Alan D Pickering

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Psychology

Poetry is arguably the most creative expression of language and can evoke diverse subjective experiences, such as emotions and aesthetic responses, subsequently influencing the subjective judgment of the creativity of poem. This study investigated how certain personality traits—specifically openness, intellect, awe-proneness, and epistemic curiosit...

Linking neurobiology to relatively stable individual differences in cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior can require large sample sizes to yield replicable results. Given the nature of between-person research, sample sizes at least in the hundreds are likely to be necessary in most neuroimaging studies of individual differences, regardless...

Agency is the sense that one has control over one’s own actions and the consequences of those actions. Despite the critical role that agency plays in the human condition, little is known about its neural basis. A novel theory proposes that increases in agency disinhibit the dopamine system and thereby increase the number of tonically active dopamin...

Creative cognition is the driving force behind all cultural and scientific progress. In recent years, the field of neurocognitive creativity research (NCR) has made considerable progress in revealing the neural and psychological correlates of creative cognition. However, a detailed understanding of how cognitive processes produce creative ideas, an...

Agency is the sense that one has control over one’s own actions and the consequences of those actions. Despite the critical role that agency plays in the human condition, little is known about its neural basis. A novel theory proposes that increases in agency disinhibit the dopamine system and thereby increase the number of tonically active dopamin...

Trait social anxiety may predict differences in the cognitive control of emotional distraction when emotional face discrimination is required. This effect can be investigated using an emotional face flanker task. This study addresses an important research gap, as previous studies did not separate the effects of trait social interaction anxiety from...

While frontal midline theta (FMθ) has been associated with threat processing, with cognitive control in the context of anxiety, and with reinforcement learning, most reinforcement learning studies on FMθ have used reward rather than threat‐related stimuli as reinforcer. Accordingly, the role of FMθ in threat‐related reinforcement learning is largel...

According to the standard definition, creative ideas must be both novel and useful. While a handful of recent studies suggest that novelty is more important than usefulness to evaluations of creativity, little is known about the contextual and interpersonal factors that affect how people weigh these two components when making an overall creativity...

Participating in creative activities is associated with increased positive emotions and enhanced subjective well-being in general populations. However, these relationships are less understood in the daily lives of creative individuals who regularly engage in both professional creative behaviors and everyday creative experiences. Therefore, in this...

Participating in creative activities is associated with increased positive emotions and enhanced subjective well-being in general populations. However, these relationships are less understood in the daily lives of creative individuals who regularly engage in both professional creative behaviors and everyday creative experiences. Therefore, in this...

Marek et al. analyzed three very large magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and concluded that thousands of participants are necessary to ensure replicable results in “brain-wide associations studies,” which they defined as “studies of the associations between common inter-individual variability in human brain structure/function and cognition...

This paper represents the outcome of a multidisciplinary discussion on what works, what does not, and what can be improved, in ongoing work on biobehavioral taxonomies and their biomarkers. The authors of this paper, representing a wide spectrum of biobehavioral disciplines (clinical, developmental, differential psychology, neurophysiology, endocri...

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is widely used to measure anxiety in academic, psychiatric, and medical settings. However, it has been proposed that the trait scale does not measure pure anxiety but contains subscales that measure either anxiety or depression. As this may have implications for the interpretation of research, we investigate...

Aims: The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between impulsivity-related personality traits based on the UPPS-P model and e-cigarette use. The study used a sample of mainly European adults and compared e-cigarette users with non-smokers, cigarette smokers and dual users (those who currently smoke cigarettes and use e-cigarettes)....

Background: Electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use continues to rise, while there is conflicting evidence about the health effects of its use. As such, research is needed to better determine risks factors for e-cigarette use. Accumulating evidence suggests that attitudes toward e-cigarette use could be a potential risk factor for e-cigarette use. O...

Trait extraversion has been theorized to emerge from functioning of the dopaminergic reward system. Recent evidence for this view shows that extraversion modulates the scalp-recorded Reward Positivity, a putative marker of dopaminergic signaling of reward-prediction-error. We attempt to replicate this association amid several improvements on previo...

On our path towards artificial general intelligence, video games have become excellent tools for research. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are particularly successful in this domain, with the added benefit of having fairly well established biological foundations. To improve how artificial intelligence research and the cognitive sciences can...

People high in social anxiety experience fear of social situations due to the likelihood of social evaluation. Whereas happy faces are generally processed very quickly, this effect is impaired by high social anxiety. Mouth regions are implicated during emotional face processing, therefore differences in mouth salience might affect how social anxiet...

The feedback-related negativity (FRN) is an EEG-based event-related potential that appears to index reward-prediction error signalling in humans. The personality trait extraversion has been implicated in sensitivity to reward and, consistent with this view, three previous studies have found a relationship between extraversion and the size of the FR...

Research shows that anxiety may relate to any or all of the following: goal conflict resolution; distraction, and the automatic detection of threat-related stimuli. To investigate these relationships we used a modified Stroop task where fearful and happy emotional target faces are overlaid with either emotionally neutral, emotionally congruent or e...

The behavioral urgency hypothesis suggests that stimuli signaling potential danger will receive attentional priority. However, results from the gaze cueing paradigm have failed to consistently show that emotional expression modulates gaze following. One possible explanation for these null results is that participants are repeatedly exposed to the s...

Phasic firing changes of midbrain dopamine neurons have been widely characterized as reflecting a reward prediction error (RPE). Major personality traits (e.g., extraversion) have been linked to inter-individual variations in dopaminergic neurotransmission. Consistent with these two claims, recent research (Smillie et al., 2011; Cooper et al., 2014...

Interactions between the Salience Network (SN) and the Default Mode Network (DMN) are thought to be important for cognitive control. However, evidence for a causal relationship between the networks is limited. Previously, we have reported that traumatic damage to white matter tracts within the SN predicts abnormal DMN function. Here we investigate...

Medial-frontal negativity occurring ∼200–300 ms post-stimulus in response to motivationally salient stimuli, usually referred to as feedback-related negativity (FRN), appears to be at least partly modulated by dopaminergic-based reward prediction error (RPE) signaling. Previous research (e.g., Smillie et al., 2011) has shown that higher scores on a...

We investigated the electrophysiological correlates of somatosensory processing under different arm postures by recording event-related potentials at frontal, central and centroparietal sites during tactile stimulation of the hands. Short series of 200 ms vibrotactile stimuli were presented to the palms of the participants' hands, one hand at a tim...

The psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs is not yet well understood, although research indicates that there are stable individual differences in conspiracist ideation - individuals' general tendency to engage with conspiracy theories. Researchers have created several short self-report measures of conspiracist ideation. These measures largely con...

British psychologists such as Hans Eysenck and Jeffrey Gray have been giants in the field of individual differences, offering psychobiological accounts of major personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism, as well as the cluster of impulsive antisocial sensation-seeking personality facets, marked by Eysenck's psychoticism scale. These t...

This research consisted of two studies, the fundamental aim of which was to delineate the pattern of relationships between measures of cognitive task performance and both symptom subtypes in schizophrenia and their corresponding schizotypal personality traits in healthy individuals. Study 1 compared these relationships in healthy individuals using...

Anxiety and fear are often confounded in discussions of human emotions. However, studies of rodent defensive reactions under naturalistic conditions suggest anxiety is functionally distinct from fear. Unambiguous threats, such as predators, elicit flight from rodents (if an escape-route is available), whereas ambiguous threats (e.g., the odor of a...

Medial frontal scalp-recorded negativity occurring ∼200–300 ms post-stimulus [known as feedback-related negativity (FRN)] is attenuated following unpredicted reward and potentiated following unpredicted non-reward. This encourages the view that FRN may partly reflect dopaminergic ‘reward–prediction–error’ signalling. We examined the influence of a...

We have discovered a directional coding error for the derived cue reactivity (CR) index. Thus contrary to the finding initially reported, CR during acute abstinence (baseline) was inversely associated with relapse risk: i.e., smokers showing high baseline CR were less likely to relapse at follow-up. In all other respects test values remain as state...

The Theory of the General Factor of Personality Evidence for the GFP Evaluating the Psychometric Evidence Artifact or Substance? Good Guys and Bad Guys Evolutionary Perspectives on the GFP Additional Challenges Conclusions Future Research Directions References

Individual differences in psychophysiological function have been shown to influence the balance between flexibility and distractibility during attentional set-shifting [e.g., Dreisbach et al. (2005). Dopamine and cognitive control: The influence of spontaneous eyeblink rate and dopamine gene polymorphisms on perseveration and distractibility. Behav...

Neurobiological models of addiction suggest that abnormalities of brain reward circuitry distort salience attribution and inhibitory control processes, which in turn contribute to high relapse rates. The aim of this study is to determine whether impairments of salience attribution and inhibitory control predict relapse in a pharmacologically unaide...

Corr argues that the behavioural inhibition system (BIS) provides executive control over automatic processes. His broad account may somewhat downplay the role of the hippocampus, thereby narrowing the range of BIS-triggering events that he considers. Recent data suggest that neurotic-anxious personality traits, reflecting the BIS, may have complex...

This study tested the assumption that measures of schizotypal personality provide non-clinical analogues of the heterogeneous symptomatology found in the schizophrenic disorder. The Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE) was administered to schizophrenic patients and healthy controls, and measures of symptomatology from the...

Quantitative geneticists estimate the heritability of Extraverted personality to be around 40-60%. Theory and research which links Extraversion with variation in dopaminergic function suggests that dopaminergic genes should be a start-point for molecular genetic investigations of this trait. Recent endeavours in this area have met with some encoura...

We have demonstrated previously that acute smoking abstinence is associated with lowered reward motivation and impaired response inhibition. This prospective study explores whether these impairments, along with withdrawal-related symptoms, recover over 3 months of sustained abstinence. Participants completed a 12-hour abstinent baseline assessment...

DeCaro et al. [DeCaro, M. S., Thomas, R. D., & Beilock, S. L. (2008). Individual differences in category learning: Sometimes less working memory capacity is better than more. Cognition, 107(1), 284-294] explored how individual differences in working memory capacity differentially mediate the learning of distinct category structures. Specifically, t...

The influence of Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) on personality psychology has been far greater than Jeffrey Gray would ever have conceived. This is especially the case for the Behavioural Activation System (or Behavioural Approach System) (BAS), which was introduced to his model on a somewhat arbitrary basis, only to be embraced by others a...

Jeffrey Gray developed a 'bottom-up' approach to personality which began with the identification of large-scale brain-behavioral systems in animals (based on lesion and psychopharmacological evidence). The systems which he emphasized were: a reward system (later termed the Behavioral Activation System or BAS); a punishment system; an arousal system...

Jeffrey Gray's (1976, 1982) behavioural inhibition system (BIS) theory of anxiety has stood well the test of time. This theory of personality – which is now widely known as reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) – has gradually evolved over the past 30 years, seeing its major revision in 2000 by Gray and McNaughton, and even further elaborations an...

This study measured schizotypal personality traits in a sample of 33 healthy participants using the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences. These traits were correlated with measures of inhibition and facilitation of response times (RTs) within a cued letter-comparison task. It was expected that scores on a measure of positive schiz...

Smokers may show abnormal functioning in prefrontal cortex during acute abstinence, reflecting deficient activity in mesocorticolimbic circuitry. Cognitive correlates of this putatively include impaired response inhibition and other aspects of executive functioning. To investigate whether inhibitory control and other executive functions in smokers...

Brain reward pathways implicated in addiction appear to be less reactive in regular drug users; behavioural manifestations may include decreased sensitivity to natural reinforcers. This study aimed to replicate earlier findings of abstinence-associated incentive motivation deficits in smokers and to determine whether these can be reversed with nico...

Berlin and Kay (1969) found systematic restrictions in the color terms of the world's languages and were inclined to look to the primate visual system for their origin. Because the visual system does not provide adequate neurophysiological discontinuities to supply natural color category boundaries, and because recent evidence points to a linguisti...

In this article, we review recent modifications to Jeffrey Gray's (1973, 1991) reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST), and attempt to draw implications for psychometric measurement of personality traits. First, we consider Gray and McNaughton's (2000) functional revisions to the biobehavioral systems of RST. Second, we evaluate recent clarification...

This was an exploratory study with three aims: (1) to examine the relationship during pregnancy between expectations of birth and symptoms of anxiety; (2) to examine the relationship between expectations and subsequent experience of birth; (3) to examine the effect of parity on expectations and experience. A prospective postal questionnaire study w...

This chapter describes the first steps on the research work that aims at understanding the neuropsychological foundations of a specific cluster of personality traits that are referred to as impulsive antisocial sensation seeking (ImpASS). Schizotypal personality traits are tendencies to behave and think in ways that are qualitatively similar to fea...

The neural circuitry implicated in addictive drug use, which appears to be down-regulated in early abstinence, corresponds closely with brain reward pathways. A literature review suggests that responses to incentive stimuli and the ability to inhibit reflexive responses, both of which have been associated with normal functioning in these pathways,...

The effect of a sequentially presented memory scanning task on rule-based and information-integration category learning was investigated. On each trial in the short feedback-processing time condition, memory scanning immediately followed categorization. On each trial in the long feedback-processing time condition, categorization was followed by a 2...

It is argued in this report that there is a need to integrateknowledgeondevelopmental processes in children and adolescents and to document the behavioral outcomes which are the result of these processes. The present study will attempt to contribute to the need for multidisciplinary research by bringing together in a single study, a conduct disorde...

Data were analysed from 640 attempts by eyewitnesses to identify the alleged culprit in 314 lineups organised by the Metropolitan Police in London. Characteristics of the witness, the suspect, the witness’s opportunity to view the culprit, the crime and the lineup were recorded. Data analysis, using mixed effects multinomial logistic regression, re...

Schizophrenic patients show deficits on stimulus salience tasks such as latent inhibition and blocking, which measure the ability to disregard irrelevant stimuli. Amphetamine-treated animals show similar deficits in analogous tasks, thereby providing a model of the stimulus-selection deficits observed in schizophrenia. In two experiments, the effec...

The partial reinforcement extinction effect (PREE) was studied in human subjects. It has been suggested that the PREE depends on neural mechanisms critical to the cognitive dysfunction which underlines acute schizophrenia. We therefore predicted that the PREE should be reduced, through decreased resistance to extinction in the partial reinforcement...

It has been proposed that a characteristic of schizophrenic processing is an abnormality of top-down processing. The relationship between impaired top-down processing and symptoms of reality distortion was investigated using a 'degraded interference' task. In this task, fragmented stimuli (Stroop words, control words and crosses) are presented on a...

Although usually displaying increased distractibility, schizophrenic patients sometimes show a reduced influence of distractors during selective attention tasks. This study explored whether reduced distractor processing effects can also occur in healthy individuals with high levels of schizotypal personality traits. In all, 36 healthy volunteers co...

Many theoretical accounts of selective attention and memory retrieval include reference to active inhibitory processes, such as those argued to underlie the negative priming effect. fMRI was used in order to investigate the areas of cortical activation associated with Stroop interference, Stroop facilitation and Stroop negative priming tasks. The m...

Latent inhibition (LI) is a measure of reduced learning about a stimulus to which there has been prior exposure without any consequence. It therefore requires a comparison between a pre-exposed (PE) and a non-pre-exposed (NPE) condition. Since, in animals, LI is disrupted by amphetamines and enhanced by antipsychotics, LI disruption has been propos...

Recent research suggests that a proportion of women may develop posttraumatic stress disorder after birth. Research has not yet addressed the possibility that postpartum symptoms could be a continuation of the disorder in pregnancy. This study aimed to test the idea that some women develop posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of childbirth, an...

To examine the impact of fitness training with recently brain-injured inpatients on exercise capacity and functional and psychologic outcome measures. A randomized controlled trial of exercise versus relaxation training for 3 months. Blind assessments were conducted before and after the end of a 12-week training program, as well as at follow-up ass...

Cognitive models of schizophrenia have highlighted deficits of inhibitory attentional processes as central to the disorder. This has been investigated using "negative priming" (S. P. Tipper, 1985), with schizophrenia patients showing a reduction of negative priming in a number of studies. This study attempted to replicate these findings, but studie...

A dynamic threshold, which controls the nature and course of learning, is a pivotal concept in Page's general localist framework. This commentary addresses various issues surrounding biologically plausible implementations for such thresholds. Relevant previous research is noted and the particular difficulties relating to the creation of so-called i...

Forty-seven patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were investigated on the Nine-Box Maze. The task was designed to compare working memory and spatial mapping theories of the functions of the hippocampus and provide measures of spatial, object, working, and reference memory. The results extended our previous findings in a larger grou...

Discusses evidence for a specific link between pedestrian accident risk and problem behaviour in children, including the authors' study which involved 1,027 children (aged 7–15 yrs) recruited via general practice and accident and emergency records in south London. Of this sample, 150 had been involved in one or more pedestrian or cycling accidents....

This work describes a neural network model which simulates a discrete part of the dopaminergic striatal circuitry involved in reinforcement learning. We consider the proposal that learning by reinforcement is acquired by a heterosynaptic mechanism a!ecting plasticity of corticostriatal synapses, under the modulatory control of DA neurons. The simul...

Depue & Collins associate dopaminergically mediated incentive motivational processes with extraversion. In this commentary I consider dopaminergic indices from neuroimaging investigations which correlate more closely with impulsive sensation seeking personality traits than with extraversion. Measures of relevant behavioural processes also appe...

Aggleton & Brown suggest that whereas familiarity is computed in perirhinal cortex, the hippocampus contributes to recollection. This account raises issues about the definition of amnesia, clarifies confusion about dual-process models of recognition, and sits comfortably with accounts of hippocampal function from outside the amnesia literature...

In a recent paper C. L. Rusting and R. J. Larsen (see record 1997-04006-002) studied the relationship between positive/negative mood induction and personality traits (extraversion, E; neuroticism, N). They showed that positive mood induction was positively correlated with E and negative mood induction was positively correlated with N and negativel...

Effects of punishment and personality on a phylogenetically old form of knowledge acquisition, procedural learning, were studied to test J. A. Gray's 1970, 1987, 1991) theory of anxiety. Broad measures of personality (extraversion, E.; neuroticism, N; and psychoticism, P) and specific measures of trait anxiety (Anx) and impulsivity (Imp) were taken...

Effects of punishment and personality on a phylogenetically old form of knowledge acquisition, procedural learning, were studied to test J. A. Gray's (1970, 1987, 1991) theory of anxiety. Broad measures of personality (extraversion, E; neuroticism, N; and psychoticism, P) and specific measures of trait anxiety (Anx) and impulsivity (Imp) were taken...

To examine the relation between cognitive dysfunction and pseudobulbar features in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The performance of two patient groups, ALS with pseudobulbar palsy (n = 24) and ALS without pseudobulbar palsy (n = 28), was compared with 28 healthy age matched controls on an extensive neuropsychological battery. T...

Traces the conceptual nervous system (CoNS) approach to the study of personality back to the ideas of Pavlov, with an emphasis on the links between his ideas and 2 strands of modern European personality theory (Eysenck's arousal theory of extraversion, 1967 and Gray's reinforcement sensitivity theory, 1970). Recent data concerning reinforcement sen...

The effect of oral amphetamine administration on the Kamin-blocking effect in healthy volunteer subjects was investigated. Against predictions, Kamin blocking was not disrupted by either a high or low oral dose of D-amphetamine under conditions which have, in previous studies, led to disruption of a related learning phenomenon (latent inhibition)....

Patients with unilateral temporal lobe damage resulting from intractable temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE, n = 30) or from temporal lobe resection (temporal lobectomy, TLR, n = 47) were investigated on the Nine-box Maze. The task, analogous to the radial arm maze, was designed to compare spatial mapping and working memory theories of the functions of th...

In this paper I first consider a neurofunctional approach to the study of amnesic patients. This approach stresses the need for theorising about the processing operations of brain regions and circuits rather than for theorising about neuropsychological syndromes. A syndrome such as amnesia-may not exist, in any meaningful sense, if there is marked...

This chapter discusses individual differences in personality in terms of reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST). The authors discuss how this theory has fared, especially in the light of data recently gathered in their own laboratories. A major contention of this chapter is that the work that has been carried out to date, plus the authors' own rece...