Current research in behavioral sciences最新文献

Loneliness is associated with poor mental and physical health in the general population. It is thought to be prevalent among international students, but few studies have investigated this. To capture what loneliness means in the everyday lives of international students we analysed data from 521 international students aged 16–40 years who participated online in the 2018 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Loneliness Experiment. Using the approach of thematic analysis of free‐text responses to a question probing the perceived meaning of loneliness, we identified six main themes: (1) Negative psychological and social aspects of loneliness; (2) The distressing experience of being alone; (3) Disrupted ability to make meaningful connections; (4) Sense of entrapment in a state of loneliness; (5) Awareness of others’ stigmatizing perceptions of oneself as lonely; (6) Perceptions of positive aspects of loneliness. These findings identified a range of negative social and psychological dimensions of loneliness in international students in relation to their well-being, emotional health, and social functioning, hampering the benefits to be gained from their overseas study. Higher education teaching staff, pastoral staff, and mental health professionals need to be more aware of the prevalence and impacts of loneliness and should tackle it in culturally appropriate ways.

In the pursuit of healthy eating, as with many other health goals, most benefits for one's health are not realized immediately, but instead occur after a person engages in consistent patterns of healthy eating across many weeks, months, and years. Thus, being able to represent temporally distant benefits when making seemingly trivial daily eating decisions (e.g., choosing fruit salad rather than ice cream for dessert) should be a key determinant of healthy eating. Here, we tested a priori, preregistered hypotheses in a large online sample of adults (N = 360) by examining the role of self-continuity in people's daily eating behaviors, as well as the relationship between self-continuity and motivational factors behind people's decisions to eat healthy. We also examined the moderating influence of self-continuity on training in self-regulatory strategies intended to promote healthy eating. Overall, we garnered support for our hypotheses, as there were links between self-continuity measures, autonomous motivation levels, and daily eating of healthy and unhealthy foods, with participants’ ability to consider future consequences associated with unhealthy eating measures, and participants’ connectedness to their future selves associated with healthy eating measures. Taken together, the present findings suggest that continuity with one's future self is an important factor underlying daily eating decisions and successful goal pursuit in the eating domain.

The aim of the present study was to examine whether loneliness and friendship quality are bidirectionally associated with one another over time. Based on the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018) and the classical definition of loneliness (Peplau & Perlman, 1982), such a bidirectional association would be expected, but empirical research in this regard is limited. We used data from 615 adolescents (M_age = 10.77 years at Wave 1; 53.5% girls) in a three-wave longitudinal study with one-year intervals between successive measurement waves. Loneliness was measured using the peer-related loneliness subscale of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents. Friendship quality was measured using the help and closeness subscales of the Friendship Qualities Scale. To test our hypothesis we estimated a cross-lagged panel model. Higher friendship quality was associated with lower levels of concurrent loneliness, which is in line with findings of previous research. However, no significant across-time predictions were found between the two constructs. Hence, using a sample of early adolescents, we could not provide evidence supporting important aspects of the aforementioned loneliness theories.

Two studies were performed to determine whether political orientations were related to loci-of-hope, which are where one acquires or sustains one's hope that one's goals may be achieved. Study 1 employed a nationally representative sample of Canadian English-speaking adults (N = 866), who completed the Locus-of-Hope Scale (Bernardo, 2010) that measures the extent to which trait hope comes from four different sources: from oneself as an individual; from one's family; from peers; and from one's sense of spirituality or religious faith. The results indicate that the peer locus-of-hope was associated with liberalism, while the spiritual and family loci were related to conservatism. The participants in Study 2 were Canadian university students (N = 555) who completed the Locus-of-Hope Scale as well as a related measure that treats hope as an emotional state rather than a trait. In this sample, there were again significant associations between political orientations and loci-of-hope at the peer and family loci such that greater reliance on peers predicted more liberal orientations, and greater dependence on family was associated with more conservative outlooks. The implications of these findings for three established theoretical paradigms that purport to explain the acquisition of political orientations are explored.

Suicide bereavement is a risk factor for suicide and psychiatric illness. Its lifetime prevalence in the general population is estimated at 22%, and in one (US) veteran sample as 47%, but no estimates exist for a UK veteran sample. We aimed to measure the lifetime prevalence of suicide bereavement in a clinical sample of UK veterans to inform service provision for this group. Our secondary aim was to measure the prevalence of loneliness and investigate the association between suicide bereavement and loneliness. We searched the routine electronic clinical records of all veterans treated in a London veterans’ crisis care service over the period September 2021 to June 2022 (n=69), capturing data on their sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, including the proportions recorded as having experienced the suicide of a friend or relative and as experiencing loneliness. We used multivariable logistic regression models to test for an association of suicide bereavement with loneliness. The lifetime prevalence of suicide bereavement was 30% (predominantly of friends) and the period prevalence of loneliness was 57%. There was no association of suicide bereavement with loneliness. This work highlights the high proportion of veterans in this clinical sample with two specific suicide risk factors, and their likely needs for specific support to address the psychological consequences of suicide loss.

This paper investigates how horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism predict self-report loneliness in addition to the variance accounted for by age and sex in 28 countries (N = 8,345). Horizontal and vertical aspects of individualism and collectivism had small but significant contributions to predicting loneliness. Horizontal-collectivism (for 19 country samples) and, to a lesser extent, horizontal-individualism (for seven country samples), significantly predicted lower loneliness scores. Vertical-individualism (for 16 country samples), and to a lesser extent, vertical-collectivism (for six country samples), predicted feeling more loneliness among our participants. Adjusted R² values suggested that between 0.6% and 27.7% of self-report loneliness was predicted. These results suggest that those who value egalitarian social relations also tend to report being less lonely whereas those who value individuality and competitiveness endorse the loneliness items more. These results are of importance to those investigating and helping lonely individuals by appreciating the influence of perceived culture.

This scoping review focused on the use of trauma focused therapy (TFT) with participants who have suicidal ideation. Methods: Following the PRISMA extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines, MEDLINE, EMBASE, APA PsycINFO, and CINAHL databases were searched on March 18, 2021. Peer-reviewed studies in English reporting on the use of TFT with patients with suicidal ideation or Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) were included.  Results: From 3,272 publications, 43 studies were included. Most studies utilized Prolonged Exposure, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Cognitive Processing Therapy, and other exposure-based interventions, alone or in combination with another intervention. Approximately 50% of studies used intensive (two sessions or more per week) delivery of the intervention. Studies mainly focused on clinical improvement of symptoms, rather than suicidality. Overall, studies reported symptom improvements in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and BPD symptoms, suicidal ideation and non-suicidal self-injury, with few critical adverse events on record. Conclusion: Despite increased research interest in this area, knowledge gaps remain. Greater attention to mixed methods studies may increase our understanding of the lived experience of those with suicidal ideation undergoing TFT. There is a need for studies to explore the effect of TFT on symptoms associated with psychiatric diagnoses other than PTSD, and for studies reporting on the significance of both sex and gender of patients. Prospective interventional studies that focus on participants with suicidal ideation, and consensus on standardized suicidal ideation outcome measures, are also needed. There is a need to compare intensive vs. non-intensive TFT, and to examine whether inclusion of emotion regulation skills is a significant determinant of suicidal risk outcomes in this context.  In contrast to common apparent clinical practice decisions restricting TFT to patients without suicidal symptoms, limited evidence indicates that TFT, including intensive delivery, may not increase suicide risk. Due to methodological issues, further studies are needed to confirm this observation and to determine any increased risk for specific patient subgroups and TFT interventions.

Embodied cognition theories propose that higher-order cognitive functions are grounded in the activity of cerebral systems supporting lower-level sensorimotor interactions between the body and the environment. However, the way in which sensorimotor body representations affect higher cognitive functions, such as cognitive control, is still not defined. Here we investigate in two Experiments whether the bodily content of visual stimuli and their stimulus-response congruency modulate motor inhibition, i.e., a key function of cognitive control. Participants completed an online manual Go/No-Go task on visual stimuli belonging to three categories (bodily-related: a right hand, and non-bodily related: a shape and a leaf) (Exp 1). Results show slower reaction times and lower accuracy in Go trials for hand compared to non-body images. We further investigated how the degree of stimulus-response congruency (left-hand vs right-hand stimuli) modulates the inhibitory resources (Exp 2). The data from the two experiments were compared to test whether the category (i.e., body vs. non-body images; Exp 1) or sensorimotor representations (i.e., hand stimulus-response congruency; Exp 2) affect inhibitory mechanisms differently. Results show stronger interference with high levels of congruency and support that bodily content influences response inhibition performance in accordance with an embodied view of cognitive functions.