The Arctic sea ice retreat has accelerated over the last decade. The negative trend is largest in summer, but substantial interannual variability still remains. Here we explore observed atmospheric conditions and feedback mechanisms during summer months of anomalous sea ice melt in the Arctic. Compositing months of anomalous low and high sea ice melt over 1979–2013, we find distinct patterns in...

BACKGROUND Studies have suggested several risk factors for a negative birth experience among primiparas. Factors that are mentioned frequently include labour dystocia, operative intervention such as acute caesarean section or vacuum extraction, or the infant being transferred to neonatal care. Another important factor mentioned is lack of support from the midwife. METHODS A study was made of ...

Anhedonia is a key diagnostic criterion for major depression. Investigating the relation between the specific symptoms and emotional processing may help to understand the underlying cognitive mechanism of anhedonia in depression. In this study, we explored the potential association between memory for emotional words and anhedonia in 71 patients with depression and 61 healthy individuals. An emo...

The authors investigated the dynamic change of specific self-efficacy in information searching on the Internet. In Study 1, the valence of experience was manipulated by task difficulty to obtain the developmental curve of self-efficacy change in consecutive information-searching trials. The results indicated that positive task experiences in information searching elicited a linear increase in s...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during an emotional Stroop task were measured in two groups of participants: 14 participants who had experienced the great Sichuan earthquake (earthquake group) and 14 participants who did not experience the earthquake (control group). ERP data showed that negative words elicited a more negative P2 than positive words in the earthquake group. Moreover, nega...

Although research has established a negative association between trait neuroticism and cognition, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this relationship. We examined the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts and negative affect as potential mediators of the relationship between neuroticism and cognitive performance. We hypothesized that the tendency to experience intrusive tho...

Emotion strengthens the subjective experience of recollection. However, these vivid and confidently remembered emotional memories may not necessarily be more accurate. We investigated whether the subjective sense of recollection for negative stimuli is coupled with enhanced memory accuracy for contextual details using the remember/know paradigm. Our results indicate a double-dissociation betwee...