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Aim of research. Our aim was to find out whether eliciting moral disgust influences sexual arousal and desire. Methods. We conducted research on 171 participants, most of whom were university students. They were presented with a story eliciting moral disgust (experimental group) or a neutral story (control group), with photographs of the characters from the stories. Subsequently, the participants were asked to fill in the Sexual Arousal and Desire Scale, within which they had to remind themselves of their last sexual experiences. The scale consists of four sub-scales: evaluative, negative/aversive, physiological and motivational aspect. Results. No significant differences were found in terms of the three positive sub-scales: evaluative, physiological and motivational aspects. It indicates that moral disgust does not influence the vividness of positive aspects of sexual arousal and desire. However, discrepancies in the negative/aversive aspect of the SADI scale were found - morally disgusted participants were noted to have statistically higher scores in this sub-scale than the controls. No gender differences were found in these relationships. Limitations. The research was conducted on a group that was homogeneous with respect to age, education and the place of residence. Conclusions. The results imply that moral disgust has an influence on accessibility of negative elements of last sexual experience's memories, regardless of accessibility of positive elements of such memories. Earlier studies suggested that disgust makes moral judgments more severe, and this study widens this relationship - moral disgust increases judgments in general, including the negative parts of sexual experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate whether people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) can benefit from reliving positive autobiographical memories in terms of mood and state self-esteem and elucidate the neural processes supporting optimal memory reliving. Particularly the role of vividness and brain areas involved in autonoetic consciousness were studied, as key factors involved in improving mood and state self-esteem by positive memory reliving. Women with BPD (N = 25), Healthy Controls (HC, N = 33) and controls with Low Self-Esteem (LSE, N = 22) relived four neutral and four positive autobiographical memories in an MRI scanner. After reliving each memory mood and vividness was rated. State self-esteem was assessed before and after the Reliving Autobiographical Memories (RAM) task. Overall, mood and state self-esteem were lower in participants with BPD compared to HC and LSE, but both the BPD and LSE group improved significantly after positive memory reliving. Moreover, participants with BPD indicated that they relived their memories with less vividness than HC but not LSE, regardless of valence. When reliving (vs reading) memories, participants with BPD showed increased precuneus and lingual gyrus activation compared to HC but not LSE, which was inversely related to vividness. Women with BPD seem to experience more challenges in reliving neutral and positive autobiographical memories with lower vividness and less deactivated precuneus potentially indicating altered autonoetic consciousness. Nevertheless, participants with BPD do benefit in mood and self-esteem from reliving positive memories. These findings underline the potential of positive autobiographical memory reliving and suggest that interventions may be further shaped to improve mood and strengthen self-views in people with BPD. • The therapeutic potential of positive memories was studied in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). • Women with BPD are compared to a healthy (HC) and low self-esteem control group (LSE). • Vividly reliving positive memories has the potential to improve mood and state self-esteem in women with BPD. • Lower overall vividness and less deactivated precuneus indicate more challenges in reliving for women with BPD. • There is scope for positive memory reliving in a clinical setting for individuals with BPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the objective accuracy of visual-short term memory (VSTM) representations and their subjective conscious experience is unknown. We investigated this issue by assessing how the objective and subjective components of VSTM in a delayed cue-target orientation discrimination task are affected by intervening distracters. On each trial, participants were shown a memory cue (a grating), the orientation of which they were asked to hold in memory. On approximately half of the trials, a distractor grating appeared during the maintenance interval; its orientation was either identical to that of the memory cue, or it differed by 10 or 40 degrees. The distractors were masked and presented briefly, so they were only consciously perceived on a subset of trials. At the end of the delay period, a memory test probe was presented, and participants were asked to indicate whether it was tilted to the left or right relative to the memory cue (VSTM accuracy; objective performance). In order to assess subjective metacognition, participants were asked indicate the vividness of their memory for the original memory cue. Finally, participants were asked rate their awareness of the distracter. Results showed that objective VSTM performance was impaired by distractors only when the distractors were very different from the cue, and that this occurred with both subjectively visible and invisible distractors. Subjective metacognition, however, was impaired by distractors of all orientations, but only when these distractors were subjectively invisible. Our results thus indicate that the objective and subjective components of VSTM are to some extent dissociable.