectively. The CS+ was paired repeatedly with a fearful, screaming face (unconditioned stimulus). Generalisation included intermediate faces which varied in their similarity to the CS+ and CS-. We measured eyeblink startle reflex and self-reported ratings. Acquired fear of the CS+ generalised to intermediate stimuli in proportion to their perceptual similarity to the CS+. Our findings demonstrate how fears of new individuals may develop based on resemblance to others with whom an individual has had negative experiences. The paradigm offers new opportunities for probing the role of generalisation in the emergence of common and persistent fears.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.