People hold divergent beliefs regarding the controllability of their emotions. These beliefs can refer to emotion, in general, or to a particular emotion. But are beliefs about particular emotions distinct and emotion-specific or do they capture one general construct? To address this question, in this investigation, we tested the emotion-specificity of such beliefs. In Study 1 (N = 244), we assessed beliefs about the ability to control sadness, anger, and disgust, cross-sectionally. Beliefs about the ability to control specific emotions were associated but psychometrically distinct. As expected, beliefs about the ability to control a specific emotion were largely associated with experiences of that emotion at both the trait and state levels, although there was some overlap. In Study 2 (N = 157), we tested beliefs about the ability to control sadness and irritation in daily life, over 7 daily diaries. As expected, beliefs about the ability to control a specific emotion were associated with the respective trait emotion, and prospectively and differentially predicted experiences of that emotion in daily life. These findings demonstrate that although there is some commonality across them, beliefs about the ability to control particular emotions are emotion-specific. Accordingly, to better understand the experience and regulation of specific emotions, it may be useful to assess beliefs about the controllability of those emotions, in particular.

The paper addresses the issue of the paradoxical impact on religious fundamentalism within intergroup relations. In particular, the present study tested how the presence of beliefs of human nature as good (vs. evil) could serve as a moderating factor on the association between religious fundamentalism and outgroup hate. The results from two correlational studies with Muslim participants (a majority group) targeting 2 outgroup minorities, (non-Muslim) Chinese Indonesians (Study 1; N = 400) and Christians (Study 2; N = 183) showed that the positive association between religious fundamentalism and hate was attenuated when people believed that human nature is good instead of evil. Same pattern of results was obtained using an experimental design (Study 3, N = 154) from Muslim participants targeting Chinese Indonesians. The findings indicate a promising sign for a way to suppress the influence of religious fundamentalism on outgroup hate.

Background: Emotion dysregulation (ED) is a significant characteristic of ADHD. Cognitive control (CC) mechanisms have been suggested to contribute to ED, but little is known about how their manifestation in daily life is associated with ED processes in ADHD. Here, we examined the contribution of two CC components - inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM) - as they unfold over time and context, to emotional dysregulation (ED) in young adults with and without ADHD.

Methods: 122 young adults (ages 18-33) with (N=60) and without (N=62) ADHD completed a self-reported ED questionnaire and behavioral CC tasks (IC and WM) at baseline, followed by an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, in which they completed the CC tasks in 5 times/day during a 5-day period.

Results: For IC, mean and lability of performance over EMA significantly accounted for differences in ED, but not baseline IC performance. For WM, both baseline and mean of EMA, but not EMA lability, accounted for the variance in ED. ADHD status further uniquely contributed to the explained variance of ED, with no interaction with CC.

Conclusions: Our results support the centrality of contribution of dynamic IC processes to ED in ADHD, in addition to WM performance level, and highlight the importance of investigating the different components of CC dynamically and ecologically.

Two of the dominating tasks in the visual working memory (VWM) literature are the Delayed Estimation (DE) task and the Change Detection (CD) task. However, there are no studies that directly compared how participants’ expectation to be tested in these tasks impacts memory formation. Here, three experiments interspersed DE and CD trials with identical displays until the reporting stage. During each session, the frequency of trials of each task was altered to manipulate expectations of which task would be required. Expectation of a DE task led to an increase in the number of fixations during encoding and to more precise estimation. By contrast, expectation of a CD trial did not modulate CD accuracy. These results suggest that the precision with which information is encoded into VWM differs between these two tasks. This has implications for current theoretical debates on VWM and underscores the importance of the typically overlooked effect of task type on memory performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Objective

Increases in stress, anxiety, and depression among women pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic have been reported internationally. Yet rigorous comparison of the prevalence of maternal mental health problems across countries is lacking. Moreover, whether stress is a common predictor of maternal mental health during the pandemic across countries is unknown.

Methods

8148 pregnant women from Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States were enrolled in the XXX Study between April 17 and May 31, 2020. Sociodemographic characteristics, pandemic-related stress, pregnancy-specific stress, anxiety, and depression were assessed with well-validated instruments. The magnitude of stress and mood disturbances was compared across countries. A path model predicting clinically significant levels of anxiety and depression from maternal characteristics and stress was tested for all study participants and then examined separately in each country with >200 participants.

Results

Countries differed significantly in magnitude of pandemic-related pregnancy stress and pandemic-unrelated pregnancy-specific stress, and in prevalence of clinically significant anxiety and depression levels. A well-fitting common path model for the entire sample indicated that mood and anxiety disturbances were strongly predicted by pandemic-related and pregnancy-specific stress after accounting for maternal characteristics. The model was replicated in individual countries.

Conclusions

Although pregnant women in high-income Western countries experienced different levels of stress resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, stress is a strong, common predictor of anxiety and depressive symptoms in these individuals. The common model can be used to inform research and clinical interventions to protect against adverse consequence of prenatal maternal stress, anxiety, and depression for mothers and infants.

Associative binding is key to normal memory function and is transiently disrupted during periods of post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Electrophysiological abnormalities including low-frequency activity are common following TBI. Here, we investigate associative memory binding during PTA and test the hypothesis that misbinding is caused by pathological slowing of brain activity disrupting cortical communication. Thirty acute moderate-severe TBI patients (25 males; 5 females) and 26 healthy controls (20 males; 6 females) were tested with a precision working memory paradigm requiring the association of object and location information. Electrophysiological effects of TBI were assessed using resting-state EEG in a subsample of 17 patients and 21 controls. PTA patients showed abnormalities in working memory function and made significantly more misbinding errors than patients who were not in PTA and controls. The distribution of localisation responses was abnormally biased by the locations of non-target items for patients in PTA suggesting a specific impairment of object and location binding. Slow wave activity was increased following TBI. Increases in the delta-alpha ratio indicative of an increase in low-frequency power specifically correlated with binding impairment in working memory. Connectivity changes in TBI did not correlate with binding impairment. Working memory and electrophysiological abnormalities normalised at six-month follow-up. These results show that patients in PTA show high rates of misbinding that are associated with a pathological shift towards lower frequency oscillations.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:

How do we remember what was where? The mechanism by which information e.g., object and location is integrated in working memory is a central question for cognitive neuroscience. Following significant head injury, many patients will experience a period of post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) during which this associative binding is disrupted. This may be due to electrophysiological changes in the brain. Using a precision working memory test and resting-state EEG we show that PTA patients demonstrate impaired binding ability, and this is associated with a shift towards slower frequency activity on EEG. Abnormal EEG connectivity was observed but was not specific to PTA or binding ability. These findings contribute to both our mechanistic understanding of working memory binding and PTA pathophysiology.

Centrality, in some sense, captures the extent to which a vertex controls the flow of information in a network. Here, we propose Local Detour Centrality as a novel centrality-based betweenness measure that captures the extent to which a vertex shortens paths between neighboring vertices as compared to alternative paths. After presenting our measure, we demonstrate empirically that it differs from other leading central measures, such as betweenness, degree, closeness, and the number of triangles. Through an empirical case study, we provide a possible interpretation for Local Detour Centrality as a measure that captures the extent to which a word is characterized by contextual diversity within a semantic network. We then examine the relationship between our measure and the accessibility to knowledge stored in memory. To do so, we show that words that occur in several different and distinct contexts are significantly more effective in facilitating the retrieval of subsequent words than are words that lack this contextual diversity. Contextually diverse words themselves, however, are not retrieved significantly faster than non-contextually diverse words. These results were obtained for a serial semantic memory task, where the word’s location constitutes a significant mediator in the relationship between the proposed measure and accessibility to knowledge stored in memory.

Although people often want to regulate their emotions, they are sometimes reluctant to invest the necessary effort in doing so. We propose that people could be motivated to invest effort in emotion regulation, by rendering the target emotional state more desirable. Rendering an emotion goal more desirable can motivate people to invest effort in emotion regulation, ultimately facilitating successful emotion regulation. In three studies (N = 452), we show that both inside and outside the lab, rendering calmness more desirable, boosted the motivational strength to increase calmness, increasing the effort people invested to increase calmness, and ultimately made people calmer. This investigation points to the importance of motivational strength as a potential means to promote effort and success in emotion regulation.

Interoceptive exposure, or exposure to one’s feared physical sensations, has been shown to be an important technique in cognitive behavioral therapies for anxiety disorders and related constructs, such as anxiety sensitivity (AS). The current study sought to further clarify the underlying cognitive-behavioral mechanisms of interoceptive exposure in a lab-based, analog study with individuals high in AS. Participants (n = 59) were randomized into three groups: a cognitive-behavioral intervention emphasizing belief disconfirmation (CbI), a behavioral intervention emphasizing exposure (BI), and a control condition. Self-report measures assessing AS, catastrophizing of bodily sensations, and subjective units of distress (SUDS) were collected before, during and after the intervention. Participants also completed online questionnaires at a one-month follow-up. Following the CbI but not BI, a decrease was observed in both AS and catastrophizing interpretations. Furthermore, only the CbI group exhibited a decrease in SUDS ratings, whereas the BI group exhibited a significant increase. Notably, these effects were not maintained at a one-month follow-up. Findings suggest that cognitive interventions without repeated behavioral exposure may be sufficient in reducing self-reported anxiety-related symptoms and catastrophic misinterpretations, though not at maintaining them. This raises questions regarding the role of pure behavioral mechanisms in exposure.

Accumulating research suggests the structure of psychopathology is best represented by continuous higher-order dimensions, including a general dimension, “p,” and more specific dimensions, for example, externalizing and internalizing factors. Here, we aimed to (a) replicate p in early childhood, (b) examine stability and change of genetic and environmental influences on the psychopathology factors from early to midchildhood, (c) externally validate the factors with key constructs of psychological functioning, and (d) test whether the factors can be predicted by early-life measures (e.g., neonatal complications). Data are based on the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins. Mothers reported on pregnancy and neonatal conditions and repeatedly filled in questionnaires on each twin's externalizing and internalizing symptoms from ages 3 to 9. Cognitive ability was assessed in the lab at age 6.5, and personality traits, self-esteem, and life satisfaction were self-reported by the twins at ages 11–13. A bifactor model that included p and externalizing and internalizing factors fit the data best, and associations between p, cognitive ability, and personality were replicated. Longitudinal twin analyses indicated that p is highly heritable (64–73%) with a substantial proportion of the genetic influences stable from age 3. The specific internalizing and externalizing factors (net of p) were also highly heritable. Higher p predicted lower self-esteem at age 11. Early-life measures were not strongly associated with psychopathology. Our results show that p is discernible in early childhood, highly heritable, and prospectively associated with negative outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)