Biomedical subjects

Anne Richards

Publications and source records attributed to Anne Richards.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Anxiety and sensitivity to eye gaze in emotional faces.

This paper reports three studies in which stronger orienting to perceived eye gaze direction was revealed when observers viewed faces showing fearful or angry, compared with happy or neutral, emotional expressions. Gaze-related spatial cueing effects to laterally presented fearful faces and centrally presented angry faces were also modulated by the anxiety level of participants, with high- but not low-state anxious individuals revealing enhanced shifts of attention. In contrast, both high- and low-state anxious individuals demonstrated enhanced orienting to averted gaze when viewing laterally presented angry faces. These results provide novel evidence for the rapid integration of facial expression and gaze direction information, and for the regulation of gaze-cued attention by both the emotion conveyed in the perceived face and the degree of anxiety experienced by the observer.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Anatomical signatures of dyslexia in children: unique information from manual and voxel based morphometry brain measures.

Thirteen male control and thirteen male dyslexic children (age, 121-152 months) were studied to determine if voxel based morphometry (VBM) could identify anatomical differences in the right cerebellar anterior lobe, and right and left pars triangularis that were identified with manual measures of the same children. VBM demonstrated significant gray and white matter differences in these three brain regions. In contrast to the manual results, these differences were not significant after controlling for brain volume, suggesting the manual measures captured additional important variance that distinguished the groups. Post-hoc VBM comparisons demonstrated white matter volume differences in a left temporal-parietal region that are consistent in location with results from diffusion tensor imaging studies of dyslexia. The VBM analyses also identified, gray matter volume differences in the left and right lingual gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule and cerebellum, areas that had not been examined with manual methods. We conclude that manual and automated methods provide valuable and complementary approaches to the search for functionally significant neurobiological characteristics of dyslexia.

Brain↗

PubMed2004

Independent manipulation of emotion in an emotional stroop task using classical conditioning.

The effects of emotional connotation on emotional Stroop interference in anxiety were examined. First, a classical conditioning paradigm was used in which neutral words and nonwords were paired with either negative or neutral pictures. These conditioned stimuli were then presented in an emotional Stroop paradigm. Finally, participants rated each word and nonword for emotional connotation. The high-anxious group demonstrated significant interference for the nonwords that had been negatively conditioned, and these effects did not dissipate over time. The affective rating data supported the view that nonwords, but not the words had been successfully conditioned in the high-anxious group. This experiment provides evidence for the importance of emotional connotation rather than confounded semantic factors in the emotional Stroop effect.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Reasoning about emotional and neutral materials. Is logic affected by emotion?

In two experiments, we investigated whether people reason differently when they reason about emotional and neutral contents. We gave participants a conditional reasoning task ("If p, then q") and varied the emotionality of the items used as p and q. Participants were asked to draw inferences based on these statements. In Experiment 1, we compared statements including preexisting emotional and neutral words. In Experiment 2, we experimentally manipulated the emotionality of initially neutral words using classical conditioning. In both experiments, emotionality affected participants' responses. They were more likely to draw invalid inferences in response to emotional compared with neutral statements.

Affect↗

PubMed2003

Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: beyond the emotion-congruent effect.

The authors investigated how anxiety influences the use of contextual information in the resolution of ambiguity. Participants heard ambiguous homophones (threat/neutral, positive/neural, and neutral/neutral) with related contextual information. State anxiety was manipulated experimentally. The interpretations of anxious participants were influenced by context to a greater extent than those of control participants. Some mood-incongruent effects were observed where anxious participants were more likely to adopt neutral interpretations of potentially threatening stimuli. Effects were observed in a spelling task (Experiments 1 and 2) and in a lexical decision task (Experiment 3), with supraliminal, and subliminal presentation of contextual cues, and with 2 different anxiety-induction procedures. Results show how anxiety affects both the content and the process of resolution of ambiguity.

Affect↗

PubMed2003

The illusion of presence in immersive virtual reality during an fMRI brain scan.

The essence of immersive virtual reality (VR) is the illusion it gives users that they are inside the computer-generated virtual environment. This unusually strong illusion is theorized to contribute to the successful pain reduction observed in burn patients who go into VR during woundcare (www.vrpain.com) and to successful VR exposure therapy for phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The present study demonstrated for the first time that subjects could experience a strong illusion of presence during an fMRI despite the constraints of the fMRI magnet bore (i.e., immobilized head and loud ambient noise).

Adult↗

PubMed2003

The influence of children's self-report trait anxiety and depression on visual search for emotional faces.

BACKGROUND: This study presents two experiments that investigated the relationship between 7- and 10-year-olds' levels of self-report trait anxiety and depression and their visual search for threatening (angry faces) and non-threatening (happy and neutral faces) stimuli. METHOD: In both experiments a visual search paradigm was used to measure participants' reaction times to detect the presence or absence of angry, happy or neutral schematic faces (Experiment 1) or cartoon drawings (Experiment 2). On target present trials, a target face was displayed alongside three, five or seven distractor items. On target absent trials all items were distractors. RESULTS: Both experiments demonstrated that on target absent (but not present) trials, increased levels of anxiety produced significantly faster search times in the angry face condition, but not in the neutral condition. In Experiment 2 there was some trend towards significance between anxiety and searches for happy faces in absent trials. There were no effects of depression on search times in any condition. CONCLUSION: The results support previous work highlighting a specific link between anxiety and attention to threat in childhood.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2002

Stroop interference and negative priming in patients with multiple sclerosis.

The experiment reported represents a preliminary assessment of the ability of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients to inhibit distracting stimuli in a selective attention task. Twenty MS and 20 matched control participants were given a card version of the Stroop colour-word interference task. Four conditions were included; neutral (strings of coloured Xs), congruent (colour and word matched), Stroop interference (colour and word conflicted) and ignored repeated (again, conflicting colour and words, but colour on trial n matched the word on trial n-1). Response times (RTs) to 30 trials in each condition were measured to the nearest second. Increased Stroop interference scores were evident for the MS patients relative to the control group. However, a negative priming effect was evident for both MS and control groups; RTs were longer for the ignored repeated condition relative to the Stroop interference condition. This suggests that both groups were able to inhibit distractors on trial n-1, and that increased Stroop interference scores, for MS patients were not due to a complete breakdown of inhibitory processing. Although negative priming effects did not differ across the groups, the possibility of a partial breakdown in inhibitory processes could not be ruled out. Other explanations for increased Stroop interference in MS patients are also briefly considered.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Anxiety-related bias in the classification of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions.

High- and low-trait socially anxious individuals classified the emotional expressions of photographic quality continua of interpolated ("morphed") facial images that were derived from combining 6 basic prototype emotional expressions to various degrees, with the 2 adjacent emotions arranged in an emotion hexagon. When fear was 1 of the 2 component emotions, the high-trait group displayed enhanced sensitivity for fear. In a 2nd experiment where a mood manipulation was incorporated, again, the high-trait group exhibited enhanced sensitivity for fear. The low-trait group was sensitive for happiness in the control condition. The mood-manipulated group had increased sensitivity for anger expressions, and trait anxiety did not moderate these effects. Interpretations of the results related to the classification of fearful expressions are discussed.

Adolescent↗