Browsing by Subject "Object Attachment"

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    Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy.
    (Dev Cogn Neurosci, 2012-01) Decety, Jean; Svetlova, Margarita
    The ontogeny of human empathy is better understood with reference to the evolutionary history of the social brain. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. In this paper, we argue that it is essential to consider empathy within a neurodevelopmental framework that recognizes both the continuities and changes in socioemotional understanding from infancy to adulthood. We bring together neuroevolutionary and developmental perspectives on the information processing and neural mechanisms underlying empathy and caring, and show that they are grounded in multiple interacting systems and processes. Moreover, empathy in humans is assisted by other abstract and domain-general high-level cognitive abilities such as executive functions, mentalizing and language, as well as the ability to differentiate another's mental states from one's own, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.
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    Taking tests in the magnet: Brain mapping standardized tests.
    (Human brain mapping, 2017-11) Rubin, David C; Li, Dawei; Hall, Shana A; Kragel, Philip A; Berntsen, Dorthe
    Standardized psychometric tests are sophisticated, well-developed, and consequential instruments; test outcomes are taken as facts about people that impact their lives in important ways. As part of an initial demonstration that human brain mapping techniques can add converging neural-level evidence to understanding standardized tests, our participants completed items from standardized tests during an fMRI scan. We compared tests for diagnosing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the correlated measures of Neuroticism, Attachment, and Centrality of Event to a general-knowledge baseline test. Twenty-three trauma-exposed participants answered 20 items for each of our five tests in each of the three runs for a total of 60 items per test. The tests engaged different neural processes; which test a participant was taking was accurately predicted from other participants' brain activity. The novelty of the application precluded specific anatomical predictions; however, the interpretation of activated regions using meta-analyses produced encouraging results. For instance, items on the Attachment test engaged regions shown to be more active for tasks involving judgments of others than judgments of the self. The results are an initial demonstration of a theoretically and practically important test-taking neuroimaging paradigm and suggest specific neural processes in answering PTSD-related tests. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5706-5725, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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    The relation between insecure attachment and posttraumatic stress: Early life versus adulthood traumas.
    (Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy, 2015-07) Ogle, Christin M; Rubin, David C; Siegler, Ilene C
    The present study examined the relations between insecure attachment and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among community-dwelling older adults with exposure to a broad range of traumatic events. Attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance predicted more severe symptoms of PTSD and explained unique variance in symptom severity when compared to other individual difference measures associated with an elevated risk of PTSD, including NEO neuroticism and event centrality. A significant interaction between the developmental timing of the trauma and attachment anxiety revealed that the relation between PTSD symptoms and attachment anxiety was stronger for individuals with current PTSD symptoms associated with early life traumas compared to individuals with PTSD symptoms linked to adulthood traumas. Analyses examining factors that account for the relation between insecure attachment and PTSD symptoms indicated that individuals with greater attachment anxiety reported stronger physical reactions to memories of their trauma and more frequent voluntary and involuntary rehearsal of their trauma memories. These phenomenological properties of trauma memories were in turn associated with greater PTSD symptom severity. Among older adults with early life traumas, only the frequency of involuntary recall partially accounted for the relation between attachment anxiety and PTSD symptoms. Our differential findings concerning early life versus adulthood trauma suggest that factors underlying the relation between attachment anxiety and PTSD symptoms vary according to the developmental timing of the traumatic exposure. Overall our results are consistent with attachment theory and with theoretical models of PTSD according to which PTSD symptoms are promoted by phenomenological properties of trauma memories.