Modulation of Trust in Borderline Personality Disorder by Script-Based Imaginal Exposure to Betrayal

Interpersonal and trust-related difficulties are central features of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In this study, we applied script-driven betrayal imagery to evoke mistrustful behavior in a social reinforcement learning task. We compared this approach to the standard confederate paradigm in twenty-one BPD and twenty healthy control (HC) participants. The script-driven imagery evoked transient negative affect and decreased trusting behavior in both groups. Across conditions, we also replicated previously reported between-group differences in affect and task behavior, results that support the validity of script-driven imagery as an alternative social task stimulus. This approach is appealing for eliminating deception, scaling easily, and evoking disorder-specific states of social difficulty.

Further investigating effects of task repetition proportion on n – 2 repetition costs: Task shielding as a potential modulating factor?

Previous research has shown that n – 2 repetition costs are reduced when the experimental procedure allows for task repetitions. The present study aimed to further elucidate possible mechanisms underlying this effect. To this end, three experiments were conducted in which the possibility of task repetitions was tied to individual tasks. In Experiment I, the specific repetition proportions varied between participants. The reduction of n – 2 repetition costs was stronger when the relative amount of task repetitions associated with a particular task was high, suggesting that inhibition is reduced when the presence of repetitions tied to a specific task can easily be detected. In Experiment II, task preparation time varied between blocks to investigate whether cue-based preparation underlies this reduction of n – 2 repetition costs. While the duration of the preparation interval had no effect in this respect, additional combined analyses of both experiments revealed an influence of stimulus congruency: n – 2 repetition costs were highest when repetitions were precluded and the task stimulus was incongruent, whereas no effect of stimulus congruence on n – 2 repetition costs was observed with tasks that possibly repeated. This data pattern was replicated in Experiment III. This result is interpreted in terms of task shielding which is reduced for tasks without repetitions, making these tasks more vulnerable to crosstalk from competing tasks when they are still in an inhibited state.

Associative Recognition Processes Are Modulated by Modality Relations

Although memory of episodic associations is generally considered to be recollective in nature, it has been suggested that when stimuli are experienced as a unit, familiarity-related processes might contribute to their subsequent associative recognition. Furthermore, intradomain associations are believed to be unitized more readily than interdomain associations. To assess these claims, we tested associative recognition following two types of pair associate learning. In the unimodal task, stimulus pairs were pictures of common objects, whereas in the cross-modal task, stimulus pairs consisted of an object picture and an unrelated environmental sound. At test, participants discriminated intact from recombined pairs while ERPs were recorded. In the unimodal task only, associative recognition was accompanied by a robust frontal deflection reminiscent of a component commonly interpreted as related to familiarity processes. In contrast, ERP correlates of associative recognition observed at more posterior sites, akin to a component that has been related to recollection, were apparent in both tasks. These findings indicate that retrieval of unimodal associations can be supported by familiarity-related processes that are dissociable from recollective processes required for the retrieval of cross-modal associations.

THE CONSTRUCT VALIDITY OF GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENT TESTS AS MEASURES OF IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

Grammaticality judgment tests (GJTs) have been, and continue to be, frequently used in the field of SLA as a measure of learners’ linguistic ability in the second language (L2). However, only a few studies have examined their construct validity as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge (Bowles, 2011; R. Ellis, 2005), and even fewer have explored in detail how features of these tests, such as time pressure and task stimulus, affect their construct validity (Loewen, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect that time pressure and task stimulus have on the type of knowledge representations on which L2 learners draw when performing GJTs. The results show that the grammatical and ungrammatical sections of a timed and an untimed GJT loaded differently in both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This finding can be interpreted as indicating that grammatical and ungrammatical sentences constitute measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. Additionally, the results show that time pressure and task stimulus have significant effects on learners’ performance on GJTs.