Positive
- the author has provided a detail background in the contribution of gene
- clear indication of aims and hypothesis
- provided detail information in design and material section
Negative
- should have clarify (methodology and result) and criticized past research
- the author failed to clarify the methodology use in the proposed study (Hariri et al. , 2000)
- missing information (i.e. figure)
Confused
- I don't understand the use of emotion task, as both anger and fear are negative emotion, the
stimuli itself would be confounded if the author is concerned with attentional bias toward negative
stimuli (as both anger and fear facial expression are considered as threat signals).
- I don't understand the definition of amygdala reactivity, why is it measured as a change score
between the emotional task and the sensormotor task
- the measurement of cognitive bias and cognitive vulnerability are confusing
Things I liked…
-
Starts broad so you can see the meaningful implications of the work straight away
The procedure seemed to be generally well thought out and well justified e.g. choice
of scales
Generally nice flow between paragraphs in the background section: could see how
each paragraph linked to the previous paragraph
Things I didn’t like…
-
-
Some grammatical errors / missing words
o E.g. Overuse of “which” (often confuse “which” and “that”)
o E.g. p8 “so as [to] rule out”, “They will also be divided [into] two groups”
Would gain clarity from being more concise. Sometimes it was a bit too wordy, there
are sentences where extra words or repetitious words have been used that make it a
bit convoluted (e.g. p9 “later investigations began to investigate”)
When I got to the aims and predicted outcomes, I was surprised by the use of
children as participants – I think there needed to be more in the background about
kids. Even just a mention of the fact that there isn’t much research in this area with
regards to children.
o Same thing with “depressogenic attribution style” – it wasn’t mentioned at all
in the background, so it comes as a surprise in the aims
Becomes less clear as it goes on, parts of the significance and implications section
are quite difficult to understand
Things I didn’t understand…
-
When referring to a more “reactive amygdala”, it’s not clear whether the amygdala
is only more reactive in response to negative stimuli or all emotional stimuli
-
On p3 it says “structural and functional changes to the amygdala”, but what are
these changes? Or at least, do they relate to the incidence of depression?
Why the age range? It seems like 6-12 years is a big age range, especially for
measuring brain activity (lots of change and growth happening in this time)
Other questions…
Would you expect any difference between fearful and angry faces? These have the same valence,
but differ in that anger is an approach emotion, but fear is a withdrawal emotion. I noticed the
measurement was to be taken from the right amygdala, but approach and withdrawal show
different patterns of left/right hemisphere activation.
What about the recency/severity of trauma? Or the age of experiencing trauma?
3 things i liked:
-method section is quite clear
-lots of details given
-
3 things i didnt like:
-introduction too wordy, seems to jump around in ideas - hard to follow logic
- i dont see the point of this study - when we already know that early life stress can cause depression later
in life
- in the section about significance - it takes too long to go into why this study was so important - what we
would learn and how it helps us understand depression.
3 things i didnt understand:
-why match people with same iq?
-why didnt they go into any details of past experiments? only giving results...
-in the last section - it is written that it will help us to identify "at risk" individuals - 1)how would we know
who has short alleles? 2)it already seems obvious that those from maltreated backgrounds are at risk. 3)i
dont see the point of this study
I like:
1. A well structured-background, there is enough information there for someone who’s
not familiar with neuroscience to understand how one point leads to another
2. Variables in methodology were all well thought out and relevant; looked at all areas
of the question - genotype, early experience, amygdala reactivity and attributional
style
3. The Significant section was also relevant, highlighting the benefits of this study in
picking out “ at risk” individuals earlier on in life, and also proposed intervention
strategies or solutions if results were found to be significant
I didn’t like:
1. Although it’s informative enough for someone to understand what the researcher is
trying to say, a lot of “how” questions were left unanswered, e.g. how does early
experience affect the structural changes of the amygdala and how does amygdala
activity change affective behaviour? More information about these statements
would be more interesting and informative.
2. If the issue here is a reactive amygdala, then taking into account the positive scale of
the CASQ-R as well as positive images in the fMRI paradigm would also be interesting
to look at and good to control - rather than “picking out” what they want to see.
3. More than 6 spelling/grammatical mistakes found (underly?, sever, valency etc.). I
think this is important as it questions the credibility of the proposal.
4. Don’t see the point of mentioning (without further explaining) under Innovation that
it will be an Australian sample since it’s supposedly a different experiment to past
studies, and it’s not going to be taken into account during analysis anyway
I didn’t understand:
1. In terms of methodology – will there also be 6 images in the control trial block too?
Only mentioned how many images in emotion block, this is important to control for
how long the participants performed the task (the longer, the more changes in
amygdala activity?).
2. How signal change is exactly calculated - Is signal change score calculated by
subtracting from the mean of each task or for each block? Or the peak in activity for
each one?
3. Since DNA sampling occurs after recruitment, how will they analyse the data in the
case of unequal n’s? It is most likely that the possession of s/s, s/l etc. alleles (and
their early life experience) won’t fall equally across the 3 groups