The relationship between a history of substance use disorder and the early course of psychotic illness was examined in 96 subjects with schizophrenia and 106 subjects with affective psychosis followed in the Suffolk County Mental Health Project, a longitudinal study of first-admission psychosis. Subjects received a structured diagnostic interview and clinical ratings at baseline assessment and ...

We investigated emotional disturbances in 36 schizophrenia patients, 48 of their first-degree relatives, and 56 controls to determine if abnormal affective startle modulation could be associated with genetic risk for schizophrenia. Both patients and relatives had a pattern of startle modulation indistinguishable from controls, with potentiated startle amplitude while viewing negative valence sl...

The circumplex structure derived from similarity ratings of affect words is assumed to be a conceptual representation of affect anchored in semantic knowledge. Recently, it been suggested that this structure is not based on semantic knowledge at all, but may instead reflect a type of episodic knowledge: The degree to which emotions covary in everyday life. In two experience-sampling studies, we...

This paper explores gender differences in the evaluation of male and female speakers’ affective features in public speaking. We analyzed 260 two-minute behavioral videos (200 of females and 60 of males), collected from an online public speaking practice tool. We adopted a linear regression model that utilized facial and prosodic features, including facial action units (AU), word count, pitch, a...

Background Exposure therapy is at the core of treatment pathological anxiety. While inhibitory learning model proposes a framework for mechanisms underlying exposure therapy, in particular expectancy violation, causal evidence its assumptions remains elusive. Therefore, aim current study was to provide influence violation on extinct...

This research compared ratings of task performance and contextual performance from three different sources: self, peer, and supervisor. Participants were service industry employees in the service industries in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. A Sample of 146 employees and 40 supervisors   from the service industries provided ratings of task performance and contextual performance. The results indicated th...

The rewarding sensation of touch in affiliative interactions is hypothesized to be underpinned by a specialized system of nerve fibers called C-Tactile afferents (CTs), which respond optimally to slowly moving, gentle touch, typical of a caress. However, empirical evidence to support the theory that CTs encode socially relevant, rewarding tactile information in humans is currently limited. Whil...

Environmental stimuli constantly compete for human attention and in many cases decisions are made based on the affective meaning they convey. Although the network of structures involved in processing affective value has been well described, the specific contribution of these structures to the process by which affective value guides decision making is less well understood and is the focus of the...

A genetically informed cross-lagged model was applied to twin data to explore etiological links between autistic-like traits and affective problems in early childhood. The sample comprised 310 same-sex twin pairs (143 monozygotic and 167 dizygotic; 53 % male). Autistic-like traits and affective problems were assessed at ages 2 and 3 using parent ratings. Both constructs were related within and ...

Affective touch and cutaneous pain are two sub-modalities of interoception with contrasting affective qualities (pleasantness/unpleasantness) and social meanings (care/harm), yet their direct relationship has not been investigated. In 50 women, taking into account individual attachment styles, we assessed the role of affective touch and particularly the contribution of the C tactile (CT) system...