Low spatial frequency filtering modulates early brain processing of affective complex pictures

Recent research on affective processing has suggested that low spatial frequency information of fearful faces provide rapid emotional cues to the amygdala, whereas high spatial frequencies convey fine-grained information to the fusiform gyrus, regardless of emotional expression. In the present experiment, we examined the effects of low (LSF, <15 cycles/image width) and high spatial frequency filtering (HSF, >25 cycles/image width) on brain processing of complex pictures depicting pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral scenes. Event-related potentials (ERP), percentage of recognized stimuli and response times were recorded in 19 healthy volunteers. Behavioral results indicated faster reaction times in response to unpleasant LSF than to unpleasant HSF pictures. Unpleasant LSF pictures and pleasant unfiltered pictures also elicited significant enhancements of P1 amplitudes at occipital electrodes as compared to neutral LSF and unfiltered pictures, respectively; whereas no significant effects of affective modulation were found for HSF pictures. Moreover, mean ERP amplitudes in the time between 200 and 500ms post-stimulus were significantly greater for affective (pleasant and unpleasant) than for neutral unfiltered pictures; whereas no significant affective modulation was found for HSF or LSF pictures at those latencies. The fact that affective LSF pictures elicited an enhancement of brain responses at early, but not at later latencies, suggests the existence of a rapid and preattentive neural mechanism for the processing of motivationally relevant stimuli, which could be driven by LSF cues. Our findings confirm thus previous results showing differences on brain processing of affective LSF and HSF faces, and extend these results to more complex and social affective pictures.

La cultura política del sandinismo: nacimiento, desarrollo y realineamiento de una anomalía política centroamericana

Sandinista ideology and its political culture are born in 1927, with the refusal of the Pacto del Espino Negro by Augusto César Sandino, while its disappearance can be placed in 1999, date of the signature of the Liberal-Sandinista pact with which –effectively- the two main protagonist of nicaraguan politics at that time, Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán, halt the democratization process of Nicaragua, so putting on ice also its political development. Meanwhile, in the lapse of time between these two pacts, the most intense, feverish, dramatic and participated period of political history of the Central American country develops: an anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare ended in a bloodbath; a dynastic dictatorship of predatory authoritarianism for more than 40 years; a popular revolution that throws down the dictatorship; a decade of revolutionary government attacked by a counter-revolutionary war; an electoral defeat that will lead to a season of “pactismo” that will end the Sandinista anomaly and that will give an opening to something that we could consider –not with a certain difficulty- its pretence. The aim of this essay consists in analyzing how it has been possible that a political experience like the Sandinista Front , created not only for gaining power and for revolutionizing politically, socially and economically Nicaragua, but also for changing radically cultural, ethic and moral perspective of the country and its people, arrived being the contrary of what had been posed as the horizon to aspire...