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This paper examines the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on memories and metaphors associated with the earlier AIDS epidemic. It argues that while previous research has focused on how HIV informs COVID-19, the reverse relationship has received insufficient attention. The authors propose a more comprehensive understanding of the issues, using insights from the sociology of memory. Experiences during COVID-19 not only reshape perceptions of HIV in the present but also transform how we remember the AIDS crisis of the past. We discuss the impact of these pandemics particularly for gay and bisexual men and their connected communities. Doing so underscores the co-construction of collective memories in the present, suggesting that COVID-19 has not only redefined our experience of HIV, but it has also reframed our understanding of the earlier AIDS crisis. We conclude by highlighting the potential for these transformations to be leveraged for empowerment, political action and change. Revisiting and reframing our memories of AIDS in the light of COVID-19 can open up new avenues for optimism and positive engagement.

In recent years, dating apps have become important allies in public health. In this paper, we explore the implications of partnering with dating apps for health promotion. We consider the opportunities and challenges inherent in these collaborations, paying special attention to privacy, trust, and user care in a digital environment.Despite their potential as targeted health promotion tools, dating apps raise significant ethical concerns, including the commodification of user data and privacy breaches, which highlight the complexities of blending healthcare initiatives with for-profit digital platforms. Furthermore, the paper delves into issues of discrimination, harassment and unequal access within these apps, factors which can undermine public health efforts.We develop a nuanced framework, emphasising the development of transparent data policies, the decoupling of content moderation from health initiatives and a commitment to combat discrimination. We underscore the importance of embedding app-based health initiatives within broader care pathways, ensuring comprehensive support beyond the digital domain. This essay offers vital insights for public health practitioners, app developers and policymakers navigating the intersection of digital innovation and healthcare., Competing Interests: Competing interests: AF sits on the Advisory Board of 'Period Realty' which is developing a period tracking app. There is no financial relationship to this post. MN has received speaker fees from Gay Health Network Ireland (€ 500)., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

This letter explores the societal aspects and healthcare implications that underlie thinking about mpox (formerly known was monkeypox), in the 2022 outbreak, as a sexually transmitted infection (STI). The authors examine what underlies this question, exploring what is an STI, what is sex, and what is the role of stigma in sexual health promotion. The authors argue that, in this specific outbreak, mpox is an STI among men who have sex with men (MSM). The authors highlight the need of critically thinking about how to communicate effectively, the role of homophobia and other inequalities, and the importance of the social sciences., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed., (Copyright: © 2023 Garcia Iglesias J et al.)

This paper explores experiences of PrEP, a HIV-prevention intervention, among bugchasers, gay men who eroticize HIV. While PrEP has been hailed as a "game changer" in HIV-prevention, little attention has been paid to why and how some people may discontinue it in the face of HIV risk, such as bugchasers do. This paper relies on interview data with bugchasers themselves to discuss the process of discontinuation and its effects. The paper argues that, for these men, discontinuation is a fluid, complex, and sometimes contradictory process. It also describes how participants perceived themselves as being at different stages of discontinuation. The paper also analyzes how these men see PrEP as a barrier to intimacy, risk, and a tool to negotiate their desires and identity: through discontinuing PrEP, these men are able to reflect on and build their identities as bugchasers.

Background: There has been a lack of systematic exploration of remotely delivered intervention content and their effectiveness for behaviour change outcomes. This review provides a synthesis of the behaviour change techniques (BCT) contained in remotely delivered alcohol and/or substance misuse approaches and their association with intervention promise., Methods: Searches in MEDLINE, Scopus, PsycINFO (ProQuest), and the Cochrane Library, included studies reporting remote interventions focusing on alcohol and/or substance misuse among adults, with a primary behaviour change outcome (e.g., alcohol levels consumed). Assessment of risk of bias, study promise, and BCT coding was conducted. Synthesis focussed on the association of BCTs with intervention effectiveness using promise ratios., Results: Studies targeted alcohol misuse (52 studies) or substance misuse (10 studies), with predominantly randomised controlled trial designs and asynchronous digital approaches. For alcohol misuse studies, 16 were very promising, 17 were quite promising, and 13 were not promising. Of the 36 eligible BCTs, 28 showed potential promise, with seven of these only appearing in very or quite promising studies. Particularly promising BCTs were 'Avoidance/reducing exposure to cues for behaviour', 'Pros and cons' and 'Self-monitoring of behaviour'. For substance misuse studies, three were very promising and six were quite promising, with all 12 BCTs showing potential promise., Conclusions: This review showed remotely delivered alcohol and substance misuse interventions can be effective and highlighted a range of BCTs that showed promise for improving services. However, concerns with risk of bias and the potential of promise ratios to inflate effectiveness warrant caution in interpreting the evidence., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest The authors have declared that no conflicts of interest exist., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In the perception of Navon hierarchical stimuli (e.g., large letters made up of small letters), young adults identify large letters faster than small ones (known as 'global advantage') and identify more slowly small letters when they form a different (or incongruent) large letter (known as 'unidirectional global interference'). Since some global/local perceptual alterations might be occurring with aging, we investigated whether these effects vary across healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Here, the Navon letter task was administered to 26 healthy elderly (HE), 21 adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 26 adults with AD. The same task was administered 1 year later, and different neuropsychological variables were incorporated into the analyses. The cross-sectional study revealed no global advantage but did reveal both global and local interferences in all groups when response times were analyzed. Regarding discrimination sensitivity, HE showed unidirectional global interference, while AD displayed better discrimination of local than global letters in the incongruent condition, which denotes less interference by global distractors than by local ones. The longitudinal study revealed that 1 year later the participants with MCI showed a slowdown in inhibiting local distractors in the global task, revealing a certain bias toward focus in their attention on small stimuli. The elders with AD reflected a generalized slowing of their responses with a clear bias toward local analysis of stimuli, also suggested by their better discrimination in the incongruent local task at the second moment of assessment. Furthermore, all response timing measures in the Navon task were correlated with several neuropsychological indexes of highly sensitive neuropsychological tests, suggesting that performance in this task may also have a potential diagnostic value for differentiating typical from atypical cognitive aging. All these results support the need for a multidomain approach to define neuropsychological markers of progression toward AD, including visual perceptual organization evaluated via measures of performance quality., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Álvarez-San Millán, Iglesias, Gutkin and Olivares.)

Background: Substance misuse is a significant global health concern. In the UK, the prevalence of substance misuse has increased over the past decade and the number of alcohol and drug related deaths are increasing. Individuals with substance dependency issues are entitled to access treatment services. However, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges for public services, including drug and alcohol treatment, and resulted in significant service reconfiguration and a shift from in-person to remote delivery. This study aims to evaluate the delivery of drug and alcohol services in a large metropolitan area in Northern England during the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to understand the impact of service reconfiguration for services, staff and service users, and to use this understanding to inform the future optimised design of services., Design and Methods: The study has five workstreams within a mixed methods framework: (1) Systematic review of literature; (2) Qualitative process evaluation with service providers (digital timelines, focus groups and interviews); (3) Qualitative process evaluation with service users (interviews, focus groups, text based conversations and case studies); (4) Quantitative outcomes and health economic analysis; and (5) Data synthesis and dissemination., Expected Impact of the Study for Public Health: The breadth of the study, its novel nature, and the importance of substance misuse as a public health issue, mean that this study will provide valuable findings for those who commission, deliver and use drug and alcohol treatment services nationally and internationally. There will also be important learning for the effective remote delivery of services in sectors beyond drug and alcohol treatment., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

Appraisal theories of emotion sustain that stimuli containing high biological relevance preferentially capture our attention, regardless of their valence. In this work, we study the priming effect of both cute and threatening pictures on global/local visual processing. Seventy-eight males and 168 females in different menstrual cycle phases performed the global/local Navon letter task immediately after observing cute (infants and baby animals), threatening (animals in aggressive poses) or neutral pictures. Hierarchical stimuli were made up of global and local letters that could be either congruent (e.g. global H, local H ) or incongruent (e.g. global H, local S ). While we observed no interaction between affective primes and sex/menstrual cycle phase, each of these variables did have an independent effect on the global/local task. Thus, letter identification was significantly slower in the global task (only) after cute vs. neutral primes. Relevantly, the local-minus-global RT index revealed an attentional narrowing after both cute and threatening primes (vs. neutral primes) in incongruent trials. As for sex effects, a facilitation of global vs. local processing was observed in both sexes. However, women registered slower RTs than men, whereas women in the luteal phase showed faster RTs than those in follicular phase in the local task. This suggests that women, mainly those in their luteal menstrual phase, tend to rely on a more analytical style of processing while attending to hierarchical stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli containing high biological significance drive narrowing of the attentional focus in global/local visual processing, especially in conditions of higher attentional demand., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Obesity is a global epidemic affecting all age groups, populations and income levels across continents. The causes of obesity are complex and are routed in health behaviours, environmental factors, government policy and the cultural and built environment. Consequently, a Whole System Approach (WSA) which considers the many causes of obesity and shifts the focus away from individuals as points of intervention and puts an emphasis on understanding and improving the system in which people live in is required. This protocol describes a programme of research that will: critically evaluate the evidence for WSAs; assess longitudinally the implementation of a WSA to diet and healthy weight to explore the range of levers (drivers) and opportunities to influence relevant partnerships and interventions to target obesity in East Scotland. The programme consists of four workstreams within a mixed methods framework: 1) Systematic review of reviews of WSAs to diet and healthy weight; 2) Longitudinal qualitative process evaluation of implementing two WSAs in Scotland; 3) Quantitative and Qualitative momentary analysis evaluation of a WSA; and 4) the application of System Dynamics Modelling (SDM) methodology to two council areas in Scotland. A Public Involvement in Research group (PIRg) have informed each stage of the research process. The research programme's breadth and its novel nature, mean that it will provide valuable findings for the increasing numbers who commission, deliver, support and evaluate WSAs to diet and healthy weight nationally and internationally., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis, is a novel HIV prevention strategy. Highly efficacious, its development and delivery has caused significant debate. This paper explores the ways in which PrEP is signified and some of the new identities it gives rise to through the analysis of PrEP discourses among 'bugchasers'. Bugchasers comprise a niche group of gay men who eroticise HIV and fantasise with or seek to get infected. The research explores how bugchasers negatively conceptualise PrEP as a barrier to thrill and masculinity and discusses PrEP as a positive intervention that allows them to understand their own desires for risk-taking. Finally, it addresses a new identity position, the 'poz pleaser' who identifies as a bugchaser yet uses PrEP. Findings link to current debates about PrEP meanings and signification by using bugchasing as a niche yet illustrative example of how men make sense of this intervention based on their existing frameworks. Discussion highlights how this helps us understand how people make sense of biomedical interventions, the importance of emotional 'side effects', and the development of new identity positions. In so doing, it advances existing work on PrEP signification and contributes to ongoing debates about bugchasing.

Introduction: Alcohol and substance misuse are a public health priority. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that harmful alcohol use accounts for 5.1% of the global burden of disease and that 35.6 million people worldwide are affected by substance misuse. The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has disrupted delivery of face-to-face alcohol and substance misuse interventions and has forced the development of alternative remote interventions or adaptation to existing ones. Although existing research on remote interventions suggests they might be as effective as face-to-face delivery, there has been a lack of systematic exploration of their content, the experience of service users, and their effectiveness for behavioural outcomes. This review will provide a narrative synthesis of the behaviour change techniques (BCT) contained in interventions for alcohol and/or substance misuse and their association with effectiveness., Methods and Analysis: Systematic searches will be conducted in MEDLINE, Scopus, PsycINFO (ProQuest), and the Cochrane Library. Included studies will be those reporting remote interventions focusing on alcohol and/or substance misuse among adults living in the community and which have a primary behaviour change outcome (i.e., alcohol levels consumed). Data extraction will be conducted by one author and moderated by a second, and risk of bias and behaviour change technique (BCT) coding will be conducted by two authors independently. A narrative synthesis will be undertaken focussing upon the association of BCTs with intervention effectiveness using promise ratios., Patient and Public Involvement (ppi): The Public Involvement in Research Group (PIRG), part of the NIHR-funded PHIRST, will be involved in refining the review questions, eligibility criteria, data synthesis and dissemination., Dissemination: Dissemination will be through an academic peer reviewed publication, alongside other outputs to be shared with non-academic policy, professional, and public audiences, including local authorities, service users and community organisations., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The global COVID-19 pandemic poses new challenges for communities built around certain sexual practices, and some of which have responded by using their previous experiences of HIV. In this article, we undertake an online ethnography of a popular Anglo-American barebackers' forum to understand how HIV and COVID-19 converge and how these men negotiate COVID-19 risk by adapting previous sexual and disease prevention strategies. Barebackers, aka gay men who eroticise condomless anal intercourse, provide a relevant group to consider given their longstanding negotiation of HIV. We explore processes of responsibility, risk management and pleasure during the COVID-19 pandemic. We suggest that their experiences of both the AIDS crisis and the current context of HIV frame their decisions around COVID-19. We focus on how responsibility and desire shape discussions of bathhouses and the survival of barebackers' sexual practices during and after COVID-19., (© 2021 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL (SHIL).)

The global precedence effect (GPE), originally referring to processing hierarchical visual stimuli composed of letters, is characterised by both global advantage and global interference. We present herein a study of how this effect is modulated by the variables letter and sex. The Navon task, using the letters "H" and "S," was administered to 78 males and 168 females (69 follicular women, 52 luteal women, and 47 hormonal contraceptive users). No interaction occurred between the letter and sex variables, but significant main effects arose from each of these. Reaction times (RTs) revealed that the letter "H" was identified more rapidly in the congruent condition both in the global and the local task, and the letter "S" in the incongruent condition for the local task. Also, although RTs showed a GPE in both males and females, males displayed shorter reaction times in both global and local tasks. Furthermore, luteal women showed higher d' index (discrimination sensitivity) in the congruent condition for the local task than both follicular women and hormonal contraceptive users, as well as longer exploration time of the irrelevant level during the global task than males. We conclude that, according to the linear periodicity law, the GPE is enhanced for compound letters with straight vs. curved strokes, whereas it is stronger in males than in females. Relevantly, luteal phase of the menstrual cycle seems to tilt women to rely on finer grained information, thus exhibiting an analytical processing style in global/local visual processing., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Álvarez-San Millán, Iglesias, Gutkin and Olivares.)

Neuropsychological studies have shown that prosopagnosic individuals perceive face structure in an atypical way. This might preclude the formation of appropriate face representations and, consequently, hamper effective recognition. The present ERP study, in combination with Bayesian source reconstruction, investigates how information related to both external (E) and internal (I) features was processed by E.C. and I.P., suffering from acquired and developmental prosopagnosia, respectively. They carried out a face-feature matching task with new faces. E.C. showed poor performance and remarkable lack of early face-sensitive P1, N170 and P2 responses on right (damaged) posterior cortex. Although she presented the expected mismatch effect to target faces in the E-I sequence, it was of shorter duration than in Controls, and involved left parietal, right frontocentral and dorsofrontal regions, suggestive of reduced neural circuitry to process face configurations. In turn, I.P. performed efficiently but with a remarkable bias to give "match" responses. His face-sensitive potentials P1-N170 were comparable to those from Controls, however, he showed no subsequent P2 response and a mismatch effect only in the I-E sequence, reflecting activation confined to those regions that sustain typically the initial stages of face processing. Relevantly, neither of the prosopagnosics exhibited conspicuous P3 responses to features acting as primes, indicating that diagnostic information for constructing face representations could not be sufficiently attended nor deeply encoded. Our findings suggest a different locus for altered neurocognitive mechanisms in the face network in participants with different types of prosopagnosia, but common indicators of a deficient allocation of attentional resources for further recognition., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Event related potentials (ERPs) provide precise temporal information about cognitive processing, but with poor spatial resolution, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reliably identifies brain areas involved, but with poor temporal resolution. Here we use fMRI to guide source localization of the ERPs at different times for studying the temporal dynamics of the neural system for recognizing familiar faces. fMRI activation areas were defined in a previous experiment applying the same paradigm used for ERPs. The Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method was used to estimate the generators of the ERPs to unfamiliar, visually familiar, and personally-familiar faces constraining the model by fMRI activation results. For this, higher prior probabilities in the solution space were assigned to the fMRI-defined regions, which included face-selective areas and other areas related to "person knowledge" retrieval. Source analysis was carried out in three-time windows: early (150-210 ms), middle (300-380 ms) and late (460-580 ms). The early and middle responses were generated in fMRI-defined areas for all face categories, while these areas do not contribute to the late response. Different areas contributed to the generation of the early and middle ERPs elicited by unfamiliar faces: fusiform (Fus), inferior occipital, superior temporal sulcus and the posterior cingulate (PC) cortices. For familiar faces, the contributing areas were Fus, PC and anterior temporal areas for visually familiar faces, with the addition of the medial orbitofrontal areas and other frontal structures for personally-significant faces. For both unfamiliar and familiar faces, more extended and reliable involvement of contributing areas were obtained for the middle compare with early time window. Our fMRI guide ERP source analysis suggested the recruitment of person-knowledge processing areas as early as 150-210 ms after stimulus onset during recognition of personally-familiar faces. We concluded that fMRI-constrained BMA source analysis provide information regarding the temporal-dynamics in the neural system for cognitive processsing.

We investigated the neural correlates of the access to and retrieval of face structure information in contrast to those concerning the access to and retrieval of person-related verbal information, triggered by faces. We experimentally induced stimulus familiarity via a systematic learning procedure including faces with and without associated verbal information. Then, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in both intra-domain (face-feature) and cross-domain (face-occupation) matching tasks while N400-like responses were elicited by incorrect eyes-eyebrows completions and occupations, respectively. A novel Bayesian source reconstruction approach plus conjunction analysis of group effects revealed that in both cases the generated N170s were of similar amplitude but had different neural origin. Thus, whereas the N170 of faces was associated predominantly to right fusiform and occipital regions (the so-called "Fusiform Face Area", "FFA" and "Occipital Face Area", "OFA", respectively), the N170 of occupations was associated to a bilateral very posterior activity, suggestive of basic perceptual processes. Importantly, the right-sided perceptual P200 and the face-related N250 were evoked exclusively in the intra-domain task, with sources in OFA and extensively in the fusiform region, respectively. Regarding later latencies, the intra-domain N400 seemed to be generated in right posterior brain regions encompassing mainly OFA and, to some extent, the FFA, likely reflecting neural operations triggered by structural incongruities. In turn, the cross-domain N400 was related to more anterior left-sided fusiform and temporal inferior sources, paralleling those described previously for the classic verbal N400. These results support the existence of differentiated neural streams for face structure and person-related verbal processing triggered by faces, which can be activated differentially according to specific task demands.

We analyze the functional significance of different event-related potentials (ERPs) as electrophysiological indices of face perception and face recognition, according to cognitive and neurofunctional models of face processing. Initially, the processing of faces seems to be supported by early extrastriate occipital cortices and revealed by modulations of the occipital P1. This early response is thought to reflect the detection of certain primary structural aspects indicating the presence grosso modo of a face within the visual field. The posterior-temporal N170 is more sensitive to the detection of faces as complex-structured stimuli and, therefore, to the presence of its distinctive organizational characteristics prior to within-category identification. In turn, the relatively late and probably more rostrally generated N250r and N400-like responses might respectively indicate processes of access and retrieval of face-related information, which is stored in long-term memory (LTM). New methods of analysis of electrophysiological and neuroanatomical data, namely, dynamic causal modeling, single-trial and time-frequency analyses, are highly recommended to advance in the knowledge of those brain mechanisms concerning face processing.

In face processing tasks, prior presentation of internal facial features, when compared with external ones, facilitates the recognition of subsequently displayed familiar faces. In a previous ERP study (Olivares & Iglesias, 2010) we found a visibly larger N400-like effect when identity mismatch familiar faces were preceded by internal features, as compared to prior presentation of external ones. In the present study we contrasted the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces in the face-feature matching task to assess whether the so-called "internal features advantage" relies mainly on the use of stored face-identity-related information or if it might operate independently from stimulus familiarity. Our participants (N = 24) achieved better performance with internal features as primes and, significantly, with familiar faces. Importantly, ERPs elicited by identity mismatch complete faces displayed a negativity around 300-600 msec which was clearly enhanced for familiar faces primed by internal features when compared with the other experimental conditions. Source reconstruction showed incremented activity elicited by familiar stimuli in both posterior (ventral occipitotemporal) and more anterior (parahippocampal (ParaHIP) and orbitofrontal) brain regions. The activity elicited by unfamiliar stimuli was, in general, located in more posterior regions. Our findings suggest that the activation of multiple neural codes is required for optimal individuation in face-feature matching and that a cortical network related to long-term information for face-identity processing seems to support the internal feature effect., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The perceptual processing of faces was studied using event-related potentials (ERPs) in 12 elderly patients with cognitive impairment, 15 elderly adults and 16 young adults in order to explore the sensitivity of N170/VPP to the cognitive decline associated to Alzheimer's disease. Famous and unknown faces were presented in a familiarity categorization task. Eight patients and 11 elderly adults repeated this task to obtain longitudinal data. Topographical effects were analyzed using PCA. The posterior N170 showed reduced amplitude in patients with cognitive impairment and elderly adults, compared to young adults, which could indicate perceptual impairment in configural face-encoding processing. The anterior VPP showed enhanced amplitude in patients with cognitive impairment, compared to young and elderly adults, which might relate to the prefrontal dysfunction associated to mild dementia. These preliminary findings suggest that N170/VPP could be modulated by the decline related to pathological cognitive aging., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Unlabelled: BackGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment show selective loss of knowledge regarding facial identification., Methods: The authors focus on decline effects on event-related potentials (ERPs) P100, N170, N250, and N400, associated with the processing of facial identity. Different famous and unknown faces were presented in explicit and implicit familiarity tasks., Results: Patients with cognitive impairment showed modulations on P100 and N170 and greater activity in prefrontal areas in the earlier component. In healthy elderly individuals, but not in patients, famous faces modulated the long-latency ERPs N250 and N400, related to the access and retrieval of stored facial-related information, respectively., Conclusion: ERPs have potential as markers of neurodegenerative disease such as dementia. The neural systems supporting facial identification may differ in normal and cognitively impaired older adults.

Whereas some behavioral studies have shown that internal features are crucial for efficient face recognition in healthy adults, compared to external features, the brain mechanisms underlying this "internal features advantage" are still unknown. In the present study, the differential relevance of both subsets of facial features is addressed analyzing N400-like potentials elicited in a face-feature matching task, where external or internal features and complete face targets were displayed consecutively in each trial. Experiment 1 revealed a larger and longer-lasting N400-like effect with the prior presentation of internal features, which suggests more efficient processing of long-term face-related information. An analysis of neural sources in Experiment 2 revealed greater activation of frontal and left temporal brain areas in the processing of mismatching targets when preceded by internal features. Thus, brain electrical correlates of the "internal features advantage" could be verified around 300-400ms post-stimulus and supported by a face-identity related neural network., (Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the role of attention on the processing of facial expressions of fear and disgust. Stimuli consisted of overlapping pictures of a face and a house. Participants had to monitor repetitions of faces or houses, in separate blocks of trials, so that object-based attention was manipulated while spatial attention was kept constant. Faces varied in expression and could be either fearful or neutral (in the fear condition) or disgusted or neutral (in the disgust condition). When attending to faces, participants were required to signal repetitions of the same person, with the facial expressions being completely irrelevant to the task. Different effects of selective attention and different patterns of brain activity were observed for faces with fear and disgust expressions. Results indicated that the perception of fear from faces is gated by selective attention at early latencies, whereas a sustained positivity for fearful faces compared to neutral faces emerged around 160ms at central-parietal sites, independent of selective attention. In the case of disgust, ERP differences began only around 160ms after stimulus onset, and only after 480ms was the perception of disgust modulated by attention allocation. Results are interpreted in terms of different neural mechanisms for the perception of fear and disgust and related to the functional significance of these two emotions for the survival of the organism.

In this ERP study we analyzed how different orders of presentation of external and internal features influence the integration of facial components into face gestalts. Participants carried out a face-feature matching task in which, in each trial, external (E) and internal (I) facial features were presented separately and in sequence, followed by a complete unfamiliar face (matching or mismatching). For the E-I group of participants the order of presentation was external features, internal features and then the complete face. The I-E group viewed the internal features first. Mismatch effects in complete faces were more conspicuous and lasted from about 300 to 600 ms with the order E-I, while those with the order I-E were scarcely observable, and significant only from 450 to 470 ms. The external features tended to elicit a larger P150, while the N170 was preferentially associated with the internal ones. A P360, probably indicating stimulus relevance, was present in both groups for external features, while it was associated with internal features only in the I-E group. These results suggest that in the E-I order the binding of facial features into a single face representation occurs according to a stepwise process which facilitates the integration. In turn, in the I-E order the processing related to the two sets of features appears more dissociated and is of a more componential nature. Moreover, we propose that the external features may be especially relevant for object categorization, while internal features would be more closely related to subsequent configural mechanisms.

We address how adults perceive facial and vocal signs of emotions in infants with and without Down syndrome. A set of naturalistic data from infants with trisomy 21 and typically developing infants (joy expression of young infants, 3.8-4.4 months, and anger and neutral expressions of older infants, 6.8-12.8 months) was rated by adult judges categorically or dimensionally. Facial signs alone, vocal signs alone, and both facial and vocal signs were presented for each expression. Raters were university students who did not have regular contact with infants, nor with people with mental retardation. Young infants' joy expressions were correctly recognized more frequently for typically developing infants than for infants with Down syndrome and, specifically, joy vocalizations in infants with Down syndrome were not identified. Facial signs were also more communicative than vocal signs in the case of older infants' anger and neutral expressions. These results are relevant to the way infant emotion is perceived by others, and may be particularly useful in facilitating interaction between adults and infants with Down syndrome., ((c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

In Antioquia, Colombia, investigators have recently discovered the largest family with the E280A mutation in the presenilin 1 gene that causes one type of familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD). The current study compares two groups within this family: those diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in its early stage (nine subjects) and relatives (carriers) who did not show any signs of dementia (nine subjects). A battery of the following neuropsychological tests was administered to subjects in both groups: the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD), a Phonological Verbal Fluency test, the Visual "A" Cancellation Test, memory of three phrases, the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure, and the Trail Making Test Part A. Statistical analyses of the average test scores of each group showed that the AD group scored significantly (p < 0.01 or p < 0.05) lower on 29 of the 43 neuropsychological variables measured (67 percent). Therefore, this specific battery was useful in discriminating subjects with AD from their healthy relatives who are carriers of the disease. The AD group as a whole presented slight dementia with predominant deficits in memory, language, praxis, and attention. This profile is similar to those reported in subjects with sporadic AD in its early stage and confirms the findings found in other neuropsychological studies of subjects with FAD linked to mutations in chromosome 14.

N400 brain event-related potential (ERP) is a mismatch negativity originally found in response to semantic incongruences of a linguistic nature and is used paradigmatically to investigate memory organization in various domains of information, including that of faces. In the present study, we analyzed different mismatch negativities evoked in N400-like paradigms related to recognition of newly learned faces with or without associated verbal information. ERPs were compared in the following conditions: (1) mismatching features (eyes-eyebrows) using a facial context corresponding to the faces learned without associated verbal information ("pure" intradomain facial processing); (2) mismatching features using a facial context corresponding to the faces learned with associated occupations and proper names ("nonpure" intradomain facial processing); (3) mismatching occupations using a facial context (cross-domain processing); and (4) mismatching names using an occupation context (intradomain verbal processing). Results revealed that mismatching stimuli in the four conditions elicited a mismatch negativity analogous to N400 but with different timing and topographical patterns. The onset of the mismatch negativity occurred earliest in Conditions 1 and 2, followed by Condition 4, and latest in Condition 3. The negativity had the shortest duration in Task 1 and the longest duration in Task 3. Bilateral parietal activity was confirmed in all conditions, in addition to a predominant right posterior temporal localization in Condition 1, a predominant right frontal localization in Condition 2, an occipital localization in Condition 3, and a more widely distributed (although with posterior predominance) localization in Condition 4. These results support the existence of multiple N400, and particularly of a nonlinguistic N400 related to purely visual information, which can be evoked by facial structure processing in the absence of verbal-semantic information.