Schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is theoretically part of the schizophrenia spectrum both clinically and neurobiologically. A liability for developing schizophrenia may be associated with dysfunction of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and its cortical and/or subcortical circuitry. If so, abnormalities on tasks associated with DLPFC functioning among SPD subjects would support the thesis that SPD is neurobiologically related to schizophrenia. Antisaccade and ocular motor delayed response performance, both of which are ostensibly supported by DLPFC circuitry, were assessed among 29 SPD, 17 schizophrenia, and 25 normal subjects. Generally, the SPD subjects' performance was more similar to normal than to schizophrenia groups. There was evidence, however, for inhibition abnormalities in a subgroup of SPD subjects. Antisaccade performance identified more SPD subjects as “abnormal” than delayed response measures.

In an electroencephalographic (EEG) study of 27 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) twins discordant for schizophrenia, 13 pairs of MZ twins concordant for schizophrenia, 40 pairs of healthy MZ twins, and 91 healthy, unrelated subjects with repeated assessments, we investigated (a) the trait quality of brainwave patterns with respect to interindividual differences, intraindividual stability over time, and within-pair MZ concordance; (b) the EEG characteristics that enable discrimination between affected and unaffected individuals; and (c) the EEG characteristics that reflect the severity of illness. In comparison with healthy control subjects, the MZ twins who were discordant and concordant for schizophrenia exhibited a much lower within-pair EEG concordance, so that EEG abnormalities associated with schizophrenia and manifested differently in the co-twins concordant for schizophrenia seemed to reflect nongenetic, pathological developments of genetically identical brains.

Boiten (1996) used the Directed Facial Action task (a task we developed in which participants follow instructions, based on theory about how emotion is expressed in the face, to move facial muscles deliberately to produce different facial configurations) to investigate heart rate differences among six emotional configurations. Boiten's findings closely replicated ours (Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990) in terms of heart rate change, self-reported emotion, and rated difficulty during the configurations. Boiten concluded that differences in difficulty were responsible for found differences in heart rate; in contrast, we had concluded that heart rate findings could not be explained in this manner. In this paper, we argue that neither Boiten nor we did the critical analyses needed to determine whether heart rate changes were mediated in this way. Performing these analyses, we conclude that neither reported difficulty nor two other potential mediators (time required to make the facial configurations; activity of nonfacial muscles) mediated the heart rate differences that we found between emotional configurations in the Directed Facial Action task.

Two studies examined the effects of breast-feeding on maternal cardiovascular function. In the first experiment, groups of breast-feeding and bottle-feeding women were compared on preejection period (PEP), heart rate (HR), cardiac output (CO), and total peripheral resistance (TPR) recorded for 1-min periods before and during standard laboratory stressors. Compared with bottle-feeders, breast-feeders had higher CO throughout the session, and greater decreases in CO and increases in TPR during cold pressor. In the second experiment, HR and blood pressure (BP) were compared before and after one breast-feeding and one bottle-feeding session in a within-subjects design. Both feeding methods increased BP but decreased HR, and systolic BP was higher for the breast-feeding than the bottle-feeding condition. Both studies support the notion that breast-feeding alters maternal cardiovascular function, possibly through the actions of oxytocin.

The effect of level of muscle tension on the perception of painful stimuli was assessed in 13 chronic back pain patients, 14 subjects at high risk for chronic back pain, and 14 matched healthy controls. Subjects received painful intracutaneous electric stimuli to the forearm or the lower back while they produced either high or low muscle tension levels. Visual analog scale (VAS) ratings of acute pain were obtained after each trial. Electroencephalograms, electromyograms, skin conductance levels, and blood pressure were measured during the trials. Although subjective pain ratings were not significantly affected by muscle tension levels, the chronic pain patients displayed elevated N150 and N150/P260 amplitudes of the somatosensory-evoked potentials in the low as compared to the high muscle tension condition. The high risk group showed a trend toward higher N150 amplitudes in the low as compared to the high tension condition. The results of this study partially support the hypothesis that increases in muscle tension might serve as a pain-reducing mechanism in chronic pain patients and those at risk for chronicity, thus leading to a vicious pain-tension cycle.

Hemodynamic responses to an anger interview and cognitive and physical stressors were compared, and the stability of associated hemodynamic reactions examined. Participants experienced control, handgrip, counting, and mental arithmetic tests and an anger interview on two occasions. Systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, stroke volume, and cardiac output were measured. Total peripheral resistance was also derived. The anger interview produced larger, more sustained changes in blood pressure in both sessions than the other stressors. These changes were largely a consequence of increased peripheral resistance. Consistent with previous findings, handgrip was associated with a resistance-type reaction whereas arithmetic was associated with a cardiac output-type reaction. There was low-to-modest stability of hemodynamic reactions to the interview. Further research is necessary to optimize its utility in studies of cardiovascular function. Nevertheless, the findings underscore the ability of ecologically relevant stressors to provoke unique configurations of cardiovascular activity.

The topography of the postimperative negative variation (PINV) was analyzed in participants with high and low scores on the German version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. Scalp amplitude and Laplacian maps of the terminal contingent negative variation (tCNV) and PINV and the time course of the PINV were compared between the two groups. CNV and PINV were induced with a delayed matching-to-sample task, in which the pattern of the imperative stimulus was either clearly or ambiguous matched to one of the two diamonds simultaneously presented as a warning stimulus 4.0 s earlier. Electroencephalograms were recorded with a DC amplifier (32 channels). Negativity increased from tCNV to PINV, especially at frontal sites, and the PINV was larger under ambiguous than under clear matching conditions. Low-scoring participants showed a right-sided predominance of the PINV, which was absent in high-scoring participants. These results resemble differences in the topography of the PINV between healthy control participants and those with schizophrenia under identical experimental conditions and suggest functional differences between tCNV and PINV.

We investigated the potential influence of sustained wakefulness on pre-attentive capacities by recording the mismatch negativity (MMN), an electrophysiological manifestation associated with nonintentional detection of auditory oddball stimuli. The MMN was elicited by pitch deviants presented to both ears via earphones, at the beginning of a total sleep deprivation session (baseline), after 24 hr, and after 36 hr of continuous controlled wakefulness. A conspicuous MMN response was elicited at all three sessions. With time, however, a small yet significant gradual reduction in the MMN amplitude was evident. Whereas previous research suggested that controlled attention-demanding tasks are hampered by sleep deprivation, the balance of the present results suggests that passive (total) sleep deprivation may also bring about some degradation in the pre-attentive detection of environmental irregularities and as a consequence may disrupt the reflexive shift of attention induced by such events.

This study sought to determine whether prepulse inhibition and valence modulation of startle are independent, both within and across individuals. Acoustic probes (105 dB) were delivered as 68 undergraduates viewed pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures. Weak acoustic stimuli (8 dB above background) preceded half of the probes by 120 ms. As expected, startles were larger during unpleasant than during pleasant pictures, and smaller on prepulse than no-prepulse trials. In general, valence modulation and prepulse inhibition of startle were unrelated. That is, prepulse inhibition was consistent across affective states, valence modulation did not differ between no-prepulse and prepulse trials, and valence modulation and prepulse inhibition effects were uncorrelated across individuals. Analysis of raw and percent modification scores generally led to similar conclusions. It is concluded that valence modulation and prepulse inhibition are independent startle modulatory phenomena, although this conclusion is tempered by a finding of poor internal consistency reliability for valence modulation.

The purposes of the present study were to determine the autonomic origins of a bradycardiac response to a moderate intensity nonsignal auditory stimulus and the changes in autonomic cardiac control of this response as a function of habituation. Pure tone stimuli were repeatedly presented to participants while phasic changes in heart period (HP), preejection period (PEP), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were observed. Tone stimuli initially elicited an increase in HP, an increase in RSA, and a decrease in PEP, suggesting a coactivation of the parasympathetic and sympathetic inputs mediating changes in the bradycardiac HP response. As expected, HP responses habituated with repeated presentations of the tones. PEP and RSA responses, however, demonstrated different habituation rates than HP. These data demonstrate that cardiodeceleratory responses to nonsignal stimuli can arise from changes in activity of both autonomic divisions and document the importance of considering the autonomic origins of habituating cardiac responses in order to fully understand the process of response habituation.

Previous studies have found that the magnitude of the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) at the time of response initiation is constant across spontaneous variations in response time in both cued and uncued, speeded tasks. Other studies have found that the LRP is also unaffected by instructed changes in peak response force and time to peak force in cued, self-paced tasks, but that the LRP is sensitive to instructed changes in force gain rate in uncued, self-paced tasks. The present study examined the LRP in an uncued, speeded task as a function of response time and several measures of response kinetics. The magnitude of the LRP at the time of electromyographic onset was constant across spontaneous variations in all measures. The peak of the contingent negative variation did vary as a function of peak response force and integrated force to peak, but not response time. These findings support the idea that the LRP in speeded tasks is a selective, on-line index of the preparation associated with using a particular hand, and is not an index of the elements of motor programming that determine subsequent response kinetics.

The neurophysiological correlates of verbal and nonverbal memory have been extensively studied in adults, but comparable investigations of children are limited. A memory paradigm that is well established with adults is the repetition task, which finds a positive shift in the ERP waveform in response to repeated items, called the “repetition effect.” This is thought to represent the brain's memory trace for previously seen information and is reported predominantly at midline frontal and parietal electrodes. We recorded ERPs in thirteen 11- to 14-year old children during repetition tasks of words and faces. Performance was better and ERP latencies shorter for the word than the face task. Although a repetition effect similar to adults was seen at parietal electrodes with increased positivity to repeated items, increased negativity was observed at frontal electrodes; this suggests that the neural substrates of recognition memory continue to develop beyond 11 to 14 years of age. The demonstration of a repetition effect in children provides a basis for studying the neural correlates of specific childhood memory deficits.

Twelve young and 11 elderly men (mean ages 21.1 and 70.1) performed a choice-reaction time (RT) task in which stimulus degradation and stimulus–response (S-R) compatibility were manipulated. The extant literature has suggested that the effects of age on RT are usually augmented (multiplicative) in more difficult task conditions, but also that the effects of age on the latency of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) are constant (additive). The results indicated that the effects of age on RT were enhanced in more difficult conditions, whether the difficulty consisted of stimulus degradation or S-R incompatibility. However, the effects of age on P300 latency were enlarged as the stimuli were degraded, but not if the S-R mapping was incompatible. Thus, it appears that task content determines if effects of age on P300 latency are additive or multiplicative. A simple model is proposed that produces the obtained pattern of effects.

In Näätänen's model of early attention, the role of arousal in influencing the permanent feature detection system (indexed by mismatch negativity [MMN]) and the temporary feature-detection system (indexed by processing negativity [PN]) is unclear. To address this question, we investigated the effects of the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide (N2O) on the MMN and PN. Ten subjects performed a dichotic listening task in which discrimination difficulty and breathing mixture (air or 25% N2O) were manipulated factorially. MMN, PN, N1 and P300 at Fz, Cz, and Pz, as well as reaction time (RT), were measured. N2O had no effect on the PN, but decreased MMN amplitude. As expected, N2O decreased the amplitude of the N1 and P300 and increased the latency of the P300 and RT. The dissociation of MMN and PN by N2O suggests that this agent decreases the ability to detect automatic stimulus change without affecting voluntary selective attention. We interpret these results as indicating that arousal has multidimensional effects on early attentional mechanisms. These dimensions can be differentiated chemically by neurotransmitters in the reticular formation of the brain.

We investigated the nature of event-related potential (ERP) effects in a handedness recognition task requiring mental rotation. Thirty subjects were tested with rotated and sometimes reflected alphanumeric characters while ERPs were recorded from 18 electrodes. On each trial, a cue provided valid information about the angular displacement of the following probe. This design allowed a distinction between three processing episodes: evaluation of the difficulty of the forthcoming task, preparation for the task, and the mental rotation task itself. The three episodes were accompanied by distinct ERP effects having distinct polarities, a different rank order of amplitudes for different probe orientations, and a different topography. These data confirm previous findings showing that mental rotation is accompanied by a parietal negativity. However, they also suggest that the rotation-related negativity found after tilted stimuli in standard mental rotation tasks is most likely overlapping with another, simultaneously triggered ERP effect functionally related to an evaluation of task difficulty.

Priming effects to words are reduced when modality changes from study to test. This change was examined here using behavioral and electrophysiological measures of priming. During the study, half of the words were presented visually and half auditorally; during a subsequent lexical decision test, all words were presented visually. Lexical decisions were faster for within- than cross-modality repetitions. In contrast, modality influenced recognition only for low-frequency words. During lexical decision, event-related brain potentials were more positive to studied than unstudied words (200–500 ms). A larger and shorter duration effect was observed for within- than cross-modality repetitions (300–400 ms). This latter effect is viewed as an electrophysiological index of modality-specific processing associated with priming. Results suggest that multiple events—both modality-specific and modality-nonspecific—underlie perceptual priming phenomena.

The impact of static muscle tension on total respiratory resistance (TRR) was examined. Participants (24 healthy, 24 asthmatic) performed biofeedback-assisted sequences of tensing (15 s) and relaxing (20 s) forehead and forearm muscles. Muscle tension levels were 40% or 80% of the maximum individual force. Oscillatory TRR, electromyograms, ventilation, heart period, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia were recorded. Baseline TRR did not change over the session as a whole. Decreases in TRR during forehead tension in both groups were accompanied by increases in end-expiratory volume, which could have mediated TRR changes. During forearm tension, decreases in TRR with minimal ventilation changes were only observed in healthy participants, whereas asthmatic patients revealed marked increases in respiratory volume and flow. These results indicate that static muscle activity and TRR are negatively related. Ventilatory changes can exaggerate or diminish evidence for this relationship.

The effects of a heterotopic cold pain stimulus applied to the hand on the scalp-recorded negative difference potential (NDP) and subjective pain ratings elicited by electrical stimulation of the sural nerve were examined in 24 participants. Our previous work strongly suggests that the NDP is generated in part by the cognitive division of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACCcd). The latency and magnitude of the ACCcd activity were estimated from the NDP and from the dipole source localization analysis of the NDP. As expected, the sural nerve pain ratings were smaller in the cold pain condition than in the control condition. The ACCcd activity underlying the 125-ms peak of the NDP did not change across conditions, whereas the ACCcd activity underlying the 210-ms NDP peak was largest in the cold pain condition. The dissociation between pain-evoked ACCcd activity and pain ratings observed here and elsewhere suggest that not all of the nociresponsive neurons in the ACCcd are involved in pain sensation. Rather, differences in the cognitive demands of the control and cold pain conditions suggest that the pain-evoked 210-ms ACCcd activity reflects response selection processes, perhaps response competition monitoring.

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes; the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Japanese. It was found that semantic violations elicited the conventional N400, which was distributed in the bilateral occipital and the right temporal regions, and that the syntactic violations elicited the P600 in a broad area, predominantly in the centroparietal regions. Scalp current density mappings suggested that the right temporal cortex plays a significant role in integrating pieces of contextual information, especially when it is difficult to integrate a word in the context of a sentence, and that the P600 was connected to the syntactic processes conceivably indexed by the left temporal current sink with a relatively early onset.

In certain conditions patients with schizophrenia make markedly smaller (hypometric) saccades than controls. This hypometria has been thought to reflect dopaminergic blockade as a result of antipsychotic medication. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the performance of an antipsychotic-naïve group and an antipsychotic-treated group of first-episode schizophrenic patients on a predictive saccade paradigm. We explored the possibility that hypometria reflects a spatial working memory deficit by correlating performance on neuropsychological tests of mnemonic function with saccadic accuracy. Both the drug-naïve and treated schizophrenic patients made hypometric saccades when compared with a group of matched controls. Primary saccade amplitude also correlated significantly with performance on some of the neuropsychological tests. These results are discussed in terms of the roles of cortical dopamine and working memory deficits in schizophrenic patients.