‘NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat: A New Perspective on Western Threat Perception and Policy Making’

It has been argued that the US strategy paper NSC 68 of 1950 which ushered in the great Cold War rearmament process first in the US and then in NATO was a vast overreaction. This paper argues, by contrast, that given the intelligence about the Soviet Union's and its satellites' military buildup and the role of China in that period, this was a reasonable strategy to embrace.

Securing critical infrastructures and critical control systems: approaches for threat protection

The increased use of technology is necessary in order for industrial control systems to maintain and monitor industrial, infrastructural, or environmental processes. The need to secure and identify threats to the system is equally critical. Securing Critical Infrastructures and Critical Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection provides a full and detailed understanding of the vulnerabilities and security threats that exist within an industrial control system. This collection of research defines and analyzes the technical, procedural, and managerial responses to securing these systems.

Prefrontal inhibition of threat processing reduces working memory interference

Bottom-up processes can interrupt ongoing cognitive processing in order to adaptively respond to emotional stimuli of high potential significance, such as those that threaten wellbeing. However it is vital that this interference can be modulated in certain contexts to focus on current tasks. Deficits in the ability to maintain the appropriate balance between cognitive and emotional demands can severely impact on day-to-day activities. This fMRI study examined this interaction between threat processing and cognition; 18 adult participants performed a visuospatial working memory (WM) task with two load conditions, in the presence and absence of anxiety induction by threat of electric shock. Threat of shock interfered with performance in the low cognitive load condition; however interference was eradicated under high load, consistent with engagement of emotion regulation mechanisms. Under low load the amygdala showed significant activation to threat of shock that was modulated by high cognitive load. A directed top-down control contrast identified two regions associated with top-down control; ventrolateral PFC and dorsal ACC. Dynamic causal modeling provided further evidence that under high cognitive load, top-down inhibition is exerted on the amygdala and its outputs to prefrontal regions. Additionally, we hypothesized that individual differences in a separate, non-emotional top-down control task would predict the recruitment of dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC during top-down control of threat. Consistent with this, performance on a separate dichotic listening task predicted dorsal ACC and ventrolateral PFC activation during high WM load under threat of shock, though activation in these regions did not directly correlate with WM performance. Together, the findings suggest that under high cognitive load and threat, top-down control is exerted by dACC and vlPFC to inhibit threat processing, thus enabling WM performance without threat-related interference.

Interpretation of ambiguous situations: evidence for a dissociation between social and physical threat in Williams syndrome

Williams Syndrome (WS) is associated with an unusual profile of anxiety, characterised by increased rates of non-social anxiety but not social anxiety (Dodd & Porter, 2009). The present research examines whether this profile of anxiety is associated with an interpretation bias for ambiguous physical, but not social, situations. Sixteen participants with WS, aged 13-34 years, and two groups of typically developing controls matched to the WS group on chronological age (CA) and mental age (MA), participated. Consistent with the profile of anxiety reported in WS, the WS group were significantly more likely to interpret an ambiguous physical situation as threatening than both control groups. However, no between-group differences were found on the ambiguous social situations.

The dynamic effects of age-related stereotype threat on explicit and implicit memory performance in older adults

While an awareness of age-related changes in memory may help older adults gain insight into their own cognitive abilities, it may also have a negative impact on memory performance through a mechanism of stereotype threat (ST). The consequence of ST is under-performance in abilities related to the stereotype. Here, we examined the degree to which explicit and implicit memory were affected by ST across a wide age-range. We found that explicit memory was affected by ST, but only in an Early-Aging group (mean age 67.83), and not in a Later-Aging group (mean age 84.59). Implicit memory was not affected in either the Early or Later Aging group. These results demonstrate that ST for age-related memory decline affects memory processes requiring controlled retrieval while sparing item encoding. Furthermore, this form of ST appears to dissipate as aging progresses. These results have implications for understanding psychological development across the span of aging.

Instantaneous threat detection based on a semantic representation of activities, zones and trajectories

Threat detection is a challenging problem, because threats appear in many variations and differences to normal behaviour can be very subtle. In this paper, we consider threats on a parking lot, where theft of a truck’s cargo occurs. The threats range from explicit, e.g. a person attacking the truck driver, to implicit, e.g. somebody loitering and then fiddling with the exterior of the truck in order to open it. Our goal is a system that is able to recognize a threat instantaneously as they develop. Typical observables of the threats are a person’s activity, presence in a particular zone and the trajectory. The novelty of this paper is an encoding of these threat observables in a semantic, intermediate-level representation, based on low-level visual features that have no intrinsic semantic meaning themselves. The aim of this representation was to bridge the semantic gap between the low-level tracks and motion and the higher-level notion of threats. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our semantic representation is more descriptive for threat detection than directly using low-level features. We find that a person’s activities are the most important elements of this semantic representation, followed by the person’s trajectory. The proposed threat detection system is very accurate: 96.6 % of the tracks are correctly interpreted, when considering the temporal context.

The application of social marketing in reducing road traffic accidents amoung young male drivers: an investigation using physical fear threat appeals

There were 338 road fatalities on Irish roads in 2007. Research in 2007 by the Road Safety Authority in Ireland states that young male drivers (17 – 25 years) are seven times more likely to be killed on Irish roads than other road users. The car driver fatality rate was found to be approximately 10 times higher for young male drivers than for female drivers in 2000. Young male drivers in particular demonstrate a high proclivity for risky driving behaviours. These risky behaviours include drink driving, speeding, rug-driving and engaging in aggressive driving. Speed is the single largest contributing factor to road deaths in Ireland. Approximately 40% of fatal accidents are caused by excessive or inappropriate speed. This study focuses on how dangerous driving behaviours may be addressed through social marketing. This study analyses the appropriate level of fear that needs to be induced in order to change young male driving behaviour.

Environmental SLAPPs in the UK: threat or opportunity?

Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) brought against the environmental movement in the UK since the 1990s are examined. SLAPPs, a form of Green backlash, have been mobilised across a wide range of policy areas that have seen vigorous campaigning and protest by the movement, including roads, GMOs and, more recently, climate change. SLAPPs are typically regarded as a threat, designed to close down democratic free speech and protest. However, in the UK, there are some notable cases where the environmental movement has been able to use agency to convert what may appear as a legal threat into a positive legal or media opportunity.

Threat interpretation bias in anxious children and their mothers

The role of parents in the development of anxiety disorders in children is of increasing research and clinical interest. This study investigated interpretation biases of anxious children and their mothers using the ambiguous stimuli task developed by Hadwin, Frost, French, and Richards (1997). Three groups of children (aged 7 to 12 years) and their mothers were recruited; 23 non-clinical controls, 18 children with an anxiety disorder and 15 children with an externalising disorder. Following diagnostic assessments of the children, children and their mothers independently completed the homophone task and self-report measures of anxiety. Mothers of anxious children had significantly higher self-reported anxiety than mothers of non-clinical children. As hypothesised, children in the anxious group had higher threat interpretation scores than the non-clinical group. The hypothesis that mothers of anxious children would make more threat interpretations was not supported. Paired correlations showed no significant association between threat interpretations made by children and their mothers. There was a significant positive correlation between maternal threat interpretation and child anxiety. The results suggest that there is a complex association between mother's anxiety and cognitions and those of their children, which requires further examination in controlled observational and experimental studies, including treatment trials.

What is going on around here? Intolerance of uncertainty predicts threat generalization

Attending to stimuli that share perceptual similarity to learned threats is an adaptive strategy. However, prolonged threat generalization to cues signalling safety is considered a core feature of pathological anxiety. One potential factor that may sustain over-generalization is sensitivity to future threat uncertainty. To assess the extent to which Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) predicts threat generalization, we recorded skin conductance in 54 healthy participants during an associative learning paradigm, where threat and safety cues varied in perceptual similarity. Lower IU was associated with stronger discrimination between threat and safety cues during acquisition and extinction. Higher IU, however, was associated with generalized responding to threat and safety cues during acquisition, and delayed discrimination between threat and safety cues during extinction. These results were specific to IU, over and above other measures of anxious disposition. These findings highlight: (1) a critical role of uncertainty-based mechanisms in threat generalization, and (2) IU as a potential risk factor for anxiety disorder development.

Acquisition of Pavlovian Fear Conditioning Using beta-Adrenoceptor Activation of the Dorsal Premammillary Nucleus as an Unconditioned Stimulus to Mimic Live Predator-Threat Exposure

In the present work, we sought to mimic the internal state changes in response to a predator threat by pharmacologically stimulating the brain circuit involved in mediating predator fear responses, and explored whether this stimulation would be a valuable unconditioned stimulus (US) in an olfactory fear conditioning paradigm (OFC). The dorsal premammillary nucleus (PMd) is a key brain structure in the neural processing of anti-predatory defensive behavior and has also been shown to mediate the acquisition and expression of anti-predatory contextual conditioning fear responses. Rats were conditioned by pairing the US, which was an intra-PMd microinjection of isoproterenol (ISO; beta-adrenoceptor agonist), with amyl acetate odor-the conditioned stimulus (CS). ISO (10 and 40 nmol) induced the acquisition of the OFC and the second-order association by activation of beta-1 receptors in the PMd. Furthermore, similar to what had been found for contextual conditioning to a predator threat, atenolol (beta-1 receptor antagonist) in the PMd also impaired the acquisition and expression of OFC promoted by ISO. Considering the strong glutamatergic projections from the PMd to the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG), we tested how the glutamatergic blockade of the dPAG would interfere with the OFC induced by ISO. Accordingly, microinjections of NMDA receptor antagonist (AP5, 6 nmol) into the dPAG were able to block both the acquisition, and partially, the expression of the OFC. In conclusion, we have found that PMd beta-1 adrenergic stimulation is a good model to mimic predatory threat-induced internal state changes, and works as a US able to mobilize the same systems involved in the acquisition and expression of predator-related contextual conditioning. Neuropsychopharmacology (2011) 36, 926-939; doi:10.1038/npp.2010.231; published online 5 January 2011

Taxation threat, motivational postures, and responsive regulation

The central proposition of motivational posturing theory is that regulatees place social distance between themselves and authority, communicating the nature of that distance through a narrative that protects the self from negative appraisal by the authority. One of the key components of posturing is the coping sensibility that individuals adopt to manage the threat of authority. At a baseline level, authorities make demands on citizens and as such threaten individual freedom. At the highest level, authorities threaten through punishment for non-compliance. Data collected from 3,253 randomly selected Australian taxpayers and a special group of 2,292 taxpayers in conflict with the tax authority are used to show that in both groups, three coping sensibilities contribute to posturing ("thinking morally,""feeling oppressed," and "taking control"), and that all three sensibilities are significantly heightened in the group experiencing conflict with the authority. The article argues that the most effective regulatory outcome is achieved when the regulatory process can dampen the "taking control" and "feeling oppressed" sensibilities, and strengthen the "thinking morally" sensibility. Responsive regulation is an approach that encourages tax authorities to read motivational postures, understand the sensibilities that shape them, and tailor a regulatory intervention accordingly.

System of systems approach to threat detection and integration of heterogeneous independently operable systems

This paper presents a system of systems approach to threat detection through integration of heterogeneous independently operable systems. The approach is presented on a realistic situation where a human-controlled base robot, swarm robot(s), and sensors work together to obtain a decision about a possible threat in the environment. The base robot is remotely operated by a human using a haptic control system. The swarm robot(s) are autonomous and can accept directives from the base robot. Finally, sensors directly communicate with (report to) the base robot. In this scenario, heterogeneous systems and human interact in a system of systems architecture. With the inclusion of human expert and sensor verification of swarm robots, the system can successfully perform the threat detection and reduce the false alarms. Finally, a system of systems simulation framework including a base robot, a swarm robot, and two sensors is presented in addition to an experimental evaluation of the proposed SoS architecture

The 'China Threat' in American self-imagination: the discursive construction of other as power politics

Argues that the "China threat" argument in mainstream international relations literature in the United States is derived, primarily, from a discursive construction of otherness. Construction which is predicated on a particular narcissistic understanding of the U.S. self and on a positivist-based realism, concerned with absolute certainty and security; Concern which is central to the dominant U.S. self-imagery.