Self-compassion and Students' Well-Being Among Vietnamese Students: Chain Mediation Effect of Narcissism and Anxiety

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - The positive psychology that increases mental health is referred to "health assets." Among those assets, self-compassion...     

Correction to: Medical Students’ Efforts to Integrate and/or Reclaim Authentic Identity: Insights from a Mask-Making Exercise

Journal of Medical Humanities - The authors would like to correct a misspelling in the name of one of the authors due to a typographical error. The name should read Atur Turakhia, not Artur...     

Gratitude for Categories of Needs Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of Happiness Studies - This naturalistic observation study investigated the influence of broad societal events such as the COVID-19 pandemic on public expressions of gratitude....     

Interactive effects of subjective memory complaints and hypertension on learning and memory performance in the elderly

This study evaluated whether the relation between subjective memory complaints and cognitive performance is influenced by the presence of hypertension in the elderly. One hundred and five healthy older adults, 70–89 years of age, with and without hypertension treatment or diagnosis, completed a scale of subjective memory complaints. Participants were divided into those with mild memory concerns and those with minimal or no complaints. All participants completed a battery of neuropsychological tests including measures of verbal and nonverbal memory. After controlling for differences in age, gender, education, and overall intellectual ability, there were significant main effects for memory concerns and significant interactions for memory complaints and hypertension on several measures of memory performance. There were no main effects for hypertension on memory performance. Simple effects analyses of the interactions showed that the hypertensive complainers demonstrated poorer performance on measures of long-term memory and greater reliance on short-term recall than the hypertensive non-complainers. There were no differences in memory performance for the non-hypertensive groups. Among healthy elderly community-dwelling adults, those with mild subjective memory complaints in the context of hypertension demonstrated greater objective cognitive difficulties than those without hypertension as well as a greater reliance on a less efficient learning strategy. These findings suggest that memory concerns in the presence of hypertension may be important when evaluating treatment efficacy in these individuals and for identifying differences in cognitive aging.     

The Yin and Yang of cell cycle progression and differentiation in the oligodendroglial lineage

In white matter disorders such as leukodystrophies (LD), periventricular leucomalacia (PVL), or multiple sclerosis (MS), the hypomyelination or the remyelination failure by oligodendrocyte progenitor cells involves errors in the sequence of events that normally occur during development when progenitors proliferate, migrate through the white matter, contact the axon, and differentiate into myelin-forming oligodendrocytes. Multiple mechanisms underlie the eventual progressive deterioration that typifies the natural history of developmental demyelination in LD and PVL and of adult-onset demyelination in MS. Over the past few years, pathophysiological studies have mostly focused on seeking abnormalities that impede oligodendroglial maturation at the level of migration, myelination, and survival. In contrast, there has been a strikingly lower interest for early proliferative and differentiation events that are likely to be equally critical for white matter development and myelin repair. This review highlights the Yin and Yang principles of interactions between intrinsic factors that coordinately regulate progenitor cell division and the onset of differentiation, i.e. the initial steps of oligodendrocyte lineage progression that are obviously crucial in health and diseases.     

Asymmetrical stimulus generalization following differential fear conditioning

Rodent ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are ethologically critical social signals. Rats emit 22 kHz USVs and 50 kHz USVs, respectively, in conjunction with negative and positive affective states. Little is known about what controls emotional reactivity to these social signals. Using male Sprague–Dawley rats, we examined unconditional and conditional freezing behavior in response to the following auditory stimuli: three 22 kHz USVs, a discontinuous tone whose frequency and on–off pattern matched one of the USVs, a continuous tone with the same or lower frequencies, a 4 kHz discontinuous tone with an on–off pattern matched to one of the USVs, and a 50 kHz USV. There were no differences among these stimuli in terms of the unconditional elicitation of freezing behavior. Thus, the stimuli were equally neutral before conditioning. During differential fear conditioning, one of these stimuli (the CS⁺) always co-terminated with a footshock unconditional stimulus (US) and another stimulus (the CS⁻) was explicitly unpaired with the US. There were no significant differences among these cues in CS⁺-elicited freezing behavior. Thus, the stimuli were equally salient or effective as cues in supporting fear conditioning. When the CS⁺ was a 22 kHz USV or a similar stimulus, rats discriminated based on the principal frequency and/or the temporal pattern of the stimulus. However, when these same stimuli served as the CS⁻, discrimination failed due to generalization from the CS⁺. Thus, the stimuli differed markedly in the specificity of conditioning. This strikingly asymmetrical stimulus generalization is a novel bias in discrimination.     

α7 Nicotinic Receptor Subunits Are Not Necessary for Hippocampal-Dependent Learning or Sensorimotor Gating: A Behavioral Characterization of Acra7-Deficient Mice

The α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) subunit is abundantly expressed in the hippocampus and contributes to hippocampal cholinergic synaptic transmission suggesting that it may contribute to learning and memory. There is also evidence for an association between levels of α7 nAChR and in sensorimotor gating impairments. To examine the role of α7 nAChRs in learning and memory and sensorimotor gating, Acra7 homozygous mutant mice and their wild-type littermates were tested in a Pavlovian conditioned fear test, for spatial learning in the Morris water task, and in the prepulse inhibition paradigm. Exploratory activity, motor coordination, and startle habituation were also evaluated. Acra7 mutant mice displayed the same levels of contextual and auditory-cue condition fear as wild-type mice. Similarly, there were no differences in spatial learning performance between mutant and wild-type mice. Finally, Acra7 mutant and wild-type mice displayed similar levels of prepulse inhibition. Other behavioral responses in Acra7 mutant mice were also normal, except for an anxiety-related behavior in the open-field test. The results of this study show that the absence of α7 nAChRs has little impact on normal, base-line behavioral responses. Future studies will examine the contribution of α7 nAChR to the enhancement of learning and sensorimotor gating following nicotine treatments.     

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short‐Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self‐interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short‐term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self‐reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes—the United Kingdom and Denmark—we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.