Excessive Worrying as a Central Feature of Anxiety during the First COVID-19 Lockdown-Phase in Belgium: Insights from a Network Approach

Since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has profoundly impacted public health and the economy worldwide. But there are not the only ones to be hit. The COVID-19 pandemic has also substantially altered mental health, with anxiety symptoms being one of the most frequently reported problems. Especially, the number of people reporting anxiety symptoms increased significantly during the first lockdown-phase compared to similar data collected before the pandemic. Yet, most of these studies relied on a unitary approach to anxiety, wherein its different constitutive features (i.e., symptoms) were tallied into one sum-score, thus ignoring any possibility of interactions between them. Therefore, in this study, we seek to map the associations between the core features of anxiety during the first weeks of the first Belgian COVID-19 lockdown-phase (n = 2,829). To do so, we implemented, in a preregistered fashion, two distinct computational network approaches: a Gaussian graphical model and a Bayesian network modelling approach to estimate a directed acyclic graph. Despite their varying assumptions, constraints, and computational methods to determine nodes (i.e., the variables) and edges (i.e., the relations between them), both approaches pointed to excessive worrying as a node playing an especially influential role in the network system of the anxiety features. Altogether, our findings offer novel data-driven clues for the ongoing field’s larger quest to examine, and eventually alleviate, the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Right out of the box: how to situate metaphysics of science in relation to other metaphysical approaches

Synthese - Several advocates of the lively field of “metaphysics of science” have recently argued that a naturalistic metaphysics should be based solely on current science, and that it...     

Importance models of the physical self: Improved methodology supports a normative‐cultural importance model but not the individual importance model

We examine theoretical and methodological issues associated with the roles of individual and group‐normative importance in self‐esteem determination. Critical issues include multicollinearity among the physical self‐subdomains, which may have affected previous results, and the need for a multidimensional perspective on importance models. We apply state‐of‐the‐art methodologies, including exploratory structural equation modelling and the product‐of‐indicators approach to latent interactions. Positive interactions would be required to support the individually importance‐weighted average model, but none were observed in the multidimensional model estimated on the full sample. Nonetheless, some interaction effects were found in the country‐specific version of the model. Rather, we found support for the alternative group importance‐weighted average model. We conclude that domain‐specific self‐concepts are weighted differently and thus differentially affect self‐esteem, but these weights do not seem to depend on individual differences in importance. Although awaiting confirmation from further studies, our results suggest the idea that individuals use mainly normative importance processes based on cultural factors in weighting each domain‐specific component of self‐concept. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reciprocal Associations between Burnout and Depression: An 8-Year Longitudinal Study

The purpose of the present four-wave longitudinal study was to examine the differentiation and reciprocal associations between burnout and depression, and their associations with a series of correlates related to employees’ physical and psychological health (sleep disturbances, somatic symptoms, self-rated subjective health, and life satisfaction). A total of 542 early career Finnish workers filled out questionnaires four times over a period of 8 years. First, our results supported the superiority of a bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling (bifactor-ESEM) representation of employees’ burnout ratings, and the empirical differentiation between burnout and depression ratings over each measurement occasion. These results further revealed moderate cross-sectional associations between burnout and depression, supporting their inter-related character but also their empirical distinctiveness. Second, autoregressive cross-lagged analyses revealed that both constructs presented a moderate level of stability over time and reciprocal associations that generalized to all time intervals considered. Finally, relations between depression and all correlates measures during the last wave of the study were in the expected direction, whereas burnout was found to be more weakly related to only a subset of these correlates. Taken together, these results thus support the distinctiveness of burnout and depression, and the presence of mutually reinforcing relations between them.     

A Person-Centred Perspective on Social Support in the Workplace

This research seeks to identify employees’ profiles characterised by distinct perceptions of three sources of social support at work (i.e., organisation, supervisor, and colleagues), and the extent to which these profiles generalise across two samples of workers (N = 185 and 387). This research also investigates the associations between the profiles and a series of outcomes. Latent profile analysis revealed five identical profiles in both samples: (1) moderately supported; (2) isolated; (3) supervisor supported; (4) weakly supported; and (5) highly supported. The most desirable outcomes (job satisfaction, performance, and affective commitment) were associated with Profile 5 (highly supported), while the highest levels of emotional exhaustion were observed in Profile 2 (isolated).     

Production of Inflected Novel Words in Older Adults With and Without Dementia

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).