Allen, J. J., Schnyer, R. N., & Hitt, S. K. (1998). The efficacy of acupuncture in the treatment of major depression in women. Psychological Science, 9(5), 397-401.
Abstract:
The effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for major depression was examined in 38 women, randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups. Specific treatment involved acupuncture treatments for symptoms of depression; nonspecific treatment involved acupuncture for symptoms that were not clearly part of depression; a wait-list condition involved waiting without treatment for 8 weeks. The nonspecific and wait-list conditions were followed by specific treatment. Five women terminated treatment prematurely, 4 prior to the completion of the first 8 weeks. Following treatments specifically designed to address depression, 64% of the women (n = 33) experienced full remission. A comparison of the acute effect of the three 8-week treatment conditions (n = 34) showed that patients receiving specific acupuncture treatments improved significantly more than those receiving the placebo-like nonspecific acupuncture treatments, and marginally more than those in the wait-list condition. Results from this small sample suggest that acupuncture can provide significant symptom relief in depression, at rates comparable to those of psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy. Acupuncture may hold sufficient promise to warrant a larger scale clinical trial.
Mussel, P., Hewig, J., Allen, J. J., Coles, M. G., & Miltner, W. (2014). Smiling faces, sometimes they don't tell the truth: Facial expression in the ultimatum game impacts decision making and event-related potentials. Psychophysiology, 51, 358--363.
J., J., & Iacono, W. G. (1997). A comparison of methods for the analysis of event-related potentials in deception detection. Psychophysiology, 34(2), 234-240.
PMID: 9090275;Abstract:
We previously reported that a Bayesian-based event-related potential memory assessment procedure (Allen, lacono, and Danielson, 1992. Psychophysiology, 29, 504-522) was highly accurate at identifying previously learned material, regardless of an individual's motivational incentive to conceal information. When a bootstrapping procedure (Farwell and Donchin, 1991. Psychophysiology, 28, 531-5475) is applied to these same data, greater motivational incentives appear to increase the accuracy of the procedure. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to examine these two procedures and a new procedure. ROC curves indicated that all three methods produce extremely high rates of classification accuracy and that the sensitivity of the bootstrapping procedure to motivational incentive is due to the particular cut points selected. One or the other method may be preferred depending upon incentive to deceive, the cost of incorrect decisions, and the availability of extra psychophysiological data.
J., J., & Cohen, M. X. (2010). Deconstructing the "resting" state: Exploring the temporal dynamics of frontal alpha asymmetry as an endophenotype for depression. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4.
PMID: 21228910;PMCID: PMC3017362;Abstract:
Asymmetry in frontal electrocortical alpha-band (8-13 Hz) activity recorded during resting situations (i.e., in absence of a specific task) has been investigated in relation to emotion and depression for over 30 years. This asymmetry reflects an aspect of endogenous cortical dynamics that is stable over repeated measurements and that may serve as an endophenotype for mood or other psychiatric disorders. In nearly all of this research, EEG activity is averaged across several minutes, obscuring transient dynamics that unfold on the scale of milliseconds to seconds. Such dynamic states may ultimately have greater value in linking brain activity to surface EEG asymmetry, thus improving its status as an endophenotype for depression. Here we introduce novel metrics for characterizing frontal alpha asymmetry that provide a more in-depth neurodynamical understanding of recurrent endogenous cortical processes during the resting-state. The metrics are based on transient ''bursts'' of asymmetry that occur frequently during the resting-state. In a sample of 306 young adults, 143 with a lifetime diagnosis of major depressive disorder (62 currently symptomatic), three questions were addressed: (1) How do novel peri-burst metrics of dynamic asymmetry compare to conventional fast-Fourier transform-based metrics? (2) Do peri-burst metrics adequately differentiate depressed from non-depressed participants? and, (3) what EEG dynamics surround the asymmetry bursts? Peri-burst metrics correlated with traditional measures of asymmetry, and were sensitive to both current and past episodes of major depression. Moreover, asymmetry bursts were characterized by a transient lateralized alpha suppression that is highly consistent in phase across bursts, and a concurrent contralateral transient alpha enhancement that is less tightly phase-locked across bursts. This approach opens new possibilities for investigating rapid cortical dynamics during resting-state EEG. © 2010 Allen and Cohen.
Allen, J. J., Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1987). Cognitive slippage and depression in hypothetically psychosis-prone college students. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 175(6), 347-353.
PMID: 3585311;Abstract:
Subjects who scored deviantly high on the combined Perceptual Aberration-Magical Ideation (Per-Mag) Scale and subjects who scored low on the scale were compared on two putative measures of cognitive slippage - a continued word association task and a task of referential communication. The Per-Mag subjects performed more deviantly than did the control subjects on both tasks, but those Per-Mag subjects who also scored above the mean on the General Behavior Inventory (GBI) depression subscale were most deviant. The Per-Mag Scale and the GBI are recommended for concurrent use in mass screening to identify a group of individuals who exhibit signs of cognitive slippage and who may, therefore, be at risk for the development of severe psychopathology.