Glenn Egan

Dissociable Neural Pathways Are Involved in the Recognition of Emotion in Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions

Facial expressions of emotion powerfully influence social behavior. The distributed network of brain regions thought to decode these social signals has been empirically defined using static, usually photographic, displays of such expressions. Facial emotional expressions are however highly dynamic signals that encode the emotion message in facial action patterns. This study sought to determine whether the encoding of facial expressions of emotion by static or dynamic displays is associated with different neural correlates for their decoding. We used positron emission tomography to compare patterns of brain activity in healthy men and women during the explicit judgment of emotion intensity in static and dynamic facial expressions of anger and happiness. Compared to judgments of spatial orientation for moving neutral facial expressions, the judgment of anger in dynamic expressions was associated with increased right-lateralized activity in the medial, superior, middle, and inferior frontal cortex and cerebellum, while judgments of happiness were associated with relative activation of the cuneus, temporal cortex, and the middle, medial, and superior frontal cortex. In contrast, the perception of anger or happiness in static facial expressions activated a motor, prefrontal, and parietal cortical network previously shown to be involved in motor imagery. The direct contrast of dynamic and static expressions indicated differential activation of visual area V5, superior temporal sulcus, periamygdaloid cortex, and cerebellum for dynamic angry expressions and differential activation of area V5, extrastriate cortex, brain stem, and middle temporal cortical activations for dynamic happy expressions. Thus, a distribution of neural activations is related to the analysis of emotion messages in the nearly constant biological motion of the face and differ for angry and happy expressions. Static displays of facial emotional expression may represent noncanonical stimuli that are processed for emotion content by mental strategies and neural events distinct from their more ecologically relevant dynamic counterparts.

Medication status affects the relationship of symptoms to prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle in schizophrenia

Inhibition of the acoustic startle response by a smaller preliminary nonstartling stimulus is termed prepulse inhibition (PPI). Schizophrenia patients have impairments in PPI that may not fully normalize even when they are clinically stable on medication, particularly typical antipsychotics. There is evidence that more severe symptoms are associated with more severe PPI abnormalities, but the effect of antipsychotics on this relationship is not clear. Seventy-three male schizophrenia patients underwent acoustic startle and PPI testing. Symptom ratings were performed using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) and its subscales. Fifty-two subjects were treated with antipsychotic medication at time of testing; 21 were unmedicated. For all subjects, PPI was negatively correlated with the BPRS psychological discomfort subscale but not with BPRS total symptoms, BPRS positive symptoms or BPRS negative symptoms. For medicated subjects analyzed separately, there were no correlations with BPRS total scores or any subscales. For the unmedicated subjects analyzed separately, there were significant correlations of lower PPI with greater severity of BPRS total symptoms, positive symptoms and the psychological discomfort subscale. These data indicate that more severe symptoms are associated with lower PPI, but that medication status is an important factor in the relationship between symptom severity and sensorimotor gating.

Lack of relationship between acoustic startle and cognitive variables in schizophrenia and control subjects

Measures of acoustic startle such as prepulse inhibition (PPI) and startle latency have been found to be impaired in schizophrenia, and are commonly thought to be related to cognitive deficits in this disease. However, findings about the relationship between startle variables and cognitive performance have been equivocal. In this study, we examined correlations between startle measures (baseline startle magnitude, latency, habituation and PPI) and cognitive performance (using the Benton Visual Retention Test, Conners Continuous Performance Test, California Verbal Learning Test, Finger Tapping Test, and Wisconsin Card Sort Test) in 107 schizophrenia patients and 94 healthy controls. Overall, there was a lack of any significant relationship between these constructs in both populations when correcting for multiple comparisons. This suggests that alterations in startle measures seen in schizophrenia may not reflect elements of information processing that cause cognitive deficits in the disease.

Declarative memory and WCST-64 performance in subjects with schizophrenia and healthy controls

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is a set-switching task used extensively to study impaired executive functioning in schizophrenia. Declarative memory deficits have also been associated with schizophrenia and may affect WCST performance because continued correct responding depends on remembering the outcome of previous responses. This study examined whether performance in visual and verbal declarative memory tasks were associated with WCST performance. Subjects comprised 30 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SCZ) and 30 demographically matched healthy controls (CON) who were tested on the WCST, the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT), the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT), and the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). SCZ subjects showed significant correlations between visual and verbal declarative memory and performance on the WCST-64 that were in the hypothesized direction such that worse memory performance was associated with worse performance on the WCST. CON subjects did not show a significant relationship between visual or verbal memory and WCST-64 performance. Fishers r to z transformations indicated that the associations between declarative memory and WCST-64 performance in the SCZ subjects differed significantly from those of CON subjects. The findings suggest that interpretations of WCST-64 scores for subjects with schizophrenia should be considered in light of their declarative memory functioning.

A Competency-Focused Commentary on the Special Section on Teaching, Training, and Supervision in Personality and Psychological Assessment

The shift to a culture of competence called for over a decade ago within health service psychology (HSP; Roberts, Borden, Christiansen, & Lopez, 2005) has occurred. A key impetus for this shift was the 2002 Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Training in Professional Psychology (Kaslow, 2004; Kaslow et al., 2004), during which time the core competencies in HSP were identified. As an outgrowth of this conference, competencies were conceptualized as foundational (knowledge, skills, and attitudes that underlie all of psychologists’ functional activities) or functional (major activities performed by psychologists) (Rodolfa et al., 2005). Since the outset of this movement, assessment has been considered a functional competency in education, training, and practice including specialty practice (Hatcher et al., 2013; Kaslow, 2004; Kaslow et al., 2004; Kaslow & Ingram, 2009; Rodolfa et al., 2005; Rodolfa et al., 2013). It remains a central competency as evidenced by its inclusion in the American Psychological Association’s (2016) Standards for Accreditation for Programs in Health Service Psychology. This consistent prominence is no surprise given that psychological assessment has for decades been a distinguishing hallmark of our profession (Watkins, Campbell, Nieberding, & Hallmark, 1995). Trainers have delineated the following central elements of the assessment competence: background in the basics of psychometric theory and the bases of psychological assessment; knowledge, skill, and techniques to assess the myriad dimensions of human experience with regard to individuals and systems; ability to assess outcomes of treatment or intervention; capacity to forge a collaborative relationship for the assessment process; understanding of the relation between assessment and intervention; and possession of technical skills such as problem identification, test selection and administration, systematic data gathering, and formulation and communication of findings (Krishnamurthy et al., 2004). Behavioral anchors associated with these central elements have been delineated for readiness for practicum, internship, and entry to practice (Fouad et al., 2009). Practitioners have noted that competence in assessment requires the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to ensure culturally informed assessment processes and diagnoses; use the relevant data, psychometric findings, and guidelines in conducting interviews and selecting, administering, and scoring assessments; make certain the interpretations are based on the integration of information from multiple sources; use all available data and pertinent criteria to formulate a conceptualization that includes a diagnostic understanding and make recommendations; and share the findings and recommendations in an organized and understandable manner while acknowledging the limitations of the methods used (Rodolfa et al., 2013). Despite these efforts, little wide-scale attention has been paid to developing agreement among psychology trainers at various stages in the training process and between trainers and credentialers with regard to the priority to be placed on this competence throughout the training sequence and beyond; the central elements and behavioral anchors across the professional life cycle of the assessment competence; and effective teaching, supervisory, and consultative strategies (Ready & Veague, 2014). Virtually no effort has been given to linking training in assessment with its practice by professional psychologists, despite the fact that assessment is one of the six core clusters for the competent practice of psychology (Rodolfa et al., 2013). None of the competency-based efforts specify the approaches to assessment that must be taught and practiced, which has contributed to the reduced focus on personality assessment, particularly performance-based personality testing (i.e., projective), in many settings worldwide (Mihura, Roy, & Graceffo, this issue; Piotrowski, 2015a, 2015b; Ready & Veague, 2014). Other contributing factors to this decline include shifts in the dominant theoretical perspectives and diagnostic system toward approaches that attend primarily to behavior, cognitions, and symptoms rather than to personality characteristics; concerns that assessments are pathologizing rather than strength-based and thus dehumanizing; vociferous critiques of the reliability and validity of projective techniques; and new priorities within health care resulting in preauthorization demands and limited reimbursement for testing (Evans & Finn, this issue; Piotrowski, 2015b). The articles in this special section offer promise for a positive evolution in the trajectory of personality assessment, such that it could once again be integral to the assessment competence within HSP. This is an optimal time for this to occur, as there is evidence, including research in this section, that training in the assessment competence is stable or increasing. The findings from Mihura and colleagues (this issue), along with other data (Ready & Veague, 2014), reveal that personality assessment is most often taught in practitioner-focused programs and least often in clinical science