Know Thy Positive Self

Skin conductance response (SCR) is a widely used psychophysiological measurement in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, especially emotion studies. Even it is a relatively "old" method used, it seems that there is no explicit standard how should you do it. More or less, the tips are told by your colleagues instead of from an explicit guidebook. Here I recorded the articles, books, and manuals that helped me to know more about SCR, which I will be used in a fear extinction study. The general workflow of the SCR is not super complex, only three steps: Recording. This is the most or lest important thing you need to care, depending on your experience. It is the most important thing because data quality is always the most important aspect of research. "garbage in, garbage out". It is the lest important thing because, usually, you will follow the way your lab's done previously. For example, which part of the body will you stick the electrode so that you can g...

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7(1), 511-535. doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526 Today I read this review on the train from Mainz to Amsterdam, the swinging train made me a little bit impatient, so the reading experience is not so good.  In this classic review, Bonanno et al., (2013) pointed out that using new analytic method -- latent growth mixture modelling -- could overcome the disadvantages of two previous approach (i.e., psychopathology approach and  the trauma event approach).  figure 1, adapted from Banonno (2004) The interesting results from the latent growth mixture modelling are that higher percentage of resilience was found.  Then this paper reviewed factors that influence resilience: personality, exposure, SES etc. The trait self-enhancement was specially mentioned in the personality factors. Also interesting to me...

Dranovsky, A., & Leonardo, E. D. (2015). The power of positivity. Nature, 522, 294. doi:10.1038/522294a Ramirez, S., Liu, X., MacDonald, C. J., Moffa, A., Zhou, J., Redondo, R. L., & Tonegawa, S. (2015). Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour. Nature, 522, 335. doi:10.1038/nature14514 I didn't totally understand the experiments in Ramirez et al (2015), but it reads like a lot of works had been done by the authors.  The basic idea is simple: if we re-activated the positive memory of mice that currently depressed, the positive memory will decrease the depressive behaviours. This basic idea was clearly illustrated by Dranovsky & Leonardo (2015), see below Of course, the actual experiment is more complicated, as well as the figures: The above figure is the figure 1a of Ramirez et al. (2015). So, there are 6 groups. The key manipulation is the positive experience, which was exposed the mice to a female conspecific in a ...

Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485-494. doi:10.1101/lm.78804 Milad, M. R., & Quirk, G. J. (2012). Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress. Annual Review of Psychology, 63(1), 129-151. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131631 Quirk, G. J., & Mueller, D. (2008). Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval. Neuropsychopharmacology, 33(1), 56-72. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301555 As I begin to do research using fear extinction paradigm, which is apparently very different from what I was doing during my PhD study, so I need to get familiar with this paradigm first. After reading a few papers related to fear extinction, I found that these three reviews are very good for a newcomer. Bouton (2004) is definitely the must-read. In this review, Bouton listed the different effects that can be considered as fear extinction. With a clear logic flow, this paper is easy to fo...

Hermans, E. J., van Marle, H. J. F., Ossewaarde, L., Henckens, M. J. A. G., Qin, S., van Kesteren, M. T. R., . . . Fernández, G. (2011). Stress-Related Noradrenergic Activity Prompts Large-Scale Neural Network Reconfiguration. Science, 334(6059), 1151-1153. doi:10.1126/science.1209603 After re-read this paper I think I get more information from it. This study included two experiments, one regular fMRI study, one with Neuro-pharmaceutical manipulations. In the first experiment, participants viewed highly stressful video clips with self-referential instruction while their brain was scanned. Using model free data-analysis (i.e., multi-voxel), the authors found that the sensory network (visual cortex) are highly correlated among participants in both aversive and neutral conditions. However, brain regions previous claimed to be involved in the intrinsic connectivity network (ICN, include autonomic neuroendocrine control [frontoinsular cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate corte...