M. de Bonis

Changes in effective connectivity during incidental and intentional perception of fearful faces.

The present fMRI study examined effective connectivity within an emotional network composed of three brain areas: Amygdala (AMY), Anterior Cingulate Cortex (AAC) and Orbito-Frontal (OFC) in processing fearful faces. Two tasks: an incidental perception (gender identification) and an intentional detection (effortful discrimination) task were performed by 14 and 10 young healthy volunteers, respectively. Participants were scanned while viewing fearful, neutral and ambiguous facial expressions. Effective connectivity was assessed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Results show that the hypothetical network fits the experimental data for both tasks and in both hemispheres. The comparison between Tasks 1 and 2 reveals significant differences in strength and direction of the connectivity patterns for the left and to a less stringent threshold for the right hemisphere. The path coefficients analysis suggests that the fearful information generated in AMY, reaches the OFC through the ACC in incidental perception, while in intentional perception, the route followed is in a reverse direction from OFC to ACC. Our findings confirm a differential brain connectivity between incidental and intentional processing of fearful faces.

Self-concept and mood: A comparative study between depressed patients with and without borderline personality disorder

Within the framework of Self-Structure Theory, this study investigated the relationship between depressed mood and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) on self and others descriptions, with a special emphasis on the self-structures valence, that is, its affective, negative and/or positive content. Seventeen DSM-III-R unipolar depressed patients with associated BPD (DSM-III-R axis II) and twelve unipolar depressed patients without BPD were compared to eighteen non-psychiatric controls on four measures of evaluation and of affective discrepancy of descriptions of self and others. Subjects were administered the grid repertory technique. The analysis of the resulting two-way valence matrix, with attributions as columns, and self and others as rows, showed that depressed patients with and without BPD differed from the non-psychiatric controls with regard to negativity of the descriptions. As compared with the two other groups, depressed patients with BPD showed a distinctive pattern characterised by the joint presence of a negative view of self and a larger affective discrepancy for others, with others being conjunctively assigned positive and negative attributes. Despite some limitations, the distinctive pattern evidenced corroborates the conflicted interpersonal relationship and is in keeping with clinical theorising on BPD.

Sex Differences and Eye Movements

This study was designed to examine sex differences in eye movements. Recordings were made from 28 right-handed students (15 males and 13 females). Both the number and direction of eye movements elicit

Activité électrodermale spontanée et variations de l’état affectif

The systematic recording of spontaneous electrodermal activity (EDA) on 23 normal subjects during 5 15-min sessions and the self-rating of anxious and/or depressive moods (Q-sort forced choice) shows

anti Ethyl β-thienyl-β-amino-α-hydroxy propionate: a regio and stereoselective ring opening of trans ethyl 2-thienyl-glycidate

Abstract anti Ethyl β-thienyl-β-amino-α-hydroxy propionate was obtained regio- and diastereo-selectively in three steps and 45% overall yield, while 95% syn ethyl β-chloro-β-thienyl-α-hydroxy ester was obtained regio-selectively in two steps and 50% overall yield, both from 2-thienyl aldehyde.

Sex differences in latencies of bilateral electrodermal responses

The present study examined sex differences in the latencies of bilateral electrodermal responses to stimuli presented in monocular vision. The stimuli were spatial-emotional, verbal-emotional, spatial-neutral and verbal-neutral slides, presented for either 35 ms or 1 s. Subjects were 15 males and 15 females. Bilateral latencies were not influenced by type of stimulus or by right/left hemisphere stimulation, which is in keeping with the most recent findings of bilateral electrodermal activity studies. However, females gave a faster right hand than left hand response and appeared to be more lateralized than males. Males showed shorter latencies on the left hand than on the right. These results confirm the importance of gender in experiments using the bilateral recordings of electrodermal activity.