Biological Psychology最新文献

Loneliness is a serious public health issue among the aging population, yet it is not merely an individual but also a relational experience. Indeed, research has shown that having a lonely partner is a "stress generator" with implications for individuals' own biopsychosocial health. Further, widowhood is a stressful and harmful experience in mid and later life, yet no research to date has examined whether the removal of chronic stress posed by a lonely partner via widowhood may be associated with improved biological health following loss. Using blood-based biomarker data from 13,205 continuously partnered and 343 recently widowed adults across two waves of data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE; 2013-2015), we examine whether a dyadic partner's loneliness pre-loss is associated with three biological markers of health as well as self-rated health among recent widow(er)s post-loss; whether this differs in comparison with continuously partnered persons over the same timeframe; and whether associations varied by age. Results indicated that (a) deceased dyadic partner's pre-loss loneliness was associated with lower (i.e., healthier) post-loss levels of Cystatin C, a marker of kidney function, among the recently widowed; (b) deceased dyadic partner's pre-loss loneliness was associated with lower (i.e., healthier) post-loss triglyceride levels, a marker of cardiovascular health, but with poorer self-rated health among recent widow(er)s in midlife, yet these effects were attenuated with age; and (c) deceased dyadic partner's pre-loss loneliness was not associated with post-loss levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. Interaction terms indicated that these effects were unique to the recently widowed, and did not apply to the continuously partnered. Overall, findings cohere with dyadic biopsychosocial approaches to health, as well as with a role histories approach to studying life transitions. We discuss implications for theory and future research.

Cardiac interoceptive accuracy has received significant attention in the growing field of interoception. Despite this, there are clear, and openly discussed limitations to the tasks commonly used to assess this dimension, including questionable construct validity, unjustified assumptions, and that, depending on the task, few participants exceed chance performance. To address this, we propose a novel version of the heartbeat discrimination task. The Staircase-Heartbeat Discrimination Task (S-HDT) addresses the aforementioned limitations and facilitates a more nuanced understanding of individual differences in cardiac interoceptive accuracy. Herein we (i) detail the experimental null, (ii) demonstrate the recoverability of known point of subjective simultaneity and accuracy values by passing simulated data through our analysis pipeline and (iii) highlight the feasibility and tolerability of this task in a young adult sample (n = 42; mean age = 22.57 +/- 4.55; 64.28 % women). In our sample, we show the S-HDT has greater sensitivity and specificity than the original HDT, and enables the prediction of accuracy as well as individuals point of subjective simultaneity. With a running time of ∼30 min, fully automated, open source, and freely available code (via GitHub), this task is accessible to further our understanding of cardiac interoception across multiple interoceptive domains.