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Background: Alexithymia is a risk factor for major depressive disorder (MDD) and has been associated with diminished treatment response. Neuroimaging studies have revealed structural aberrations of the anterior cingulate cortex and the fusiform gyrus in healthy controls with high levels of alexithymia. The present study tried to corroborate and extend these results to patients with MDD compared with healthy controls. Methods: We investigated the relationship between alexithymia, depression and grey matter volume in 63 patients with MDD (mean age [+ or -] standard deviation = 42.43 yr [+ or -] 11.91; 33 female) and 46 healthy controls (45.35 yr [+ or -] 8.37; 22 female). We assessed alexithymia using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. We conducted an alexithymia x group analysis of covariance; we used a region-of-interest approach, including the fusiform gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex, and conducted whole brain analysis using voxel-based morphometry. Results: Our analysis revealed a significant alexithymia x group interaction in the fusiform gyrus (left, [p.sub.FWE] = 0.031; right, [p.sub.FWE] = 0.010). Higher alexithymia scores were associated with decreased grey matter volume in patients with MDD ([p.sub.FWE] = 0.009), but with increased grey matter volume of the fusiform gyrus in healthy controls ([p.sub.FWE] = 0.044). We found no significant main effects in the region-of-interest analysis. Limitations: Owing to the naturalistic nature of our study, patients with MDD and healthy controls differed significantly in their alexithymia scores. Conclusion: Our results showed the fusiform gyrus as a correlate of alexithymia. We also found differences related to alexithymia between patients with MDD and healthy controls in the fusiform gyrus. Our study encourages research related to the transition from risk to MDD in people with alexithymia., Introduction Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common and disabling psychiatric diseases worldwide. (1) At least one-third of patients with MDD do not respond to first-line treatment, [...]

Increased automatic processing of threat-related stimuli has been proposed as a key element in panic disorder. Little is known about the neural basis of automatic processing, in particular to task-irrelevant, panic-related, ecologically valid stimuli, or about the association between brain activation and symptomatology in patients with panic disorder. Methods: The present event-related functional MRI (fMRI) study compared brain responses to task-irrelevant, panic-related and neutral visual stimuli in medication-free patients with panic disorder and healthy controls. Panic-related and neutral scenes were presented while participants performed a spatially nonoverlapping bar orientation task. Correlation analyses investigated the association between brain responses and panic-related aspects of symptomatology, measured using the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI). Results: We included 26 patients with panic disorder and 26 heatlhy controls in our analysis. Compared with controls, patients with panic disorder showed elevated activation in the amygdala, brainstem, thalamus, insula, anterior cingulate cortex and midcingulate cortex in response to panic-related versus neutral task-irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, fear of cardiovascular symptoms (a subcomponent of the ASI) was associated with insula activation, whereas fear of respiratory symptoms was associated with brainstem hyperactivation in patients with panic disorder. Limitations: The additional implementation of measures of autonomic activation, such as pupil diameter, heart rate, or electrodermal activity, would have been informative during the fMRI scan as well as during the rating procedure. Conclusion: Results reveal a neural network involved in the processing of panic-related distractor stimuli in patients with panic disorder and suggest an automatic weighting of panic-related information depending on the magnitude of cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms. Insula and brainstem activations show function-related associations with specific components of panic symptomatology., Introduction Recurring sudden panic attacks and anxious apprehension are the 2 core symptoms for diagnosing panic disorder. (1) Panic-related anxious apprehension is characterized by worry about future attacks and by [...]

Background: Altered memory processes are thought to be a key mechanism in the etiology of anxiety disorders, but little is known about the neural correlates of fear learning and memory biases in patients with social phobia. The present study therefore examined whether patients with social phobia exhibit different patterns of neural activation when confronted with recently acquired emotional stimuli. Methods: Patients with social phobia and a group of healthy controls learned to associate pseudonames with pictures of persons displaying either a fearful or a neutral expression. The next day, participants read the pseudonames in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Afterwards, 2 memory tests were carried out. Results: We enrolled 21 patients and 21 controls in our study. There were no group differences for learning performance, and results of the memory tests were mixed. On a neural level, patients showed weaker amygdala activation than controls for the contrast of names previously associated with fearful versus neutral faces. Social phobia severity was negatively related to amygdala activation. Moreover, a detailed psychophysiological interaction analysis revealed an inverse correlation between disorder severity and frontolimbic connectivity for the emotional > neutral pseudonames contrast. Limitations: Our sample included only women. Conclusion: Our results support the theory of a disturbed corticolimbic interplay, even for recently learned emotional stimuli. We discuss the findings with regard to the vigilance-avoidance theory and contrast them to results indicating an oversensitive limbic system in patients with social phobia., Introduction Social phobia is one of the most prevalent and burdensome anxiety disorders. (1) In addition to threat-focused information processing, early experiences and learning mechanisms are assumed to constitute a [...]

Background: Anhedonia has long been recognized as a key feature of major depressive disorders, but little is known about the association between hedonic symptoms and neurobiological processes in depressed patients. We investigated whether amygdala moodcongruent responses to emotional stimuli in depressed patients are correlated with anhedonic symptoms at automatic levels of processing. Methods: We measured amygdala responsiveness to subliminally presented sad and happy facial expressions in depressed patients and matched healthy controls using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Amygdala responsiveness was compared between patients and healthy controls within a 2 (group) x 2 (emotion) design. In addition, we correlated patients' amygdala responsiveness to sad and happy facial stimuli with self-report questionnaire measures of anhedonia. Results: We included 35 patients and 35 controls in our study. As in previous studies, we observed a strong emotion x group interaction in the bilateral amygdala: depressed patients showed greater amygdala responses to sad than happy faces, whereas healthy controls responded more strongly to happy than sad faces. The lack of automatic right amygdala responsiveness to happy faces in depressed patients was associated with higher physical anhedonia scores. Limitations: Almost all depressed patients were taking antidepressant medications. Conclusion: We replicated our previous finding of depressed patients showing automatic amygdala mood-congruent biases in terms of enhanced reactivity to negative emotional stimuli and reduced activity to positive emotional stimuli. The altered amygdala processing of positive stimuli in patients was associated with anhedonia scores. The results indicate that reduced amygdala responsiveness to positive stimuli may contribute to anhedonic symptoms due to reduced/inappropriate salience attribution to positive information at very early processing levels., Introduction Anhedonia is one of the earliest psychopathological symptoms in clinical descriptions of depression and melancholia, and has long been recognized as a core feature of depressive disorders. The term [...]

Many studies have reported that word recognition in a second language (L2) is affected by the native language (L1). However, little is known about the role of the specific language combination of the bilinguals. To investigate this issue, the authors administered a word identification task (progressive demasking) on 1,025 monosyllabic English (L2) words to native speakers of French, German, and Dutch. A regression approach was adopted, including a large number of within- and between-language variables as predictors. A substantial overlap of reaction time patterns was found across the groups of bilinguals, showing that word recognition results obtained for one group of bilinguals generalize to bilinguals with different mother tongues. Moreover, among the set of significant predictors, only one between-language variable was present (cognate status); all others reflected characteristics of the target language. Thus, although influences across languages exist, word recognition in L2 by proficient bilinguals is primarily determined by within-language factors, whereas cross-language effects appear to be limited. An additional comparison of the bilingual data with a native control group showed that there are subtle but significant differences between L1 and L2 processing. Keywords: visual word recognition, bilingualism, progressive demasking task, cross-language influences, multiple regression

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.04.005 Byline: Eva Smolka (a), Pienie Zwitserlood (b), Frank Rosler (a) Keywords: Inflectional morphology; Regularity; Participle priming; Illegal combinations; Morphological decomposition; Lexical retrieval; Single system; Stem access Abstract: This study investigated whether German participles are retrieved as whole words from lexical storage or whether they are accessed via their morphemic constituents. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular verbs and results from combinations of regular/irregular stems with regular/irregular suffixes. Data from visual priming showed that regular and irregular participles facilitated their base verbs to the same degree, which argues against different processing systems. Furthermore, 'illegal combinations' of participle affixes and verbal or nonverbal stems (geworft, gewurft) were as effective as correct participles (geworfen) in facilitating the morphologically related base verb (werfen). This indicates that stems contained in illegal combinations were accessed, regardless of whether they originated from regular or irregular verbs. These findings strongly argue for a single system that processes both regular and irregular inflection via access to morphemic constituents. Such a single processing model is suggested. Author Affiliation: (a) Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany (b) Psychological Institute II, Westfalische Wilhelms-University, Munster, Germany Article History: Received 10 March 2006; Revised 29 March 2007 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Grant 254/2 to Frank Rosler. We thank Lena Squarra and Judith Halle for running the experiment, and Juan A. Hernandez for his statistical advice. We would further like to thank Mihal Raveh and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations. Keywords: discourse context, lexical anticipation, prediction-sensitive parsing, grammatical gender, EEG

Three experiments are reported concerning the role of the syllable in the perception of spoken Dutch. Ss monitored spoken words for the presence of target strings that did or did not correspond to the words' first syllable. Effects of syllabic match were obtained for spoken words with unambiguous syllabic structure, as well as for words containing ambisyllabic consonants, which are shared by 2 syllables. For both types of words, monitoring latencies were shorter if the target matched the first syllable of the spoken word. Syllable effects were independent of the relation between targets and stem morphemes of the spoken words. Commonalities and differences between these results and those obtained in other languages such as English and French are discussed.

Models of word recognition differ in the claims they make about the processing and representation of morphological complex words. The research reported here on the processing of spoken prefixed words contrasts predictions made by continuous left-to-right processing models and by models adhering to the notion of decomposition and discontinuous access to the mental lexicon. In left-to-right models, the speech input is mapped onto full-form representations in the lexicon in a continuous manner. In discontinuous models, the particular stretch of input corresponding to the stem of a complex word is used as the access unit, irrespective of where this information is located in the speech signal. Three sets of experiments, using gating and phoneme monitoring tasks, investigate whether the processing of prefixed (and psuedo-prefixed) words is determined by the complete, full-word form, or by the stem of the word. The results clearly disconfirm the decomposition model of word-recognition. None of the experiments provide evidence for the stem as the crucial unit in lexical access. Moreover, the results are not compatible with continuous processing models which claim that the lexicon contains only full-word forms. The implications of these findings for the processing and representation of morphologically complex spoken words are discussed.

Results from our laboratories show clear frequency effects for regularly inflected forms in both German and English. Moreover, there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to treat the -s plural as the default plural in German. Together, these data do not support a dual modular structure of the language faculty.

Approaches to spoken word recognition differ in the importance they assign to word onsets during lexical access. This research contrasted the hypothesis that lexical access is strongly directional with the hypothesis that word onsets are less important than the overall goodness of fit between input and lexical form. A cross-modal priming technique was used to investigate the extent to which a rhyme prime (a prime that differs only in its first segment from the word that is semantically associated with the visual probe) is as effective a prime as the original word itself. Earlier research had shown that partial primes that matched from word onset were very effective cross-modal primes. The present results show that, irrespective of whether the rhyme prime was a real word or not, and irrespective of the amount of overlap between the rhyme prime and the original word, the rhymes are much less effective primes than the full word. In fact, no overall priming effect could be detected at all except under conditions in which the competitor environment was very sparse. This suggests that word onsets do have a special status in the lexical access of spoken words.