• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.113-126
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• 2024

Individuals with social anxiety disorders tend to hold attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in social contexts regardless of task relevance. Although attentional bias is relatively consistent, findings on memory performance are mixed. This study examined attentional and memory biases toward threat stimuli in individuals with high levels of social anxiety. Participants included 19 individuals with high social anxiety (HSA) and another 20 individuals with low social anxiety (LSA). They performed a continuous attention task to measure attentional bias to threat. Afterward, they performed an unexpected memory task using distracting stimuli from the previous attention task to measure memory bias to task-irrelevant threatening stimuli. The results indicated that the HSA and LSA groups exhibited an initial attentional bias toward emotional faces. However, only the HSA group displayed prolonged attentional bias and demonstrated memory bias toward angry faces. Conversely, the LSA group exhibited attentional bias toward happy faces after 4 s. The findings imply that the absence of bias toward positive stimuli and the presence of bias toward negative stimuli may contribute to the maintenance and severity of social anxiety pathology.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.95-107
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• 2022

Facial processing of different racial origin has been investigated at various levels including perceptual, emotional, and socio-cultural processing. Particularly, a good deal of studies have been conducted to show "other race effect (ORE)" to indicate that subtle facial information such as identity or emotional expressions are often under-processed in racial out-group members. However, few studies have investigated whether attentional modulation toward racial out-group faces could explain ORE. We investigated whether novelty-driven attentional mechanism is involved in face perception using event-related potential (ERP). Twenty-two Korean (KR) and nine Caucasian-American (AM) participants were presented with emotional faces from the two racial origins while they performed a gender categorization task. KRs showed significantly greater P3 amplitudes to AM than to KR faces indicating that the early attentional processing underlies differential perception of racial out-group faces. Interestingly, P3 was not up-regulated in the AM subjects when they were presented with KR faces, perhaps due to massive habituation to KR faces during everyday social interaction. These results indicate that racial out-group faces are highly salient stimuli which automatically occupy attentional resources, but easily habituated with repeated exposure to the racial-out group.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.242-250
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• 2016

This study was conducted to investigate whether Stroop-related cognitive task will be affected according to the preceding affective valence factored by matchedness in response time(RT) and whether facial recognition will be indexed by specific event-related potentials(ERPs) signature in normal person as in patients suffering from affective disorder. ERPs primed by subliminal(30ms) facial stimuli were recorded when presented with four pairs of affect(positive or negative) and cognitive task(matched or mismatched) to get ERP effects(N2 and P300) in terms of its amplitude and peak latency variations. Behavioral response analysis based on RTs confirmed that subliminal affective stimuli primed the target processing in all affective condition except for the neutral stimulus. Additional results for the ERPs performed in the negative affect with mismatched condition reached significance of emotional-face specificity named N2 showing more amplitude and delayed peak latency compared to the positive counterpart. Furthermore the condition shows more positive amplitude and earlier peak latency of P300 effect denoting cognitive closure than the corresponding positive affect condition. These results are suggested to reflect that negative affect stimulus in subliminal level is automatically inhibited such that this effect had influence on accelerating detection of the affect and facilitating response allowing adequate reallocation of attentional resources. The functional and cognitive significance with these findings was implied in terms of subliminal effect and affect-related recognition modulating the cognitive tasks.

• 한국노년학
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.1109-1124
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• 2016

We examined the effect of stereotype threat (STT) on spatial working memory and facial emotion recognition in Korean elderly. In addition, we investigated the role of expected moderator such as self-perception of aging. Seventeen seniors (male=7) received basic cognitive tests including K-WMS-IV, MMSE and answered self-report questionnaires including self-perception of aging, anxiety of aging, attitude toward aging and age identity on the first visit. On the second visit, they were exposed to negative stereotype by reading a script detailing cognitive decline related to aging while a control group was exposed to a neutral content. Following the exposure, they were tested on a spatial-working memory task (Corsi-block tapping task) and emotion recognition task (facial expression identification task). The results showed that the seniors exposed to STT showed significantly lower performance on emotion recognition task (p < .05) (i.e., especially on the more difficult facial stimuli). In addition, there was a significant interaction between STT and self-perception of aging (p< .05), indicating that those who have positive self-perception of aging did not show impairment in emotion recognition task and difficult spatial working memory task under STT. On the other hand, those with negative self-perception of aging showed impaired performance under STT. Taken together, the current study suggests that being exposed to STT could negatively influence cognitive and emotional functioning of elderly. Interestingly, having a positive self-perception of aging could protect the underperformance caused by STT.

• Anxiety and mood
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.106-112
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• 2020

Objective : Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by fear of social threat and exhibits limbic hyper-reactivity toward social stimuli such as emotional faces. A previous study identified the uncinate fasciculus (UF) sub-tract as particularly related to facial memory. To explore the white matter tract relating to face-specific brain regions, we investigated the UF sub-tract in SAD. Methods : The diffusion tensor images of 22 patients with SAD and 20 healthy controls were analyzed with tractography. The UF sub-tract was delineated using the regions of interest of face patches in the anterior temporal lobe and the orbitofrontal cortex, and fractional anisotrophy (FA) and total number of streamlines (ST) were analyzed. We examined the group comparison of FA and ST of the UF sub-tract and correlations of FA and ST with the social anxiety symptoms such as the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS), the Social Phobia Scale (SPS) and the Fear of Negative Evaluation scale (FNE) in SAD. Results : There were no group differences in FA and ST of the UF sub-tract. However, negative correlations were observed between ST of the right UF sub-tract and severity of social anxiety symptoms (LSAS, r_s=-0.480, p=0.024; SIAS, r_s=-0.580, p=0.005; SPS, r_s=-0.590, p=0.004; FNE, r_s=-0.675, p=0.001) in patients with SAD. Conclusion : Although patients with SAD did not show quantitative abnormalities in the UF sub-tact connecting face-specific brain regions, this structure seems to play a role in the symptom severity of SAD.

• Korean Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.102-108
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• 2016

Objectives : The deficit of recognition memory has been found as one of the common neurocognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia. In addition, they were reported to fail to enhance the memory about emotional stimuli. Previous studies have shown that bilateral eye movements enhance the memory retrieval. Therefore, this study was conducted in order to investigate the memory enhancement of bilaterally alternating eye movements in schizophrenic patients. Methods : Twenty one patients with schizophrenia participated in this study. The participants learned faces (angry or neutral faces), and then performed a recognition memory task in relation to the faces after bilateral eye movements and central fixation. Recognition accuracy, response bias, and mean response time to hits were compared and analysed. Two-way repeated measure analysis of variance was performed for statistical analysis. Results : There was a significant effect of bilateral eye movements condition in mean response time(F=5.812, p<0.05) and response bias(F=10.366, p<0.01). Statistically significant interaction effects were not observed between eye movement condition and face emotion type. Conclusions : Irrespective of the emotional difference of facial stimuli, recognition memory processing was more enhanced after bilateral eye movements in patients with schizophrenia. Further study will be needed to investigate the underlying neural mechanism of bilateral eye movements-induced memory enhancement in patients with schizophrenia.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.51-77
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• 2009

Using a modified Posner's cue-target paradigm, we investigated whether negative cues attract more attention than neutral cues in anxious people. Previous studies used commonly an unbalanced proportion of valid and invalid trials(75% vs. 25% respectively). But in the present study, an equivalent proportion of valid and invalids trials was used for measuring detection speed of cues without participant's expectancy caused by the unbalanced proportion. Emotional words(Experiment 1) and facial expressions(Experiment 2) were used as cues for target locations. The result of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that threatening cues facilitated target detection in valid trials and interfered with it in invalid trials in anxious participants and a, reverse response patterns were found in non-anxious participants. This indicates that threatening cues attract more attention to the cued location in anxious people and in contrast, non-anxious people avoid threatening stimuli. In Experiment 3, we investigated the difference of validity effect across anxiety levels. The results showed that anxious participants gave less attention to cued location when the cues were non-informative whereas non-anxious participants gave more attention to cued locations in the same condition. We discussed two kinds of cognitive bias caused by anxiety levels: attentional bias and proportion related bias.