Current research in behavioral sciences最新文献

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.

Background

Although studies have reported a significant inverse association between meaning in life and psychological distress, little is known about this association, specifically among men, or its potential underlying mechanisms. Accordingly, this study investigated prospective pathways connecting meaning in life to men's psychological distress through the serial mediation effects of resilience and loneliness.

Methods

In total, 364 male respondents provided demographic data and completed an online survey to assess meaning in life, resilience, loneliness, and psychological distress. Simple and serial mediation models were tested to examine whether resilience and loneliness mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress, both separately and jointly.

Results

Direct and indirect effects of meaning in life on men's psychological distress were found. As predicted, both resilience and loneliness independently mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress. In addition, serial mediation analysis indicated that resilience and loneliness mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress via a sequential process.

Conclusions

The findings advance knowledge concerning the influence of meaning in life on men's psychological distress and two critical underlying mechanisms in this relationship. Clinical interventions for men that enhance meaning in life may help bolster resilience and reduce loneliness, diminishing psychological distress.

The relationships between loneliness and facets of narcissism were investigated based on responses from 696 (46% women) university students. Bivariate correlations revealed small negative correlations between loneliness and the narcissism scales of arrogance and acclaim seeking. A medium positive correlation was between loneliness and reactive anger and medium negative correlations were with exhibitionism and authoritativeness. Large positive correlations were between loneliness and shame, need for admiration, and distrust and a large negative correlation was with indifference. To further examine how loneliness and narcissism are possibly related, the narcissism facets were examined using latent profile analysis, resulting in three profiles. The profile with high scores for the narcissism facets of shame, need for admiration, authoritativeness, grandiose fantasy, acclaim-seeking, and distrust had significantly higher loneliness scores compared to the two other narcissism profiles. These results add to our understanding of both loneliness and narcissism. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

There is substantial evidence supporting the processing of affective stimuli outside of conscious awareness in both healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients. However, the methodologies used to assess awareness are still a matter of debate, with also implications for dichotomous or gradual theories. In two experiments, we investigated how social threat is processed in healthy participants by combining the continuous flash suppression paradigm and the perceptual awareness scale, a fine-grained measure of perceptual awareness. Our findings revealed a gradual relationship between emotional recognition and perceptual awareness, with higher recognition sensitivity for fearful than angry bodies across all visual awareness levels, except during perceptual unawareness where performance was at chance level. Interestingly, angry body expressions were suppressed for a shorter duration than neutral and fearful ones. Furthermore, pupil dilation responses were influenced by affective expression, suppression duration and perceptual awareness level. In conclusion, our results highlight a gradual relationship between behavioral and pupillary responses and perceptual awareness, which is further influenced by the specific stimulus category being processed. In addition, our results illustrate that certain experimental choices, such as stimulus type or the method used to assess awareness, are important factors to be considered in consciousness studies.

Loneliness is common in young people, yet there are few evidence-based interventions to manage youth loneliness. Understanding the ways in which young people cope with social isolation may inform the development of targeted loneliness programmes for young people. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when social restrictions were at a peak, 2500 young people aged 12–25 years were asked to report freely on coping strategies that they would recommend to peers to manage isolation and loneliness. The coding of qualitative responses suggested that young people recommended a range of different coping strategies, which we grouped into categories: contact seeking, approach, distraction, self-care, self-talk, self-compassion, and gratitude. Regression analyses showed that age, sex and socioeconomic background were associated with recommendation of some of the coping strategies. Paradoxically, recommendation of self-compassion was associated with higher levels of loneliness, while recommendation of approach and self-talk was associated with higher levels of wellbeing. This study highlights the importance of exploring how young people manage loneliness, a complex process that involves various strategies and is associated with an individual's demographic characteristics.

In this study, we examine the relationship between anxiety and athletic performance, measuring pre-game anxiety in a corpus of 12,228 tweets of 81 National Basketball Association (NBA) players using an anxiety inference algorithm, and match this data with certified NBA individual player game performance data. We found a positive relationship between pre-game anxiety and athletic performance, which was moderated by both player experience and minutes played on the court. This paper serves to demonstrate the use case for using machine learning to label publicly available micro-blogs of players which can be used to form important discrete emotions, such as pre-game anxiety, which in turn can predict athletic performance in elite sports. Based on the results, we discuss these findings and outline recommendations for athletes, teams, team leaders, coaches, and managers.

People sometimes behave dishonestly to collect undeserved monetary rewards. Prior research has shown that people put more effort into avoiding monetary losses than into making gains, and accordingly they cheat more to avoid losses than to acquire the equivalent amount (loss aversion). However, there has been a lack of research about how reward size and money exposure affect levels of cheating. Using a real effort task, we implemented a between-subjects experimental design to test the effects of framing (loss vs gain), reward size (small vs large) and money exposure (money vs no money) on individual real performance and cheating levels. The results revealed no significant differences in real performance. However, for cheating levels, all two-way interaction effects turned out to be significant (i.e., frame by size – frame by exposure – size by exposure). To disentangle the effects of the loss frame on cheating levels, a double moderated model was tested with reward size and money exposure as moderators. The model was significant with conditional effects revealing that the loss frame generally causes increased cheating level unless (i) participants were informed about a possible large reward they had not been exposed to, and (ii) participants were informed about, and exposed to, a small reward. Our results offer a partial replication of the finding that the level of cheating is higher within the loss frame than in the gain framing, which suggests that the relationship between framing and cheating behaviour can be moderated by other variables such as reward size and exposure to a reward. They also pose new questions for future research about complex joint effects on cheating behaviour, such as the combined influence of framing and default choices.