Michela Mazzetti

Unmasking emotion: exposure duration and emotional engagement.

Effects of exposure duration on emotional reactivity were investigated in two experiments that parametrically varied the duration of exposure to affective pictures from 25-6000 ms in the presence or absence of a visual mask. Evaluative, facial, autonomic, and cortical responses were measured. Results demonstrated that, in the absence of a visual mask (Experiment 1), emotional content modulated evaluative ratings, cortical, autonomic, and facial changes even with very brief exposures, and there was little evidence that emotional engagement increased with longer exposure. When information persistence was reduced by a visual mask (Experiment 2), differences as a function of hedonic content were absent for all measures when exposure duration was 25 ms but statistically reliable when exposure duration was 80 ms. Between 25-80 ms, individual differences in discriminability were critical in observing affective reactions to masked pictures.

Syllables in the processing of spoken Italian.

Five experiments explored the role of the syllable in the processing of spoken Italian. According to the syllabic hypothesis, the sublexical unit used by speakers of Romance languages to segment speech and access the lexicon is the syllable. However, languages with different degrees of acoustic-phonetic transparency give rise to syllabic effects that vary in robustness. It follows from this account that speakers of phonologically similar languages should behave in a similar way. By exploiting the similarities between Spanish and Italian, the authors tested this prediction in Experiments 1-4. Indeed, Italian listeners were found to produce syllabic effects similar to those observed in Spanish listeners. In Experiment 5, the predictions of the syllabic hypothesis with respect to lexical access were tested. The results corroborated these predictions. The findings are discussed in relation to current models of speech processing.

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in patients with sleep disorders

Sleep can improve the off-line memory consolidation of new items of declarative and non-declarative information in healthy subjects, whereas acute sleep loss, as well as sleep restriction and fragmentation, impair consolidation. This suggests that, by modifying the amount and/or architecture of sleep, chronic sleep disorders may also lead to a lower gain in off-line consolidation, which in turn may be responsible for the varying levels of impaired performance at memory tasks usually observed in sleep-disordered patients. The experimental studies conducted to date have shown specific impairments of sleep-dependent consolidation overall for verbal and visual declarative information in patients with primary insomnia, for verbal declarative information in patients with obstructive sleep apnoeas, and for visual procedural skills in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy. These findings corroborate the hypothesis that impaired consolidation is a consequence of the chronically altered organization of sleep. Moreover, they raise several novel questions as to: a) the reversibility of consolidation impairment in the case of effective treatment, b) the possible negative influence of altered prior sleep also on the encoding of new information, and c) the relationships between altered sleep and memory impairment in patients with other (medical, psychiatric or neurological) diseases associated with quantitative and/or qualitative changes of sleep architecture.

Autonomic Reactivity during Viewing of an Unpleasant Film

The effect of an aversive, high-arousing film on heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and electrogastrographic activity (EGG) was investigated. Previous studies have indicated a larger heart-rate deceleration for visual stimuli depicting surgery or blood compared to neutral content, and this phenomenon is similar to the bradycardia observed in animals in response to fear. The heart-rate deceleration is clearly parasympathetically driven, and it is considered a general index of attention. An accurate index of cardiac vagal tone can be obtained by means of quantification of the amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The relationship between cardiac vagal tone and EGG is complex, but animal research has shown that suppressing vagal activity dampens gastric motility. We have investigated whether a movie depicting surgery is associated with greater heart-rate deceleration, larger increase in respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and greater increase in EGG activity compared to a neutral movie. In addition, if both respiratory sinus arrhythmia and EGG are indices of vagal tone, a positive correlation between these physiological responses was expected. Analysis indicated an effect of the surgery movie on heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia, but not on EGG activity. Moreover, the expected correlation was not found. Implications for future studies are discussed.

Incorporation of presleep stimuli into dream contents: evidence for a consolidation effect on declarative knowledge during REM sleep?

Presleep stimuli to be retained for further recall is often incorporated into dream contents. To establish whether processing for insertion into dream contents may improve consolidation, we compared the retention rate at delayed recall of contents resulting from incorporation of presleep sentence‐stimuli with those of other contents of the same dream experiences. We hypothesized that association with a cognitive task of recall facilitates access to recently acquired items of declarative knowledge such as presleep stimuli, and triggers the deep elaboration of their semantic features, which involves rehearsal. Twelve subjects were given a task of delayed recall for three nonsense sentences delivered once a time before each of the sleep (re‐)onsets over an experimental night. After each awakening in rapid eye movement sleep, subjects were asked to report dream experience and recall the sentence to be retained. In the morning, after spontaneous awakening, subjects were unexpectedly requested to again report their dream experiences and to recall the stimuli. Two pairs of judges independently identified possible incorporations of the stimuli, and parsed dream reports into propositional content units. The proportion of night reports with at least one incorporation of the stimulus delivered (i.e. valid incorporations) was higher than that of reports with contents similar to a stimulus(‐i) not yet delivered (forward pseudo‐incorporations) or delivered prior to an earlier sleep period (backward pseudo‐incorporations). The proportion of content units common to night and morning reports (considered to be better consolidated) was significantly higher for incorporated contents than for other contents, including pseudo‐incorporated contents. Instead, the retention at morning recall of words of sentence‐stimuli corresponding to incorporated contents was not significantly higher than that of other words. The better retention of incorporated contents provides a partial confirmation (that is, limited to the output of the processing) that a generation effect, which benefits retention of actively processed information, is operative during sleep as well as in waking.

Story-like organization of REM-dreams in patients with narcolepsy–cataplexy

Narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) is a neurological disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and an altered architecture of sleep. Previous laboratory studies have shown that frightening, bizarre and visually vivid contents are more frequent in dream experiences developed during the first period of REM sleep by NC patients than healthy subjects. As the structural organization of dream experiences of NC patients has not been yet examined, we compared its indicators in dream reports collected from a sample of NC patients and their matched controls. During an experimental night two awakenings were provoked after 8min of REM sleep in the first and third sleep cycle. Dream reports were analyzed using the rules of story grammars, capable of identifying units larger than single contents and describing their story-like organization. While dream recall (about 85%) was comparable in NC patients and controls, 1st-REM dream reports were longer in NC patients. Statistical analyses on the 12 NC patients and their matched controls who reported dreams after both REM periods showed that dream experiences occurring in 1st-REM reports of NC patients were longer and had a more complex organization than those of controls. These findings suggest that the cognitive processes underlying dream generation reach their optimal functioning earlier in the night in NC patients than in normal subjects.

Sleep and time course of consolidation of visual discrimination skills in patients with narcolepsy–cataplexy

The level of procedural skills improves in normal individuals when the acquisition is followed by a period of sleep rather than wake. If sleep plays an important role in the consolidation process the advantage it provides should be reduced or delayed when its organization is altered, as in patients with chronic sleep disorders. To test this prediction in patients with narcolepsy–cataplexy (NC), who usually have a more fragmented organization of sleep than normals, we compared the initial, intermediate and delayed level of consolidation of visual skills. Twenty‐two drug‐naive NC patients and 22 individually‐matched controls underwent training at a texture discrimination task (TDT) and were re‐tested on the next morning (after a night spent in laboratory with polysomnography) and after another six nights (spent at home). TDT performance was worse in patients than controls at training and at both retrieval sessions and the time course of consolidation was different in NC patients (who improved mainly from next‐day to 7th‐day retrieval session) compared with controls. Moreover, the less‐improving patients at next‐day retrieval had a wider disorganization of sleep, probably because of an episode of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep at sleep onset REM, on post‐training night more frequently than more‐improving patients. These findings suggest that the time course of the consolidation process of procedural skills may be widely influenced by the characteristics of sleep organization (varying night‐by‐night much more in NC patients than controls) during post‐training night.

Psychological distress of conservative and nonconservative uterine surgery: A prospective study

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study is to evaluate the psychological reaction to conization before and after the operation compared to hysterectomy. To study the incidence of psychological stress related to conization, 60 women undergoing conization were compared to 40 women who had undergone hysterectomy. METHOD Psychological disease was rated in the pre- and postoperative periods using the Symptom Questionnaire (SQ). Each patient was evaluated 2 weeks before the operation, and 3, 6 and 12 months after it. RESULTS Both the conization and hysterectomy groups showed a significant reduction in anxiety and depression at the 3-, 6- and 12-month follow-ups compared to the preoperative period. Two weeks before surgery, 8 conization patients (19.5%) showed an anxious status, while 10 (24.3%) presented high levels of anxiety and depression. Within hysterectomy patients, the occurrence was respectively of 4 (12.9%) and 10 women (32.2%). Twelve months after surgery, of the women with preoperative depression, only four (9.7%) conization and four (12.9%) hysterectomy patients presented a negative mood status. A similar trend was present for somatic symptoms but only in the conization group, because the hysterectomy patients did not show a reduction in these symptoms from the preoperative to the postoperative period. This result could be related to the surgical menopause due to the bilateral oophoriectomy executed in more than half of the hysterectomy group. CONCLUSION In general, the results of the present study show that the conservative and nonconservative uterine surgery determines a good psychological prognosis in the short- and long-term postoperative periods.

Motor events during REM sleep in patients with narcolepsy–cataplexy: A video-polysomnographic pilot study

OBJECTIVE We carried out a systematic video-polysomnographic analysis of the number and type of motor events during REM sleep in narcolepsy-cataplexy patients with REM sleep behavior disorder (NC + RBD) but not clinical RBD (NC-RBD). METHODS Twelve NC + RBD and 10 NC-RBD male patients underwent video-polysomnography (video-PSG). Motor events of different type and complexity (i.e., elementary and complex movements and vocalizations) occurring during REM sleep were visually assessed, and indices of their frequency per hour of REM sleep were calculated. Subsequently, the index values were compared in NC + RBD versus NC-RBD patients. RESULTS Typical RBD behaviors observed in five NC + RBD patients were not included in any type of motor events. No objective conventional sleep parameter, including visual analysis of chin electromyographic (EMG) activity, significantly differed between the two groups of NC patients. NC + RBD patients showed higher occurrence of elementary movements (p = 0.034) during REM sleep compared with NC-RBD patients, but the occurrence of complex movements did not differ significantly. CONCLUSIONS Video-analysis of motor events during REM sleep may improve the diagnosis of RBD in NC. RBD in NC patients is mainly characterized by elementary rather than complex movements, consistent with the view that RBD with NC patients displays a distinct phenotype with respect to other RBD patients.

Dream experience during REM and NREM sleep of patients with complex partial seizures.

This study examined the effectiveness of the cognitive processes underlying dreaming in patients with complex partial seizures (CPS), by assessing the frequency of recall and the structural organization of dreams reported after awakenings provoked alternately during REM and stage 2 NREM sleep on 12 cognitively unimpaired CPS-patients (six with epileptic focus in the right hemisphere and six in the left one). Each patient was recorded for three consecutive nights, respectively, for adaptation to the sleep laboratory context, for polysomnography and for dream collection. The frequency of dream recall was lower after stage 2 NREM sleep than REM sleep, regardless of the side of epileptic focus, while the length and structural organization of dreams did not significantly differ in REM and NREM sleep. However, the length of story-like dreams was influenced by global cognitive functioning during REM sleep. These findings indicate that in CPSs-patients the elaboration of dream experience is maintained in both REM and NREM sleep, while the access to information for conversion into dream contents and the consolidation of dream contents is much less effective during NREM rather than during REM sleep. Further studies may distinguish between these two possibilities and enlighten us as to whether the impaired memory functioning during NREM sleep is a side effect of anticonvulsant treatment.