Depressed patients show cognitive deficits along with mood disturbances. Growing evidence suggests an impairment at the level of executive control, which might account in part for patients' difficulties in everyday activities and cognitive performance. Furthermore, there is evidence that depressive patients show information processing biases for emotional information which are thought to play a role in the etiology and maintenance of the disorder. Attentional bias occurs in an early stage of information processing, while memory bias occurs in a later stage of processing (strategic elaboration). The goal of this study was to investigate executive control (the Stroop test) and information processing biases for emotional information in an early stage of processing (the emotional Stroop test) and in a later stage of processing (memory recognition test) in healthy subjects and depressive patients. A further objective of this study was to compare the performance of melancholic and non-melancholic depressive patients in the Stroop test, in the emotional Stroop test and in the memory recognition test. Last, we wanted to investigate the relationship between the performance in an executive control task (the Stroop effect) and information processing bias measures for emotional information. This study is the first to investigate the Stroop test, the emotional Stroop test and the memory recognition test in the same healthy subjects and depressed patients. Furthermore, this is the first study investigating information processing biases for emotional information in the melancholic and non-melancholic patients.

Executive control was investigated using the Stroop task, which has been extensively used to study executive control. The emotional Stroop task has widely been used to investigate attentional biases in anxiety and depression and was therefore employed also in this study. Memory bias was examined with the memory recognition test since it allowed us to study both “pure” memory and response bias. Response accuracy d’ and response bias beta were calculated according to the signal-detection model. Twenty-three depressive patients and 27 healthy subjects performed computerized mixed trial
Stroop and emotional Stroop tests. Afterwards, the subjects performed the memory recognition task. Depressive patients were divided according to DSM-IV diagnosis into melancholic and non-melancholic subgroups. Furthermore the level of anxiety and depression was assessed in all subjects.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was commonly assumed that terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would be counterproductive because such an act would be widely condemned. “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” Brian Jenkins (1975:15) opined. Jenkins’s premise was based on the assumption that terrorist behavior is normative, and that if they exceeded certain constraints and employed WMD they would completely alienate themselves from the public and possibly provoke swift and harsh retaliation. This assumption does seem to apply to certain secular terrorist groups. If a separatist organization such as the Provisional Irish Republic Army (PIRA) or the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna—ETA), for example, were to use WMD, these groups would likely isolate their constituency and undermine sources of funding and political support. When the assumptions about terrorist groups not using WMD were made in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the terrorist groups making headlines were groups with political or nationalist-separatist agenda. Those groups, with some exceptions, such as the Japanese Red Army (JRA—Rengo Sekigun), had reason not to sabotage their ethnic bases of popular support or other domestic or foreign sympathizers of their cause by using WMD.

Trends in terrorism over the past three decades, however, have contradicted the conventional thinking that terrorists are averse to using WMD. It has becomeincreasingly evident that the assumption does not apply to religious terrorist groups or millenarian cults (see Glossary). Indeed, since at least the early 1970s analysts, including (somewhat contradictorily) Jenkins, have predicted that the first groups to employ a weapon of mass destruction would be religious sectswith a millenarian, messianic, or apocalyptic mindset.

There is a large economics literature on individual and economy-wide productivity. There is also a fast-growing one on the measurement of individuals’ mental well-being. Yet economists know little about the interplay between emotions and human productivity. Although people’s happiness and effort decisions seem likely to be deeply intertwined, we lack evidence on whether, and how, they are causally connected.

This paper seeks to make two contributions. First, it attempts to alert economists to a psychology literature in which happiness (or more precisely what psychologists describe as positive affect) has been shown to be associated with higher human performance. Here the work of the psychologist Alice Isen has been particularly important. The second contribution of the paper is to design and perform an empirical inquiry that has not been done in the psychology literature. It addresses a question of particular interest to economists (and perhaps to policy-makers). Does happiness make people more productive in a paid task? We provide evidence in a standardized piece rate setting with otherwise fairly well-understood properties that it does.

In 1969 the brutal murders committed in Southern California by the followers of Charles Manson riveted the attention of the American public. The apparently senseless killings of ten people were explained by the media as the result of the strange hypnotic power exercised by Manson, who had convinced the disciples that he was Christ incarnate. Manson, in response, argued that he was nothing more than a mirror, reflecting society's own dark fantasies.

Nearly ten years later, the residents of Jonestown, a commune isolated in the jungles of Guyana, killed a visiting member of the United States House of Representatives and some of his entourage. Then, at the request of their leader, Jim Jones, nearly all of the hundreds of men, women and children of the Temple drank cyanide-laced kool-aid and died in the greatest mass suicide of modern history. At first it was assumed that the suicides were forced, but evidence indicated instead that these people willingly killed themselves and their children in order to accompany their beloved leader, whom they worshipped as a god on earth.