Categoría: Papers con abstracts

BACKGROUND: Most of the empirical studies that support the efficacy of prolonged exposure (PE) for treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been conducted on white mainstream English-speaking populations. Although high PTSD rates have been reported for Puerto Ricans, the appropriateness of PE for this population remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility of providing PE to Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans with PTSD. Particular attention was also focused on identifying challenges faced by clinicians with limited experience in PE. This information is relevant to help inform practice implications for training Spanish-speaking clinicians in PE. RESULTS: Fourteen patients with PTSD were randomly assigned to receive PE (n = 7) or usual care (UC) (n = 7). PE therapy consisted of 15 weekly sessions focused on gradually confronting and emotionally processing distressing trauma-related memories and reminders. Five patients completed PE treatment; all patients attended the 15 sessions available to them. In UC, patients received mental health services available within the health care setting where they were recruited. They also had the option of self-referring to a mental health provider outside the study setting. The Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) was administered at baseline, mid-treatment, and post-treatment to assess PTSD symptom severity. Treatment completers in the PE group demonstrated significantly greater reductions in PTSD symptoms than the UC group. Forty percent of the PE patients showed clinically meaningful reductions in PTSD symptoms from pre- to post-treatment. CONCLUSIONS: PE appears to be viable for treating Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking patients with PTSD. This therapy had good patient acceptability and led to improvements in PTSD symptoms. Attention to the clinicians’ training process contributed strongly to helping them overcome the challenges posed by the intervention and increased their acceptance of PE.

Mental health in Argentina. Autores Moldavsky D, Savage C, Stein E, Blake A.  Año 2011 Journal  Moldavsky D, Savage C, Stein E, Blake A.  Volumen 8(3): 64-66 Abstract   Otra información    

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most popular measure to evaluate implicit attitudes. Nevertheless, its neural correlates are not yet fully understood. We examined event related potentials (ERPs) in response to face- and word processing while indigenous and non-indigenous participants performed an IAT displaying faces (ingroup and outgroup members) and words (positive and negative valence) as targets of category judgments. The N170 component was modulated by valence of words and by ingroup/outgroup face categorization. Contextual effects (face-words implicitly associated in the task) had an influence on the N170 amplitude modulation. On the one hand, in face categorization, right N170 showed differences according to the association between social categories of faces and affective valence of words. On the other, in word categorization, left N170 presented a similar modulation when the task implied a negative-valence associated with ingroup faces. Only indigenous participants showed a significant IAT effect and N170 differences. Our results demonstrate an early ERP blending of stimuli processing with both intergroup and evaluative contexts, suggesting an integration of contextual information related to intergroup attitudes during the early stages of word and face processing. To our knowledge, this is the first report of early ERPs during an ethnicity IAT, opening a new branch of exchange between social neuroscience and social psychology of attitudes.

The most selective disorder of central conceptual knowledge arises in semantic dementia, a degenerative condition associated with bilateral atrophy of the inferior and polar regions of the temporal lobes. Likewise, semantic impairment in both herpes simplex virus encephalitis and Alzheimer’s disease is typically associated with bilateral, anterior temporal pathology. These findings suggest that conceptual representations are supported via an interconnected, bilateral, anterior temporal network and that it may take damage to both sides to produce an unequivocal deficit of central semantic memory. We tested and supported this hypothesis by investigating a case series of 20 patients with unilateral temporal damage (following vascular accident or resection for tumour or epilepsy), utilizing a test battery that is sensitive to semantic impairment in semantic dementia. Only 1/20 of the cases, with a unilateral left lesion, exhibited even a mild impairment on the receptive semantic measures. On the expressive semantic tests of naming and fluency, average performance was worse in the left- than right-unilateral cases, but even in this domain, only one left-lesion case had scores consistently more than two standard deviations below control means. These results fit with recent parallel explorations of semantic function using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation as well as functional imaging in stroke aphasic and neurologically intact participants. The evidence suggests that both left and right anterior temporal lobe regions contribute to the representation of semantic memory and together may form a relatively damage-resistant, robust system for this critical aspect of higher cognition.

Visual perception and integration seem to play an essential role in our conscious phenomenology. Relatively local neural processing of reentrant nature may explain several visual integration processes (feature binding or figure–ground segregation, object recognition, inference, competition), even without attention or cognitive control. Based on the above statements, should the neural signatures of visual integration (via reentrant process) be non‐reportable phenomenological qualia? We argue that qualia are not required to understand this perceptual organization.

Neurodynamics of mind: The arrow illusion of conscious intentionality as downward causation. Autores Barutta J, Gleichgerrcht E, Cornejo C, Ibanez A.  Año 2010 Journal  Barutta J, Gleichgerrcht E, Cornejo C, Ibanez A.  Volumen 44(2): 127-143 Abstract   Otra información    

A neuroanatomical model of urge-for-action phenomena has been proposed based on the «motivation-for-action” network (e.g., insula and mid-cingulate cortex). Notwithstanding the sound evidence presented regarding the functional and anatomical correlates of this model, the nature of the relationship between urges and conscious awareness remains to be addressed. Moreover, this model does not seem to explain (1) how a conscious access threshold is reached, and (2) the way in which the urges are related to more general contents of consciousness.

A role for rostral prefrontal cortex (BA10) has been proposed in multitasking, in particular, the selection and maintenance of higher order internal goals while other sub-goals are being performed. BA10 has also been implicated in the ability to infer someone else’s feelings and thoughts, often referred to as theory of mind. While most of the data to support these views come from functional neuroimaging studies, lesion studies are scant. In the present study, we compared the performance of a group of frontal patients whose lesions involved BA10, a group of frontal patients whose lesions did not affect this area (nonBA10), and a group of healthy controls on tests requiring multitasking and complex theory of mind judgments. Only the group with lesions involving BA10 showed deficits on multitasking and theory of mind tasks when compared with control subjects. NonBA10 patients performed more poorly than controls on an executive function screening tool, particularly on measures of response inhibition and abstract reasoning, suggesting that theory of mind and multitasking deficits following lesions to BA10 cannot be explained by a general worsening of executive function. In addition, we searched for correlations between performance and volume of damage within different subregions of BA10. Significant correlations were found between multitasking performance and volume of damage in right lateral BA10, and between theory of mind and total BA10 lesion volume. These findings stress the potential pivotal role of BA10 in higher order cognitive functions.

Although it has been shown that adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have impaired social cognition, no previous study has reported the brain correlates of face valence processing. This study looked for behavioral, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological markers of emotion processing for faces (N170) in adult ADHD compared to controls matched by age, gender, educational level, and handedness. We designed an event-related potential (ERP) study based on a dual valence task (DVT), in which faces and words were presented to test the effects of stimulus type (faces, words, or face-word stimuli) and valence (positive versus negative). Individual signatures of cognitive functioning in participants with ADHD and controls were assessed with a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, including executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Compared to controls, the adult ADHD group showed deficits in N170 emotion modulation for facial stimuli. These N170 impairments were observed in the absence of any deficit in facial structural processing, suggesting a specific ADHD impairment in early facial emotion modulation. The cortical current density mapping of N170 yielded a main neural source of N170 at posterior section of fusiform gyrus (maximum at left hemisphere for words and right hemisphere for faces and simultaneous stimuli). Neural generators of N170 (fusiform gyrus) were reduced in ADHD. In those patients, N170 emotion processing was associated with performance on an emotional inference ToM task, and N170 from simultaneous stimuli was associated with EF, especially working memory. This is the first report to reveal an adult ADHD-specific impairment in the cortical modulation of emotion for faces and an association between N170 cortical measures and ToM and EF.

An undisputable characteristic of cognitive science is its enormous diversity of theories. Not surprisingly, these often belong to different paradigms that focus on different processes and levels of analysis. A related problem is that researchers of cognition frequently seem to ascribe to incompatible approaches to research, creating a Tower of Babel of cognitive knowledge. This text presents a pragmatic model of meta-theoretical analysis, a theory conceived of to examine other theories, which allows cognitive theories to be described, integrated and compared. After a brief introduction to meta-theoretical analysis in cognitive science, the dynamic and structural components of a theory are described. The analysis of conceptual mappings between components and explanation strategies is also described, as well as the processes of intra-theory generalization and inter-theory comparison. The various components of the meta-theoretical model are presented with examples of different cognitive theories, mainly focusing on two current approaches to research: The dynamical approach to cognition and the computer metaphor of mind. Finally, two potential counter arguments to the model are presented and discussed.