Inmaculada León

To Know or Not to Know: Comprehending Protagonists' Beliefs and Their Emotional Consequences

Six experiments explored how readers take the protagonists mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Experiments 1. 2 and 3 demonstrated that readers with privileged information build emotional inferences corresponding to the protagonists (wrong) beliefs. The time course of inferences was studied in Experiments 2, 4, 5, and 6. The results suggest that inferences related to the protagonists beliefs are backward inferences at the text integration stage. Experiment 3 showed that negation markers are not necessary for mental perspective effects. It was concluded that readers as side participants are able to dissociate the protagonists and their own beliefs about a narrative situation.

Brain and personality bases of insensitivity to infant cues in neglectful mothers: An event-related potential study

This investigation examined the neural and personality correlates of processing infant facial expressions in mothers with substantiated neglect of a child under 5 years old. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 14 neglectful and 14 control mothers as they viewed and categorized pictures of infant cries, laughs, and neutral faces. Maternal self-reports of anhedonia and empathy were also completed. Early (negative occipitotemporal component peaking at around 170 ms on the scalp [N170] and positive electrical potential peaking at about 200 ms [P200]) and late positive potential (LPP) components were selected. Both groups of mothers showed behavioral discrimination between the different facial expressions via reaction time and accuracy measures. Neglectful mothers did not exhibit increased N170 amplitude at temporal leads in response to viewing crying versus laughing and neutral expressions compared to control mothers. Both groups had greater P200 and LPP amplitudes at centroparietal leads in response to viewing crying versus neutral facial expressions. However, neglectful mothers displayed an overall attenuated brain response in LPP that was related to their higher scores in social anhedonia but not to their empathy scores. The ERP data suggest that the brains failures in the early differentiation of cry stimuli and in the sustained processing of infant expressions related to social anhedonia may underlie the insensitive responding in neglectful mothers. The implications of these results for the design and evaluation of preventive interventions are discussed.

Brain potentials reflect access to visual and emotional memories for faces

Familiar faces convey different types of information, unlocking memories related to social-emotional significance. Here, the availability over time of different types of memory was evaluated using the time-course of P3 event related potentials. Two oddball paradigms were employed, both using unfamiliar faces as standards. The infrequent targets were, respectively, artificially-learned faces (devoid of social-emotional content) and faces of acquaintances. Although in both tasks targets were detected accurately, the corresponding time-course and scalp distribution of the P3 responses differed. Artificially-learned and acquaintance faces both elicited a P3b, maximal over centro-parietal sites, and a latency of 500ms. Faces of acquaintances elicited an additional component, an early P3 maximal over frontal sites: with a latency of 350ms. This suggests that visual familiarity can only trigger the overt recognition processes leading to the slower P3b, whereas emotional-social information can also elicit fast and automatic assessments (indexed by the frontal-P3) crucial for successful social interactions.

Understanding action language modulates oscillatory mu and beta rhythms in the same way as observing actions

The mu rhythms (8-13 Hz) and the beta rhythms (15 up to 30 Hz) of the EEG are observed in the central electrodes (C3, Cz and C4) in resting states, and become suppressed when participants perform a manual action or when they observe anothers action. This has led researchers to consider that these rhythms are electrophysiological markers of the motor neuron activity in humans. This study tested whether the comprehension of action language, unlike abstract language, modulates mu and low beta rhythms (15-20 Hz) in a similar way as the observation of real actions. The log-ratios were calculated for each oscillatory band between each condition and baseline resting periods. The results indicated that both action language and action videos caused mu and beta suppression (negative log-ratios), whereas abstract language did not, confirming the hypothesis that understanding action language activates motor networks in the brain. In other words, the resonance of motor areas associated with action language is compatible with the embodiment approach to linguistic meaning.

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials.

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentences last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonists emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word.

Action sentences activate sensory motor regions in the brain independently of their status of reality

Some studies have reported that understanding concrete action-related words and sentences elicits activations of motor areas in the brain. The present fMRI study goes one step further by testing whether this is also the case for comprehension of nonfactual statements. Three linguistic structures were used (factuals, counterfactuals, and negations), referring either to actions or, as a control condition, to visual events. The results showed that action sentences elicited stronger activations than visual sentences in the SMA, extending to the primary motor area, as well as in regions generally associated with the planning and understanding of actions (left superior temporal gyrus, left and right supramarginal gyri). Also, we found stronger activations for action sentences than for visual sentences in the extrastriate body area, a region involved in the visual processing of human body movements. These action-related effects occurred not only in factuals but also in negations and counterfactuals, suggesting that brain regions involved in action understanding and planning are activated by default even when the actions are described as hypothetical or as not happening. Moreover, some of these regions overlapped with those activated during the observation of action videos, indicating that the act of understanding action language and that of observing real actions share neural networks. These results support the claim that embodied representations of linguistic meaning are important even in abstract linguistic contexts.

Testing the Role of Attribution and Appraisal in Predicting Own and Other's Emotions

We aimed to examine the differences between appraisal and attribution as regards their capacity to predict emotions. More specifically, we hoped to test the hypothesis, derivedfrom the model of Lazarus and Smith(1988), that appraisals predictive potential increases with the subjects personal involvement in the events. The same is not true of attributions, which are probably determined more by implicit theories concerning such events than by the personal significance they might hold. Subjects were required to evaluate an episode relating either to them directly or to a fictitious character. The information in the episode was manipulated to induce certain attributions and appraisals. Following the evaluation, the subject was asked to report on his/her emotions (in the former case) or to infer those of the character. Anger andguilt were chosenas the emotions to be studied. The data, analysed using causal analysis techniques, revealed that appraisal was superior to attribution in terms of predictive ability...

Figure and Ground in Temporal Sentences: The Role of the Adverbs When and While

Abstract Multiclause sentences with the temporal adverbs whileor whenreferring to simultaneous events (e.g., “While [when] John was writing a letter, Mary comes into the room”) were compared in German and Spanish. Following Talmy (2001), we assumed that the event in the main clause is the figure (F; the event to be located in time), and the event in the adverbial clause is the ground (G; the event used as temporal reference). Germans judged as more acceptable the while(während) sentences with the longer duration event as G (e.g., writing a letter) and the shorter duration event as F (e.g., coming into the room) than vice versa. However, they judged when(als) sentences quite acceptable in both duration conditions, suggesting that this adverb is temporally less constrained than while. Spaniards produced a similar, although less conspicuous, pattern. We discuss the results in terms of the temporal metrics that underlie F-G relations in adverbial sentences, as well as crosslinguistic differences between Spanish and German.

Inferior fronto-temporo-occipital connectivity: a missing link between maltreated girls and neglectful mothers

The neurobiological alterations resulting from adverse childhood experiences that subsequently may lead to neglectful mothering are poorly understood. Maternal neglect of an infant’s basic needs is the most prevalent type of child maltreatment. We tested white matter alterations in neglectful mothers, the majority of whom had also suffered maltreatment in their childhood, and compared them to a matched control group. The two groups were discriminated by a structural brain connectivity pattern comprising inferior fronto-temporo-occipital connectivity, which constitutes a major portion of the face-processing network and was indexed by fewer streamlines in neglectful mothers. Mediation and regression analyses showed that fewer streamlines in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus tract (ILF-R) predicted a poorer quality of mother–child emotional availability observed during cooperative play and that effect depended on the respective interactions with left and right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculi (IFO-R/L), with no significant impact of psychopathological and cognitive conditions. Volume alteration in ILF-R but not in IFO-L modulated the impact of having been maltreated on emotional availability. The findings suggest the altered inferior fronto-temporal-occipital connectivity, affecting emotional visual processing, as a possible common neurological substrate linking a history of childhood maltreatment with maternal neglect.

Mediterranean spotted fever in Spain, 1997-2014: Epidemiological situation based on hospitalization records

Introduction Mediterranean spotted fever (MSF) is a zoonotic disease caused by Rickettsia conorii. In Spain, deficiencies in the official reporting result in misreporting of this disease. This study aims to describe the clinical and temporal-spatial characteristics of MSF hospitalizations between 1997 and 2014. Materials and methods We performed a retrospective descriptive study using the Hospitalization Minimum Data Set (CMBD). All CMBD’s hospital discharges with ICD-9 CM code 082.1 were analyzed. Hospitalization rates were calculated and clinical characteristics were described. Spatial distribution of cases and their temporal behavior were also assessed. Results A total of 4,735 hospitalizations with MSF diagnosis were recorded during the study period, out of which 62.2% were male, mean age of 48. Diabetes mellitus, alcohol dependence syndrome, and chronic liver disease occurred in 10.8%, 2.4% and 2.8% hospitalizations, respectively. The median annual hospitalization rate showed a decreasing trend from a maximum of 12.9 in 1997 to a minimum rate of 3.1 in 2014. Most admissions occurred during the summer, showing a significant annual seasonal behavior. Important regional differences were found. Discussion Although MSF hospitalization rates have decreased considerably, it remains a public health problem due to its severity and economic impact. Therefore, it would be desirable to improve its oversight and surveillance.