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Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another condition, 20% described hostile behaviors. Following the descrambling task, all participants read a vignette about a man named Donald who behaved in an ambiguously hostile manner and then rated him on a set of personality traits. Next, participants rated the hostility of various ambiguously hostile behaviors (all ratings on scales from 0 to 10). Participants who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald and the ambiguous behaviors as approximately 3 scale points more hostile than did those who descrambled mostly neutral sentences. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 26 independent replications ( N = 7,373 in the total sample; k = 22 labs and N = 5,610 in the primary analyses) of Srull and Wyer’s Experiment 1, each of which followed a preregistered and vetted protocol. A random-effects meta-analysis showed that the protagonist was seen as 0.08 scale points more hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% confidence interval, CI = [0.004, 0.16]). The ambiguously hostile behaviors were seen as 0.08 points less hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% CI = [−0.18, 0.01]). Although the confidence interval for one outcome excluded zero and the observed effect was in the predicted direction, these results suggest that the currently used methods do not produce an assimilative priming effect that is practically and routinely detectable.

Previous research indicates that anxiety disorders are characterized by an overgeneralization of conditioned fear as compared with healthy participants. Therefore, fear generalization is considered a key mechanism for the development of anxiety disorders. However, systematic investigations on the variance in fear generalization are lacking. Therefore, the current study aims at identifying distinctive phenotypes of fear generalization among healthy participants. To this end, 1175 participants completed a differential fear conditioning phase followed by a generalization test. To identify patterns of fear generalization, we used a k-means clustering algorithm based on individual arousal generalization gradients. Subsequently, we examined the reliability and validity of the clusters and phenotypical differences between subgroups on the basis of psychometric data and markers of fear expression. Cluster analysis reliably revealed five clusters that systematically differed in mean responses, differentiation between conditioned threat and safety, and linearity of the generalization gradients, though mean response levels accounted for most variance. Remarkably, the patterns of mean responses were already evident during fear acquisition and corresponded most closely to psychometric measures of anxiety traits. The identified clusters reliably described subgroups of healthy individuals with distinct response characteristics in a fear generalization test. Following a dimensional view of psychopathology, these clusters likely delineate risk factors for anxiety disorders. As crucial group characteristics were already evident during fear acquisition, our results emphasize the importance of average fear responses and differentiation between conditioned threat and safety as risk factors for anxiety disorders.

When confronted with threatening stimuli, animals typically respond with freezing behavior characterized by reduced movement and heart rate deceleration. Freezing-like responses during threat anticipation have also been observed in humans and are associated with anxiety. Recent evidence yet suggests that freezing does not necessarily reflect helpless immobility but can also aid the preparation of a threat escape. To investigate which further behavioral responses human freezing encompasses, we presented 50 young adults (10 male) with aversive stimuli that could sometimes be avoided while measuring gaze, cardiovascular and electrodermal activity. In trials in which the threat could be escaped, participants displayed reduced heart rate, increased electrodermal activity and reduced visual exploration. Furthermore, heart rate deceleration and restricted visual exploration predicted the speed of flight responses. These results provide evidence for freezing behavior in measures of visual exploration and suggest that such responding is adaptive in preparing the subsequent escape of approaching threats.

When confronted with threatening stimuli, animals typically respond with freezing behavior characterized by reduced movement and heart rate deceleration. Freezing-like responses during threat anticipation have also been observed in humans and are associated with anxiety. Recent evidence yet suggests that freezing does not necessarily reflect helpless immobility but can also aid the preparation of a threat escape. To investigate whether preparatory freezing can also be discerned in gaze behavior, we presented participants with aversive stimuli that sometimes could be avoided while measuring gaze, cardiovascular and electrodermal activity. In trials in which the threat could be escaped, participants displayed reduced heart rate, increased electrodermal activity and reduced visual exploration. Furthermore, heart rate deceleration and restricted visual exploration predicted the speed of flight responses. These results provide first evidence for freezing behavior in measures of visual exploration and suggest that such responding is adaptive in preparing the subsequent escape of approaching threats.

Much of our current understanding of social anxiety rests on the use of simplistic stimulation material in laboratory settings. Latest technological developments now allow the investigation of eye movements and physiological measures during real interactions with adequate recording quality. Considering the wealth of conflicting findings on gaze behavior in social anxiety, the current study aimed at unraveling the mechanisms contributing to differential gaze patterns in a naturalistic setting in the general population and in social anxiety. We introduced participants with differing social anxiety symptoms to a waiting room situation while recording heart rate and electrodermal activity using mobile sensors and eye movements using mobile eye-tracking glasses. We observed fewer fixations on the head of the confederate in the initial waiting phase of the experiment. These head fixations increased when the confederate was involved in a phone call and head fixations were most pronounced during the actual conversation. In opposition to gaze-avoidance models of social anxiety, we did not observe any correlations between social anxiety and visual attention. Social anxiety was, however, associated with elevated heart rate throughout the entire experiment suggesting that physiological hyperactivity constitutes a cardinal feature of the disorder.

Graphical abstract, Highlights • Visuo-tactile congruency influences the body schema, but not the body image. • Movement behavior may provide a window into the unconscious body schema. • We present novel methods to distort avatars and Euclidean space in virtual reality., Previous research showed that full body ownership illusions in virtual reality (VR) can be robustly induced by providing congruent visual stimulation, and that congruent tactile experiences provide a dispensable extension to an already established phenomenon. Here we show that visuo-tactile congruency indeed does not add to already high measures for body ownership on explicit measures, but does modulate movement behavior when walking in the laboratory. Specifically, participants who took ownership over a more corpulent virtual body with intact visuo-tactile congruency increased safety distances towards the laboratory’s walls compared to participants who experienced the same illusion with deteriorated visuo-tactile congruency. This effect is in line with the body schema more readily adapting to a more corpulent body after receiving congruent tactile information. We conclude that the action-oriented, unconscious body schema relies more heavily on tactile information compared to more explicit aspects of body ownership.

Lying is a very complex behavior, occurring in different forms and situations. It requires the liar not only to constantly keep the perspective of the to-be-deceived person in mind, but at the same time to remember and activate the truth, prevent the truth from slipping out, and flexibly switch between the lie and the truth. The affective correlates of lying seem to range from guilt and the fear of being discovered to a delight after successfully getting away with a lie. Because of the observed variability in the affective correlates of lying, most recent research on lie detection has started to explore methods that are based on cognitive rather than affective processes. Those methods aim either to measure the increased cognitive load during lying, or to measure lying indirectly by assessing whether a suspect recognizes critical crime-related information.

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a psychophysiological technique that allows for detecting crime-related knowledge. Usually, autonomic response measures are used for this purpose, but ocular measures have also been proposed recently. Prior studies reported heterogeneous results for the usage of countermeasures (CM) to corrupt the CIT's validity, depending on the CM technique and the dependent measure. The current study systematically compared the application of physical and mental CM on autonomic and ocular measures during the CIT. Sixty participants committed a mock crime and were assigned to one of three guilty conditions: standard guilty (without CM), physical CM, or mental CM. An additional group of 20 innocents was investigated with the same CIT to calculate validity estimates. Electrodermal responses were more vulnerable for CM usage compared to heart rate and respiration, and physical CM were more effective than mental CM. Independent of CM usage, a combined score of autonomic responses enabled a valid differentiation between guilty and innocent examinees. Fixations and blinks also allowed for detecting crime-related knowledge, but these measures were more affected by CM application than autonomic responses. The current study delivered further evidence that CM differentially impact physiological and ocular responses in the CIT. Whereas individual data channels were strongly affected by CM usage, a combination of different response measures yielded a relatively stable differentiation of guilty and innocent examinees when mental CM were used. These findings are especially relevant for field applications and might inspire future studies to detect or prevent CM usage in CIT examinations.

Graphical abstract, Highlights • Patients with social phobia show hypervigilance for the eyes of emotional faces. • This hypervigilance is evident in reflexive attentional orienting. • Exploration of diagnostically relevant facial cues is not impaired in social phobia. • Patients with social phobia demonstrate delayed gaze-following., Previous studies of social phobia have reported an increased vigilance to social threat cues but also an avoidance of socially relevant stimuli such as eye gaze. The primary aim of this study was to examine attentional mechanisms relevant for perceiving social cues by means of abnormalities in scanning of facial features in patients with social phobia. In two novel experimental paradigms, patients with social phobia and healthy controls matched on age, gender and education were compared regarding their gazing behavior towards facial cues. The first experiment was an emotion classification paradigm which allowed for differentiating reflexive attentional shifts from sustained attention towards diagnostically relevant facial features. In the second experiment, attentional orienting by gaze direction was assessed in a gaze-cueing paradigm in which non-predictive gaze cues shifted attention towards or away from subsequently presented targets. We found that patients as compared to controls reflexively oriented their attention more frequently towards the eyes of emotional faces in the emotion classification paradigm. This initial hypervigilance for the eye region was observed at very early attentional stages when faces were presented for 150 ms, and persisted when facial stimuli were shown for 3 s. Moreover, a delayed attentional orienting into the direction of eye gaze was observed in individuals with social phobia suggesting a differential time course of eye gaze processing in patients and controls. Our findings suggest that basic mechanisms of early attentional exploration of social cues are biased in social phobia and might contribute to the development and maintenance of the disorder.

The detection of deception has attracted increased attention among psychological researchers, legal scholars, and ethicists during the last decade. Much of this has been driven by the possibility of using neuroimaging techniques for lie detection. Yet, neuroimaging studies addressing deception detection are clouded by lack of conceptual clarity and a host of methodological problems that are not unique to neuroimaging. We review the various research paradigms and the dependent measures that have been adopted to study deception and its detection. In doing so, we differentiate between basic research designed to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying deceptive behavior and applied research aimed at detecting lies. We also stress the distinction between paradigms attempting to detect deception directly and those attempting to establish involvement by detecting crime-related knowledge, and discuss the methodological difficulties and threats to validity associated with each paradigm. Our conclusion is that the main challenge of future research is to find paradigms that can isolate cognitive factors associated with deception, rather than the discovery of a unique (brain) correlate of lying. We argue that the Comparison Question Test currently applied in many countries has weak scientific validity, which cannot be remedied by using neuroimaging measures. Other paradigms are promising, but the absence of data from ecologically valid studies poses a challenge for legal admissibility of their outcomes.

Eye-tracking studies on social attention have consistently shown that humans prefer to attend to other human beings. Much less is known about whether a similar preference is also evident in covert attentional processes. To enable a direct comparison, this study examined covert and overt attentional guidance within two different experimental setups using complex naturalistic scenes instead of isolated single features. In the first experiment, a modified version of the dot-probe paradigm served as a measure of covert reflexive attention toward briefly presented scenes containing a social feature in one half of the visual field compared to nonsocial elements in the other while controlling for low-level visual saliency. Participants showed a stable congruency effect with faster reaction times and fewer errors for probes presented on the social side of the scene. In a second experiment, we tracked eye movements for the same set of stimuli while manipulating the presentation time to allow for differentiating reflexive and more sustained aspects of overt attention. Supportive of the first results, analyses revealed a robust preference for social features concerning initial saccade direction as well as fixation allocation. Collectively, these experiments imply preferential processing of social features over visually salient aspects for automatic allocation of covert as well as overt attention.

Previous studies have shown an attentional bias towards social features during free-viewing of naturalistic scenes. This social attention seems to be reflexive and able to defy top-down demands in form of explicit search tasks. However, the question remains whether social features continue to be prioritized when peripheral information is limited, thereby reducing the influence of bottom-up image information on gaze orienting. Therefore, we established a gaze-contingent viewing paradigm, in which the visual field was constrained and updated in response to the viewer’s eye movements. Participants viewed social and non-social images that were randomly allocated to a free and a gaze-contingent viewing condition while their eye movements were tracked. Our results revealed a strong attentional bias towards social features in both conditions. However, gaze-contingent viewing altered temporal and spatial dynamics of viewing behavior. Additionally, recurrent fixations were more frequent and closer together in time for social compared to non-social stimuli in both viewing conditions. Taken together, this study implies a predominant selection of social features when bottom-up influences are diminished and a general influence of social content on visual exploratory behavior, thus highlighting mechanisms of social attention.

Research on trustworthiness indicates that non-native speakers are perceived as less trustworthy than native speakers. Research investigating whether people do indeed lie less well in a non-native language is, however, scarce and yielded inconsistent results. Two opposing predictions are possible. Based on the idea that lying is more demanding than truth telling, the cognitive load account predicts that speaking a foreign language imposes additional cognitive load and thereby hampers lying. Based on the idea that lying is emotionally arousing and that communication in a non-native language is perceived as less emotional, the emotional distance account predicts that speaking a foreign language facilitates lying. In three experiments, participants were asked neutral and emotional questions both in their mother tongue (German) and in a foreign language (English). Depending on a color cue, questions had to be answered sometimes truthfully and sometimes deceptively. Results across all experiments consistently revealed smaller reaction time (RT) differences between lying and truth telling in the foreign compared to the native language condition, which was mostly driven by prolonged truth responses. There were neither differences in this language modulation between emotional and neutral questions nor in autonomic responses. Results could be explained by the antagonistic effects of cognitive load and emotional distance on lying, and suggestions are made how further research may disentangle those effects. Importantly, the observation that foreign language use hampers truth telling could explain the perceived lower trustworthiness of foreign language speakers and education about this effect may help to reduce such a bias. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a well-validated means to detect whether someone possesses certain (e.g., crime-relevant) information. The current study investigated whether alcohol intoxication during CIT administration influences reaction time (RT) CIT-effects. Two opposing predictions can be made. First, by decreasing attention to critical information, alcohol intoxication could diminish CIT-effects. Second, by hampering the inhibition of truthful responses, alcohol intoxication could increase CIT-effects. A correlational field design was employed. Participants (n = 42) were recruited and tested at a bar, where alcohol consumption was voluntary and incidental. Participants completed a CIT, in which they were instructed to hide knowledge of their true identity. BAC was estimated via breath alcohol ratio. Results revealed that higher BAC levels were correlated with higher CIT-effects. Our results demonstrate that robust CIT effects can be obtained even when testing conditions differ from typical laboratory settings and strengthen the idea that response inhibition contributes to the RT-CIT effect.

Previous research has shown that low-level visual features (i.e., low-level visual saliency) as well as socially relevant information predict gaze allocation in free viewing conditions. However, these studies mainly used static and highly controlled stimulus material, thus revealing little about the robustness of attentional processes across diverging situations. Secondly, the influence of affective stimulus characteristics on visual exploration patterns remains poorly understood. Participants in the present study freely viewed a set of naturalistic, contextually rich video clips from a variety of settings that were capable of eliciting different moods. Using recordings of eye movements, we quantified to what degree social information, emotional valence and low-level visual features influenced gaze allocation using generalized linear mixed models. We found substantial and similarly large regression weights for low-level saliency and social information, affirming the importance of both predictor classes under ecologically more valid dynamic stimulation conditions. Differences in predictor strength between individuals were large and highly stable across videos. Additionally, low-level saliency was less important for fixation selection in videos containing persons than in videos not containing persons, and less important for videos perceived as negative. We discuss the generalizability of these findings and the feasibility of applying this research paradigm to patient groups.

In forensic contexts, lying is often motivated by the will to avoid negative consequences (e.g., an arrest). Previous research investigating the effect of motivation on deception has, however, nearly exclusively focused on the effect of positive motivation (e.g., via financial rewards). In the current study, we aimed to replicate previous studies on the behavioral and autonomic correlates of deception and to investigate the influence of negative motivation on those correlates. Participants committed a mock theft and underwent a questioning procedure in which they had to truthfully and deceptively answer questions about the committed mock crime and a control crime. Half of the participants completed the procedure without any specific motivation, whereas the other half of the participants was told that lies detected by a computer algorithm would result in an unpleasant electric stimulation. Results revealed longer reaction times, larger skin conductance responses, and a relative heart rate slowing for lying compared to truth telling. The latter two effects were larger in the motivation compared to the control condition. Results are in line with the motivation impairment hypothesis and effects of positive motivation on the autonomic correlates of information concealment. The observation that a higher motivation increased rather than decreased deception effects is promising for forensic contexts. The possible explanation that these effects could be related to fear conditioning should stimulate future research on the stability of differences between lying and truth telling in people who experienced no or only seldom punishment for deception in their learning history.

Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term ‘visual complexity.’ Visual complexity can be described as, “a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components.” Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an ‘arousal-complexity bias’ to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli.

Traditionally, physiological measures (autonomic, electrocortical, or neurovascular) have been used to detect concealed information in suspects. Only very recently, a few studies have provided evidence that oculomotor measures such as eye movements and blinks can also be used to infer whether a suspect recognizes critical information from a crime scene. These responses, which can also be acquired unobtrusively, seem to occur very rapidly even in the absence of explicit memory, and might provide a novel access to internally stored representations of specific events. The current chapter summarizes how memory impacts ocular responses and highlights recent studies that used variations of the Concealed Information Test in conjunction with such responses. Finally, implications for future research are discussed.

Attempts to detect deception by means of physiological measurement have evolved over more than 100 years. Combining elaborated interrogation procedures with capturing the bodily responses of the electrodermal, cardiovascular, and pulmonary systems brought forth specific procedures and measurement techniques. Nevertheless, a specific physiological pattern accompanying lying was not found in these measures. Yet, the Concealed Information Test (CIT), which classically uses a multichannel recording of physiological measures mostly related to the autonomic nervous system, proved to differentiate between concealed (e.g., crime-related) knowledge and actually absent knowledge (of an innocent person) with remarkable accuracy. From the very beginning of its application, research questions referred to the diagnostic value and the incremental information of each measure, the specific mental processes reflected in the various measures, and, particularly later with technical development, the exploration of new measures. From the applied perspective, the susceptibility of the CIT to countermeasures, leakage of crime-related information to innocents, the importance of the context in which the CIT is applied, or the influence of memory distortions, were prominent questions. Besides providing a brief overview of detection-of-deception paradigms, this chapter focuses on the CIT with “classic” polygraphic measurement, for which it summarizes the development of research lines until the present.

BACKGROUND: Anxiety disorders are more prevalent in women than in men. Despite this sexual dimorphism most experimental studies are conducted in male participants and studies focusing on sex differences are sparse. In addition the role of hormonal contraceptives and menstrual cycle phase in fear conditioning and extinction processes remain largely unknown. METHODS: We investigated sex differences in context-dependent fear acquisition and extinction (day 1) and their retrieval/expression (day 2). Skin conductance responses (SCRs) fear and unconditioned stimulus expectancy ratings were obtained. RESULTS: We included 377 individuals (261 women) in our study. Robust sex differences were observed in all dependent measures. Women generally displayed higher subjective ratings but smaller SCRs than men and showed reduced excitatory/inhibitory conditioned stimulus (CS+/CS-) discrimination in all dependent measures. Furthermore women using hormonal contraceptives showed reduced SCR CS discrimination on day 2 than men and free-cycling women while menstrual cycle phase had no effect. LIMITATIONS: Possible limitations include the simultaneous testing of up to 4 participants in cubicles which might have introduced a social component and not assessing postexperimental contingency awareness. CONCLUSION: The response pattern in women shows striking similarity to previously reported sex differences in patients with anxiety. Our results suggest that pronounced deficits in associative discrimination learning and subjective expression of safety information (CS- responses) might underlie higher prevalence and higher symptom rates seen in women with anxiety disorders. The data call for consideration of biological sex and hormonal contraceptive use in future studies and may suggest that targeting inhibitory learning during therapy might aid precision medicine.

Palmatier and Rovner (2015) attempt to establish the construct validity of the Comparison Question Test (CQT) by citing extensive research ranging from modern neuroscience to memory and psychophysiology. In this comment we argue that merely citing studies on the preliminary process theory (PPT) of the orienting response (OR) or neuroimaging research on deception without a clear specification of their connection to the CQT is insufficient for construct validity. Moreover, PPT cannot account for observed differential heart rate responses found in both CQT and Concealed Information Test (CIT) research. Furthermore, Palmatier and Rovner ignore the many other deficiencies of the CQT, such as lack of proper control and standardization, which cannot be resolved by any psychological or psychophysiological theory. In sum, we show that Palmatier and Rovner failed in their mission to establish construct validity of the CQT, and their article provides no solution to the many other deficiencies of this test.

Automatic orienting to unexpected changes in the environment is a pre-requisite for adaptive behavior. One prominent mechanism of automatic attentional control is the Orienting Response (OR). Despite the fundamental significance of the OR in everyday life, only little is known about how the OR is affected by healthy aging. We tested this question in two age groups (19–38 years and 55–72 years) and measured skin-conductance responses (SCRs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to novels (i.e., short environmental sounds presented only once in the experiment; 10% of the trials) compared to standard sounds (600 Hz sinusoidal tones with 200 ms duration; 90% of the trials). Novel and standard stimuli were presented in four conditions differing in the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) with a mean ISI of either 10 s, 3 s, 1 s, or 0.5 s (blocked presentation). In both age groups, pronounced SCRs were elicited by novels in the 10 s ISI condition, suggesting the elicitation of stable ORs. These effects were accompanied by pronounced N1 and frontal P3 amplitudes in the ERP, suggesting that automatic novelty processing and orientation of attention are effective in both age groups. Furthermore, the SCR and ERP effects declined with decreasing ISI length. In addition, differences between the two groups were observable with the fastest presentation rates (i.e., 1 s and 0.5 s ISI length). The most prominent difference was a shift of the peak of the frontal positivity from around 300 ms to 200 ms in the 19-38 years group while in the 55–72 years group the amplitude of the frontal P3 decreased linearly with decreasing ISI length. Taken together, this pattern of results does not suggest a general decline in processing efficacy with healthy aging. At least with very rare changes (here, the novels in the 10 s ISI condition) the OR is as effective in healthy older adults as in younger adults. With faster presentation rates, however, the efficacy of the OR decreases. This seems to result in a switch from novelty to deviant processing in younger adults, but less so in the group of older adults.

Because of its unique evolutionary relevance, it is understood that pain automatically attracts attention. So far, such attentional bias has mainly been shown for pain-related stimuli whereas little is known about shifts in attentional focus after actual painful stimulation. This study investigated attentional shifts by assessing eye movements into the direction of painful stimulation. Healthy participants were presented either a blank screen or a picture showing a natural scene while painful electrical stimuli were applied to the left or right hand. In general, painful stimulation reduced exploratory behavior as reflected by less and slower saccades as well as fewer and longer fixations. Painful stimulation on the right hand induced a rightward bias (ie, increased initial saccades, total number and duration of fixations to the right hemifield of the screen). Pain applied to the left hand as well as no pain induced a leftward bias that was largest for the direction of first saccades. These findings are in line with previous observations of attentional biases toward pain-related information and highlight eye tracking as a valuable tool to assess involuntary attentional consequences of pain. Future studies are needed to investigate how the observed changes in eye movements relate to pain-induced changes in perception and cognition. Perspective The study investigated pain-induced attentional shifts in terms of reflexive eye movements. This attention-capturing quality of pain should be examined in chronic pain conditions because it might contribute to the cognitive impairments often observed in chronic pain patients.

According to so-called saliency-based attention models, attention during free viewing of visual scenes is particularly allocated to physically salient image regions. In the present study, we assumed that social features in complex naturalistic scenes would be processed preferentially irrespective of their physical saliency. Therefore, we expected worse prediction of gazing behavior by saliency-based attention models when social information is present in the visual field. To test this hypothesis, participants freely viewed color photographs of complex naturalistic social (e.g., including heads, bodies) and non-social (e.g., including landscapes, objects) scenes while their eye movements were recorded. In agreement with our hypothesis, we found that social features (especially heads) were heavily prioritized during visual exploration. Correspondingly, the presence of social information weakened the influence of low-level saliency on gazing behavior. Importantly, this pattern was most pronounced for the earliest fixations indicating automatic attentional processes. These findings were further corroborated by a linear mixed model approach showing that social features (especially heads) add substantially to the prediction of fixations beyond physical saliency. Taken together, the current study indicates gazing behavior for naturalistic scenes to be better predicted by the interplay of social and physically salient features than by low-level saliency alone. These findings strongly challenge the generalizability of saliency-based attention models and demonstrate the importance of considering social influences when investigating the driving factors of human visual attention.

Developed as an alternative to traditional deception detection methods, the concealed information test (CIT) assesses recognition of critical (e.g., crime-relevant) "probes." Most often, recognition has been measured as enhanced skin conductance responses (SCRs) to probes compared to irrelevant foils (CIT effect). More recently, also differentially enlarged reaction times (RTs) and increased neural activity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, the right middle frontal gyrus, and the right temporo-parietal junction have been observed. The aims of the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study were to (1) investigate the boundary conditions of the CIT effects in all three measures and thereby (2) gain more insight into the relative contribution of two mechanisms underlying enhanced responding to concealed information (i.e., orienting versus response inhibition). Therefore, we manipulated the proportion of probe versus irrelevant items, and whether suspects were instructed to actively deny recognition of probe knowledge (i.e., deceive) during the test. Results revealed that whereas overt deception was not necessary for the SCR CIT effect, it was crucial for the RT and the fMRI-based CIT effects. The proportion manipulation enhanced the CIT effect in all three measures. The results indicate that different mental processes might underlie the response pattern in the CIT. While skin conductance responding to concealed information may best be explained by orienting theory, it seems that response inhibition drives RT and blood oxygen level dependent responding to concealed information.

The hormones progesterone and estradiol modulate neural plasticity in the hippocampus, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. These structures are involved in the superior memory for emotionally arousing information (EEM effects). Therefore, fluctuations in hormonal levels across the menstrual cycle are expected to influence activity in these areas as well as behavioral memory performance for emotionally arousing events. To test this hypothesis, naturally cycling women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the encoding of emotional and neutral stimuli in the low-hormone early follicular and the high-hormone luteal phase. Their memory was tested after an interval of 48 h, because emotional arousal primarily enhances the consolidation of new memories. Whereas overall recognition accuracy remained stable across cycle phases, recognition quality varied with menstrual cycle phases. Particularly recollection-based recognition memory for negative items tended to decrease from early follicular to luteal phase. EEM effects for both valences were associated with higher activity in the right anterior hippocampus during early follicular compared to luteal phase. Valence-specific modulations were found in the anterior cingulate, the amygdala and the posterior hippocampus. Current findings connect to anxiolytic actions of estradiol and progesterone as well as to studies on fear conditioning. Moreover, they are in line with differential networks involved in EEM effects for positive and negative items.

Traditional lie detection tools, such as the polygraph, voice stress analysis, or special interrogation techniques, rely on behavioral or psychophysiological manifestations of deception. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, the question emerged whether it would be possible to directly identify deceit in the part of the body where it is generated: the brain. After a few promising studies, these techniques became soon commercially available and there have been attempts to use such results in the court in recent years. The current article reviews the development of neuroimaging techniques in the field of deception detection and critically discusses the potential but also the shortcomings of such methods. Unfortunately, the majority of research in this field was rather unsystematic and neglected the accumulated knowledge regarding methodological pitfalls that were extensively discussed in the scientific community in conjunction with the polygraph. Therefore, neuroimaging studies on deception largely differ with respect to the experimental paradigm (the interrogation technique), the methods for analyzing the data, and the procedures to obtain individual diagnoses. Moreover, most studies used artificial laboratory settings that differ considerably from real-life applications. As a consequence, neuroimaging techniques are not applicable for detecting deception in individual field cases at the moment. However, recent advantages such as multivariate pattern analysis might yield novel neuroimaging applications in the near future that are capable of improving established techniques for detecting deception or concealed knowledge.

Objective: Patients with borderline personality disorder are characterized by emotional hyperarousal with increased stress levels, anger proneness, and hostile, impulsive behaviors. They tend to ascribe anger to ambiguous facial expressions and exhibit enhanced and prolonged reactions in response to threatening social cues, associated with enhanced and prolonged amygdala responses. Because the intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to improve facial recognition and to shift attention away from negative social information, the authors investigated whether borderline patients would benefit from oxytocin administration. Method: In a randomized placebocontrolled double-blind group design, 40 nonmedicated, adult female patients with a current DSM-IV diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (two patients were excluded based on hormonal analyses) and 41 healthy women, matched on age, education, and IQ, took part in an emotion classification task 45 minutes after intranasal administration of 26 IU of oxytocin or placebo. Dependent variables were latencies and number or initial reflexive eye movements measured by eye tracking, manual response latencies, and blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses of theamygdalato angryandfearfulcompared with happy facial expressions. Results: Borderline patients exhibited more and faster initial fixation changes to the eyes of angry faces combined with increased amygdala activation in response to angry faces compared with the control group. These abnormal behavioral and neural patterns were normalized after oxytocin administration. Conclusions: Borderline patients exhibit a hypersensitivity to social threat in early, reflexive stages of information processing. Oxytocin may decrease social threat hypersensitivity and thus reduce anger and aggressive behavior in borderline personality disorder or other psychiatric disorders with enhanced threat-driven reactive aggression. (Am J Psychiatry 2013; 170:1169–1177)

When extreme, anxiety can become debilitating. Anxiety disorders, which often first emerge early in development, are common and challenging to treat, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms that confer increased risk have only recently started to come into focus. Here we review recent work highlighting the importance of neural circuits centered on the amygdala. We begin by describing dispositional negativity, a core dimension of childhood temperament and adult personality and an important risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders and other kinds of stress-sensitive psychopathology. Converging lines of epidemiological, neurophysiological, and mechanistic evidence indicate that the amygdala supports stable individual differences in dispositional negativity across the lifespan and contributes to the etiology of anxiety disorders in adults and youth. Hyper-vigilance and attentional biases to threat are prominent features of the anxious phenotype and there is growing evidence that they contribute to the development of psychopathology. Anatomical studies show that the amygdala is a hub, poised to govern attention to threat via projections to sensory cortex and ascending neuromodulator systems. Imaging and lesion studies demonstrate that the amygdala plays a key role in selecting and prioritizing the processing of threat-related cues. Collectively, these observations provide a neurobiologically-grounded framework for understanding the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in adults and youth and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

Dyspnea is common in many cardiorespiratory diseases. Already the anticipation of this aversive symptom elicits fear in many patients resulting in unfavorable health behaviors such as activity avoidance and sedentary lifestyle. This study investigated brain mechanisms underlying these anticipatory processes. We induced dyspnea using resistive-load breathing in healthy subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Blocks of severe and mild dyspnea alternated, each preceded by anticipation periods. Severe dyspnea activated a network of sensorimotor, cerebellar, and limbic areas. The left insular, parietal opercular, and cerebellar cortices showed increased activation already during dyspnea anticipation. Left insular and parietal opercular cortex showed increased connectivity with right insular and anterior cingulate cortex when severe dyspnea was anticipated, while the cerebellum showed increased connectivity with the amygdala. Notably, insular activation during dyspnea perception was positively correlated with midbrain activation during anticipation. Moreover, anticipatory fear was positively correlated with anticipatory activation in right insular and anterior cingulate cortex. The results demonstrate that dyspnea anticipation activates brain areas involved in dyspnea perception. The involvement of emotion-related areas such as insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala during dyspnea anticipation most likely reflects anticipatory fear and might underlie the development of unfavorable health behaviors in patients suffering from dyspnea. ispartof: Neural Plasticity vol:2016 ispartof: location:United States status: published

The evolutionarily highly conserved neuropeptide oxytocin seems to be involved in the regulation of complex forms of social behavior. It enhances the processing of positive social stimuli, reduces behavioral and neuroendocrine stress responses and modulates amygdala activity in humans. Moreover, it has been proposed that oxytocin dampens sympathetic nervous system activity. This hypothesis was tested in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 38 men either receiving 24 IU oxytocin intranasally or a placebo spray. While accomplishing an emotion classification task, electrodermal responses were measured as an index of sympathetic activity. Moreover, heart rate changes were recorded that are additionally mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system. Oxytocin enhanced differential heart rate responses to facial expressions as a function of the emotional valence, but had no effect on electrodermal activity or tonic measures of physiological arousal. These results indicate that oxytocin specifically modulates phasic activity of the parasympathetic nervous system which potentially reflects an increased motivational value of facial expressions following oxytocin treatment. Findings suggest that anxiolytic effects of oxytocin are not reflected in short-term sympathetic responses and may even be a consequence of rather than a prerequisite for improved social information processing.

Previous studies demonstrated that concealed crime-related memories can be validly identified using the Concealed Information Test (CIT). However, its field applicability is still debated, and it is specifically unknown how emotional arousal during a crime would influence CIT results. In the current study, emotional arousal during a mock crime and the time delay between mock crime and CIT examination were manipulated. At the immediate and the delayed CIT occasion, central crime details were better remembered than peripheral ones and enhanced emotional arousal further reduced memory for peripheral information. Electrodermal, respiratory, and cardiovascular responses to central crime details were strong and CIT validity was unaffected by delaying the test when arousal was induced during the mock crime. These findings indicate that emotional arousal might facilitate the detection of concealed information some time after a crime occurred.

Background Behavioral studies consistently reported an increased preference for positive experiences in older adults. The socio-emotional selectivity theory explains this positivity effect with a motivated goal shift in emotion regulation, which probably depends on available cognitive resources. The present study investigates the neurobiological mechanism underlying this hypothesis. Methods Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired in 21 older and 22 young subjects while performing a spatial-cueing paradigm that manipulates attentional load on emotional face distracters. We focused our analyses on the anterior cingulate cortex as a key structure of cognitive control of emotion. Results Elderly subjects showed a specifically increased distractibility by happy faces when more attentional resources were available for face processing. This effect was paralleled by an increased engagement of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, and this frontal engagement was significantly correlated with emotional stability. Conclusions The current study highlights how the brain might mediate the tendency to preferentially engage in positive information processing in healthy aging. The finding of a resource-dependency of this positivity effect suggests demanding self-regulating processes that are related to emotional well-being. These findings are of particular relevance regarding implications for the understanding, treatment, and prevention of nonsuccessful aging like highly prevalent late-life depression.

Gaze direction is an important cue that regulates social interactions and facilitates joint attention. Although humans are very accurate in determining gaze directions in general, they have a surprisingly liberal criterion for the presence of mutual gaze. Using an established psychophysical task that required observers to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to the margins of the area of mutual gaze, we examined whether the resulting cone of gaze is altered in people with social phobia. It turned out that during presence of a second virtual person, the gaze cone's width was specifically enlarged in patients with social phobia as compared to healthy controls. The size of this effect was correlated with the severity of social anxiety. As this effect was found for merely virtual lookers, it seems to be a fundamental mechanism rather than a specific effect related to the fear of being observed and evaluated by others.

Physiological responses to trauma reminders are one of the core symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nevertheless, screening measures for PTSD largely rely on symptom self-reports. It has been suggested that psychophysiological assessments may be useful in identifying trauma survivors with PTSD (Orr and Roth, 2000). This study investigated whether heart rate (HR) responses to standardized trauma-related pictures distinguish between trauma survivors with and without acute PTSD. Survivors of motor vehicle accidents or physical assaults (N = 162) watched standardized trauma-related, generally threatening and neutral pictures at 1 month post-trauma while their ECG was recorded. At 1 and 6 months, structured clinical interviews assessed PTSD diagnoses. Participants completed self-report measures of PTSD severity and depression, peritraumatic responses, coping behaviors and appraisals. Trauma survivors with acute PTSD showed greater HR responses to trauma-related pictures than those without PTSD, as indicated by a less pronounced mean deceleration, greater peak responses, and a greater proportion showing HR acceleration of greater than 1 beat per minute. There were no group differences in HR responses to generally threatening or neutral pictures. HR responses to trauma-related pictures contributed to the prediction of PTSD diagnosis over and above what could be predicted from self-reports of PTSD and depression. HR responses to trauma-related pictures were related to fear and data-driven processing during the trauma, safety behaviors, suppression of trauma memories, and overgeneralized appraisals of danger. The results suggest that HR responses to standardized trauma-related pictures may help identify a subgroup of patients with acute PTSD who show generalized fear responses to trauma reminders. The early generalization of triggers of reexperiencing symptoms observed in this study is consistent with associative learning and cognitive models of PTSD.

Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfaces on perceived height in two psychophysical experiments. Observers judged the height of rooms varying in physical height as well as in the lightness of ceiling, floor, and walls. Experiment 1 showed the expected increase of perceived height with increases in ceiling lightness. Unexpectedly, the perceived height additionally increased with wall lightness, and the effects of wall lightness and ceiling lightness were roughly additive, incompatible with a simple effect of the lightness contrast between the ceiling and the walls. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the floor lightness has no significant effect on perceived height, and that the total brightness of the room is not the critical factor influencing the perceived height. Neither can the results be explained by previously reported effects of brightness on apparent depth or perceived distance.

Breathlessness is an aversive symptom in many prevalent somatic and psychiatric diseases and is usually experienced as highly threatening. It is strongly associated with negative affect, but the underlying neural processes remain poorly understood. Therefore, using fMRI, the present study examined the effects of breathlessness on the neural processing of affective visual stimuli within candidate brain areas including the amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). During scanning, 42 healthy volunteers, mean (SD) age: 29.0 (6.0) years, 14 female, were presented with affective picture series of negative, neutral, and positive valence while experiencing either no breathlessness (baseline conditions) or resistive‐load induced breathlessness (breathlessness conditions). Respiratory measures and self‐reports suggested successful induction of breathlessness and affective experiences. Self‐reports of breathlessness intensity and unpleasantness were significantly higher during breathlessness conditions, mean (SD): 45.0 (16.6) and 32.3 (19.8), as compared to baseline conditions, mean (SD): 1.9 (3.0) and 2.9 (5.5). Compared to baseline conditions, stronger amygdala activations were observed during breathlessness conditions for both negative and positive affective picture series relative to neutral picture series, while no such effects were observed in insula and ACC. The present findings demonstrate that breathlessness amplifies amygdala responses during affective processing, suggesting an important role of the amygdala for mediating the interactions between breathlessness and affective states. ispartof: Psychophysiology vol:55 issue:9 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

People with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report heightened physiological responses to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the trauma (1). Clinical observations suggest that these responses can be triggered by a wide range of stimuli. Furthermore, clinical observations suggest that people with PTSD may react with emotional and physiological arousal to situations that have little similarity with the trauma but overlap in particular sensory impressions (e.g. a similar color, smell or sound; ​2). Models of PTSD draw on associative learning mechanisms to explain this heightened physiological and emotional reactivity (2-6). It has been suggested that during trauma fear responses become associated with stimuli that are present at the time, and subsequently generalize more broadly to stimuli and situations that resemble the original trauma (4 - 5). One way of investigating the role of associative learning in PTSD is to measure physiological responses to trauma reminders. Several studies have demonstrated a heightened physiological reactivity in trauma survivors with PTSD compared to traumatized and non-traumatized controls (for reviews see 7 - 9). This is consistent with the notion that learned fear responses acquired during trauma contribute to PTSD. There has been a longstanding interest in trauma research whether psychophysiological responses are useful in diagnosing PTSD and in identifying people at risk of chronic PTSD soon after trauma (7). Psychophysiological measures may provide useful additional information to the widely used self-report measures. In Pole’s meta-analysis (9), psychophysiological responses to standardized trauma cues identified PTSD with a mean sensitivity of .77 and a mean specificity of .91. Responses to idiographic trauma cues identified PTSD with a mean specificity of .65 and mean specificity of .83. However, most of the studies to date were cross-sectional comparisons of survivors of very distant traumas, such as combat or sexual abuse in childhood (e.g. 10, 11). This limits the conclusiveness of the results for the development of PTSD, as the heightened physiological reactivity may be a consequence of chronic PTSD rather than a factor contributing to its development. It is thus unclear whether the reasonable sensitivity and specificity observed in these studies also applies for the early identification of trauma survivors at risk of chronic PTSD. This question is of considerable interest as many survivors recover on their own (12) and it is unclear how best to identify those who need intervention. Few studies to date have investigated physiological responses to trauma reminders soon after trauma. Elsesser et al. (13) found that chronic PTSD patients and recent trauma survivors who met criteria for acute stress disorders (ASD) at 6 weeks after the trauma showed heart rate acceleration to individualized trauma-related pictures, whereas nontraumatized controls and survivors without ASD showed heart rate deceleration. The groups did not differ in heart rate responses (HRR) to generally threatening or neutral pictures. Blanchard et al. (14) studied survivors of motor vehicle accidents (MVA) at about 2.5 months after the trauma and found that HRR to audiotaped individualized scripts describing the participants’ accident, but not responses to other stressors, distinguished survivors with PTSD from those without PTSD and nontraumatized controls. These results are in line with the notion that in the initial months after trauma, PTSD is characterized by strong learned fear responses to reminders of the trauma. There is also preliminary evidence that HRR to trauma reminders can be used to predict the chronicity of PTSD. Elsesser et al. (15) followed up 35 recent trauma survivors from their 2004 study and found that greater HRR to the individualized trauma-related pictures predicted PTSD symptoms 3 months later. Blanchard et al. (14) found that HR acceleration to individualized MVA scripts predicted chronicity of PTSD at 1 year in 48 participants who had PTSD at the initial assessment. Kleim, Ehlers and Glucksman (16) found that HRR to guided imagery of the trauma at 2 weeks predicted PTSD severity at 6 months after the trauma in female, but not male assault survivors. These studies are of possible clinical relevance as they suggest that early psychophysiological responses may be useful in identifying trauma survivors at risk of chronic PTSD. So far, the studies that investigated whether early physiological responses to trauma reminders predict PTSD used idiographic trauma reminders that were selected because of their personal relevance to the participants, mainly script-driven-imagery of one’s trauma (14, 16) or idiographic pictures selected for their personal relevance to each participant (13). This raises the question of whether HRR to standardized sets of trauma reminders would also be predictive of chronic PTSD. If associative learning theories of PTSD are correct, then one would expect stimulus generalization soon after the trauma to contribute to the chronicity of PTSD. The present study was designed to investigate whether HRR to standardized trauma-related pictures can be used to identify people who will develop chronic PTSD. This question is of potential practical interest as many trauma survivors recover from initial symptoms of PTSD (12) and screening tools that allow the identification of those at risk of chronic PTSD are needed for the efficient allocation of scarce treatment resources. Currently, such screening relies on self-report symptom measures (17), as studies have shown that initial symptom severity is a relatively good predictor of chronic PTSD (18). It was therefore of particular interest to investigate whether HRR to standardized trauma pictures predicts chronic PTSD over and above what could be predicted from self-reported symptoms at one month after the trauma. The present prospective study assessed trauma survivors at 1 and 6 months. The study built on two earlier studies suggesting that recent trauma survivors with PTSD and patients with chronic PTSD may show heightened HRR to standardized trauma-related pictures compared to those without PTSD (20, 21). In contrast, however, Blanchard et al. (14, 19) found that HRR to guided imagery of a standard MVA script or videotapes of car crashes did not distinguish between survivors with and without PTSD. The present study also explored whether skin conductance responses to trauma reminders are related to PTSD. Previous studies have suggested that HRR are particularly sensitive in detecting response differences between people with and without PTSD (9). In studies of early responses after trauma, HRR also showed the most robust findings. In Elsesser et al.’s (13) study, startle responses did not show an interaction between group and picture type. Similarly, in Blanchard et al.’s (14) study, EMG and blood pressure responses did not distinguish between the PTSD and no PTSD groups. Skin conductance responses (SCR) were chosen for this study because SCR are widely used as a measure of conditioned emotional responses in laboratory studies (e.g. 22) and because SCR has been shown to differentiate between people with chronic PTSD and controls in some, but not all idiographic trauma cue studies (9). Furthermore, Elsesser et al.’s study (13) did not find any differences in SCR between participants with and without PTSD (unpublished data, personal communication, Dr. Karin Elsesser, September 18, 2009). Finally, the present study examined whether HRR to trauma reminders are related to the participants’ emotional and cognitive responses during the trauma, in particular to the degree of peri-traumatic fear and dissociation. These responses have been shown to predict PTSD (23- 25). The literature on conditioning suggests that stronger emotional arousal during trauma leads to stronger conditioned emotional responses (26, 27). Peri-traumatic dissociation is thought to decrease focal attention, and to promote a perceptual processing style that is characteristic of PTSD (28, 29). Ehlers, Hackmann and Michael (30) proposed that perceptual processing during trauma facilitates memory processes that rely on perceptual operations, such as associative learning. In sum, the present study investigated the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Participants with PTSD show greater HRR to trauma-related pictures than participants without PTSD, but not to generally threatening or neutral pictures. Hypothesis 2: Greater HRR to trauma-related pictures at 1 month predict greater PTSD symptom severity at 6 months. Hypothesis 3: Peri-traumatic dissociation and fear during trauma predict greater HRR to trauma-related pictures at 1 month. Furthermore, the study explored whether SCR to standardized trauma cues is associated with PTSD as the previous findings on this response are mixed.

The Guilty Actions Test (GAT) is a valid and scientifically sound technique of forensic psychophysiology that allows for the detection of concealed memories. However, its application has been challenged because the results might be affected by the culprit's forgetting of crime details as well as the leakage of information to innocents. In the current study, these aspects were examined by varying the amount of time between a mock crime and the subsequent GAT, as well as by contrasting culprits with informed innocents. It turned out that culprits specifically forgot peripheral crime details during a period of 2 weeks whereas informed innocents showed similar forgetting for all details. As a consequence, GAT validity based on electrodermal, respiratory and heart rate measures remained temporally stable for culprits whereas the amount of false positive errors for informed innocents decreased as a function of time. These results indicate that the process of memory encoding and consolidation has significant effects on the physiological response pattern in the GAT.

This study examined autonomic physiological responses to personally relevant information presented during sleep and wakefulness. Heart rate and electrodermal reactions to subjects’ own first name and other first names were measured during sleep stage 2, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and wakefulness. Across all conditions, larger skin conductance responses were elicited by subjects’ own first name. During REM sleep, personally relevant information led to larger heart rate acceleration, whereas an enhanced deceleration was examined during wakefulness. These findings suggest that auditory information is processed on a semantic level even during sleep. However, personally relevant information elicits a co-activation of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system during the wake state whereas only the former system is activated during REM sleep. The response pattern in the wake state reflects a mechanism focusing attention to a specific stimulus source — termed the orienting response. In contrast, the physiological responses during sleep seem to be part of a different mechanism aiming to wake the subject after crucial information has been detected in the environment.

In search of a better lie detector, scientists are peering into the brain to probe the origins of deception.

Ziel der psychophysiologischen Aussagebeurteilung ist die Differenzierung von Tätern und Unschuldigen auf der Basis physiologischer Reaktionen auf spezifische Fragen. Die beiden wichtigsten Befragungstechniken, der Kontroll- oder Vergleichsfragentest sowie der Tatwissentest, werden im vorliegenden Artikel dargestellt und hinsichtlich ihrer Testgüte miteinander verglichen. Dabei wird insbesondere die individualdiagnostische Eignung „klassischer“ polygraphischer Kenngrößen, die auf der Aktivität des autonomen Nervensystems beruhen, diskutiert. Anschließend werden neuere Ansätze, die auf der Messung der Gehirnaktivität mittels Elektroenzephalogramm oder bildgebender Verfahren beruhen, vorgestellt und kritisch gewürdigt. Während die letztgenannten Techniken derzeit noch nicht praktisch einsetzbar sind, steht mit dem Tatwissentest ein Verfahren zur Verfügung, das auf der Grundlage peripherphysiologischer Variablen eine valide Diagnostik von Tatwissen ermöglicht und damit das forensische Methodeninventar sinnvoll ergänzen könnte.

The processing of gaze cues plays an important role in social interactions, and mutual gaze in particular is relevant for natural as well as video-mediated communications. Mutual gaze occurs when an observer looks at or in the direction of the eyes of another person. The authors chose the metaphor of a cone of gaze to characterize this range of gaze directions that constitutes "looking at" another person. In 4 experiments using either a real person or a virtual head, the authors investigated the influences of observer distance, head orientation, visibility of the eyes, and the presence of a 2nd head on the perceived direction and width of the gaze cone. The direction of the gaze cone was largely affected by all experimental manipulations, whereas its angular width remained comparatively stable.

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a psychophysiological technique that allows for detecting crime-related knowledge. Usually, autonomic response measures are used for this purpose, but ocular measures have also been proposed recently. Prior studies reported heterogeneous results for the usage of countermeasures (CM) to corrupt the CIT's validity, depending on the CM technique and the dependent measure. The current study systematically compared the application of physical and mental CM on autonomic and ocular measures during the CIT. Sixty participants committed a mock crime and were assigned to one of three guilty conditions: standard guilty (without CM), physical CM, or mental CM. An additional group of 20 innocents was investigated with the same CIT to calculate validity estimates. Electrodermal responses were more vulnerable for CM usage compared to heart rate and respiration, and physical CM were more effective than mental CM. Independent of CM usage, a combined score of autonomic responses enabled a valid differentiation between guilty and innocent examinees. Fixations and blinks also allowed for detecting crime-related knowledge, but these measures were more affected by CM application than autonomic responses. The current study delivered further evidence that CM differentially impact physiological and ocular responses in the CIT. Whereas individual data channels were strongly affected by CM usage, a combination of different response measures yielded a relatively stable differentiation of guilty and innocent examinees when mental CM were used. These findings are especially relevant for field applications and might inspire future studies to detect or prevent CM usage in CIT examinations.

The detection of deception has attracted increased attention among psychological researchers, legal scholars, and ethicists during the last decade. Much of this has been driven by the possibility of using neuroimaging techniques for lie detection. Yet, neuroimaging studies addressing deception detection are clouded by lack of conceptual clarity and a host of methodological problems that are not unique to neuroimaging. We review the various research paradigms and the dependent measures that have been adopted to study deception and its detection. In doing so, we differentiate between basic research designed to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying deceptive behavior and applied research aimed at detecting lies. We also stress the distinction between paradigms attempting to detect deception directly and those attempting to establish involvement by detecting crime-related knowledge, and discuss the methodological difficulties and threats to validity associated with each paradigm. Our conclusion is that the main challenge of future research is to find paradigms that can isolate cognitive factors associated with deception, rather than the discovery of a unique (brain) correlate of lying. We argue that the Comparison Question Test currently applied in many countries has weak scientific validity, which cannot be remedied by using neuroimaging measures. Other paradigms are promising, but the absence of data from ecologically valid studies poses a challenge for legal admissibility of their outcomes.

Dyspnea is a prevalent and threatening cardinal symptom in many diseases including asthma. Whether patients suffering from dyspnea show habituation or sensitization toward repeated experiences of dyspnea is relevant for both quality of life and treatment success. Understanding the mechanisms, including the underlying brain activation patterns, that determine the dynamics of dyspnea perception seems crucial for the improvement of treatment and rehabilitation. Toward this aim, we investigated the interplay between short-term changes of dyspnea perception and changes of related brain activation. Healthy individuals underwent repeated blocks of resistive load induced dyspnea with parallel acquisition of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Late vs. early ratings on dyspnea intensity and unpleasantness were correlated with late vs. early brain activation for both, dyspnea anticipation and dyspnea perception. Individual trait and state anxiety were determined using questionnaire data. Our results indicate an involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), midbrain/periaqueductal gray (PAG) and anterior insular cortex in habituation/sensitization toward dyspnea. Changes in the anterior insular cortex were particularly linked to changes in dyspnea unpleasantness. Changes of both dyspnea intensity and unpleasantness were positively correlated with state and trait anxiety. Our findings are in line with the suggested relationship between the anterior insular cortex and dyspnea unpleasantness. They further support the notion that habituation/sensitization toward dyspnea is influenced by anxiety. Our study extends the known role of the midbrain/PAG in anti-nociception to an additional involvement in habituation/sensitization toward dyspnea and suggests an interplay with the OFC. ispartof: Frontiers in Psychology vol:6 issue:JUN pages:748- ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

Background Impaired fear inhibition has been described as a hallmark of pathological anxiety. We aimed at further characterizing the relation between fear inhibition and anxiety by extending previous work to contextual safety stimuli as well as to dimensional scores of trait anxiety in a large sample. Methods We employed a validated paradigm for context-dependent fear acquisition/extinction (day 1) and retrieval/expression (day 2) in 377 healthy individuals. This large sample size allowed the employment of a dimensional rather than binary approach with respect to individual differences in trait anxiety. Results We observed a positive correlation on day 1 between trait anxiety with all CSs that possess an inherent inhibitory component, conveyed either by reliable non-reinforcement of a specific CS in a dangerous context (safe cue) or by the context itself (i.e., safe context). No correlation however was observed for a CS that possesses excitatory (threatening) properties only. These results were observed during fear learning (day 1) for US expectancy and fear ratings but not for SCRs. No such pattern was evident during fear and extinction retrieval/expression (day 2). Conclusion We provide further evidence that high trait anxiety is associated with the inability to take immediate advantage of environmental safety cues (cued and contextual), which might represent a promising trans-diagnostic marker for different anxiety disorders. Consequently, the incorporation of methods to optimize inhibitory learning in current cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treatments might open up a promising avenue for precision medicine in anxiety disorders. Limitations We did not include patients diagnosed with anxiety disorders.