Higher level cognitive processes are characteristically human. Until recently, these
processes were studied in a vacuum, separately from theaffective system, as if they were …

Anxiety can be hugely disruptive to everyday life. Anxious individuals show increased
attentional capture by potential signs of danger, and interpret expressions, comments and …

Genetic variation in catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), encoding an enzyme critical for
prefrontal dopamine flux, has been studied extensively using both behavioral and …

Investigations of fear conditioning in rodents and humans have illuminated the neural
mechanisms underlying cued and contextual fear. A critical question is how personality …

Biased competition models of selective attention suggest that attentional competition is
influenced both by bottom‐up sensory mechanisms sensitive to stimulus salience and top …

BEHAVIOR AND PSYCHOLOGY and are dissociable under several circumstances. For
example, drug-addicted individuals report a greater desire to consume a drug over time …

Background Executive functioning (EF) refers to the set of neurocognitive processes that
facilitate novel problem solving, modification of behavior in response to environmental …

The catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val 158 Met polymorphism is hypothesized to
affect executive function in patient and control populations. Studies inconsistently report …

Self-regulation is the ability to control inner states or responses with respect to thoughts,
emotions, attention, and performance. As such, it is a critical aspect of development and …

Prompt responses to emotional, potentially threatening, stimuli are supported by neural
mechanisms that allow for privileged access of emotional information to processing …