A human subject experiment was conducted to investigate caffeine’s effect on appraisal and performance of a mental serial subtraction task. Serial subtraction performance data was collected from three treatment groups: placebo, 200 mg caffeine, and 400 mg caffeine. Data were analyzed by average across treatment group and by challenge and threat task appraisal conditions. A cognitive model of th...

We present a multi-phase model of emotions that integrates automatic and fast affective reactions with slower cognitive appraisals to create a final emotional appraisal that is grounded in previous emotional experiences. Affective reactions are the product of an analogical comparison between the current situation and similar cases in memory. This is followed by a cognitive appraisal to do a dee...

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Gi...

OBJECTIVE Previous work investigating deficits in self-appraisal in behavioural-variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD) has focused on a single domain: social/behavioural processes. We examined whether a domain-specific versus multi-domain model best explains degraded self-appraisal in bvFTD. METHODS 49 patients with bvFTD and 73 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were administered qu...

The anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) is consistently active during personally salient decisions, yet the differential contributory processes of this region along the dorsal-ventral axis are less understood. Using a self-appraisal decision-making task and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated task-dependent connectivity of ventral aMPFC with amygdala, insula, and nucleu...

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is functionally compromised in individuals diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a major risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In functional MRI studies with healthy participants, this same region is active during self-appraisal (requiring retrieval of semantic knowledge ab...

Individual and Job-Based Determinants of Performance Appraisal: Evidence from Germany We investigate the use of performance appraisal (PA) in German Firms. First, we derive hypotheses on individual and job based determinants of PA usage. Based on a representative German data set on individual employees, we test these hypotheses and also explore the impact of PA on performance pay and further ca...

Both cognitive and psychosocial theories of adult development stress the fundamental role of older adults' appraisals of the diverse sources of cognitive and social-emotional strengths. This study reports the development of a new self-appraisal measure that incorporates key theoretical dimensions of internal and external sources of life strengths, as identified in the gerontological literature....