Behavioral,Affective, and Cognitive Parenting Mechanisms of Child Internalizing and Externalizing Problems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased mental health concerns, including depression and anxiety among parents and internalizing and...     

Correction to: Child Psychological Adjustment to War and Displacement: A Discriminant Analysis of Resilience and Trauma in Syrian Refugee Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies -     

Neural bases of Theory of Mind in children with autism spectrum disorders and children with conduct problems and callous‐unemotional traits

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty understanding other minds (Theory of Mind; ToM), with atypical processing evident at both behavioural and neural levels. Individuals with conduct problems and high levels of callous‐unemotional (CU) traits (CP/HCU) exhibit reduced responsiveness to others' emotions and difficulties interacting with others, but nonetheless perform normally in experimental tests of ToM. The present study aimed to examine the neural underpinnings of ToM in children (aged 10–16) with ASD (N = 16), CP/HCU (N = 16) and typically developing (TD) controls (N = 16) using a non‐verbal cartoon vignette task. Whilst individuals with ASD were predicted to show reduced fMRI responses across regions involved in ToM processing, CP/HCU individuals were predicted to show no differences compared with TD controls. The analyses indicated that neural responses did not differ between TD and CP/HCU groups during ToM. TD and CP/HCU children exhibited significantly greater medial prefrontal cortex responses during ToM than did the ASD group. Within the ASD group, responses in medial prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) correlated with symptom severity as measured by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). Findings suggest that although both ASD and CP/HCU are characterized by social difficulties, only children with ASD display atypical neural processing associated with ToM.     

Revisiting Media Priming Effects of Sexual Depictions: Replication,Extension, and Consideration of Sexual Depiction Strength

Two experiments were used to examine how sexual media primes influence perceptions of an unknown target's sexual characteristics and ultimate ratings of the target's appeal. Participants were randomly assigned to one condition of a fully crossed 3 (control, weak sexual, or strong sexual media prime) × 3 (general, dating, or professional social networking profile) design. Participants were first exposed to a website that contained banner and sidebar advertisements that were either high in explicitness and emphasis on sexual intercourse, low in explicitness and emphasis on intercourse but still related to sex, or devoid of sexual cues altogether. These banner and sidebar areas constituted the prime. Participants then rated the sex-related qualities and overall appeal of a target represented by an online social media profile from Facebook.com, LiveJournal.com, BlackBookSingles.com, or LinkedIn.com. Findings supported the main hypothesis that sexual media enhance the perceived sexual characteristics attributed to the target represented in social media and that these characteristics significantly contribute to evaluating overall appeal. Both sexual media primes yielded effects that were robust across social network profiles. Results are discussed in light of literature that analyzes sexual content in media.     

Susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion does not tell the whole body-awareness story

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is an enigmatic illusion that creates a feeling of owning an artificial limb. Enthusiasts of this paradigm assert that it operationalizes bodily self-awareness, but there are reasons to doubt such a clear link. Because little is known about other functional contributions to the RHI, including effects of context-dependent visual processing and cognitive control or the ability to resolve intermodal conflict, we carried out two complementary experiments. In the first, we examined the relationships between the RHI and (1) body awareness, as assessed by the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ); (2) context-dependent visual processing, as assessed by the rod-and-frame test (RFT); and (3) conflict resolution, as assessed by the Stroop test. We found a significant positive correlation between the RHI-associated proprioceptive drift and context-dependent visual processing on the RFT, but not between the RHI and body awareness on the BPQ. In the second experiment, we examined the RHI in advanced yoga practitioners with an embodied lifestyle and a heightened sense of their own body in space. They succumbed to the illusion just as much as did yoga-naïve control participants, despite significantly greater body awareness on the BPQ. These findings suggest that susceptibility to the RHI and awareness of one’s own body are at least partially independent processes.     

Neuropsychology of Environmental Navigation in Humans: Review and Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies in Healthy Participants

In the past 20 years, many studies in the cognitive neurosciences have analyzed human ability to navigate in recently learned and familiar environments by investigating the cognitive processes involved in successful navigation. In this study, we reviewed the main experimental paradigms and made a cognitive-oriented meta-analysis of fMRI studies of human navigation to underline the importance of the experimental designs and cognitive tasks used to assess navigational skills. We performed a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 66 fMRI experiments to identify the neural substrates underpinning general aspects of human navigation. Four individual ALE analyses were performed to identify the neural substrates of different experimental paradigms (i.e., familiar vs. recently learned environments) and different navigational strategies (allocentric vs. egocentric). Results of the general ALE analysis highlighted a wide network of areas with clusters in the occipital, parietal, frontal and temporal lobes, especially in the parahippocampal cortex. Familiar environments seem to be processed by an extended temporal-frontal network, whereas recently learned environments require activation in the parahippocampal cortex and the parietal and occipital lobes. Allocentric strategy is subtended by the same areas as egocentric strategy, but the latter elicits greater activation in the right precuneus, middle occipital lobe and angular gyrus. Our results suggest that different neural correlates are involved in recalling a well-learned or recently acquired environment and that different networks of areas subtend egocentric and allocentric strategies.     

What I like is How I Am: Impact of Alexithymia on Aesthetic Preference

Aim of this work was to explore the impact of alexithymia on art works appreciation, to examine the influence of emotion regulation on art judgment. While observing a painting, the viewer's cognitive structure contains several types of information (semantic, episodic, and strategic) and is the repository of personal traits, motivations, and emotional dispositions that are involved in this interaction. The study of how personal traits influence work of art appreciation, and especially the study of the way emotion regulation impacts on art judgment, was aimed at improving the comprehension of the aesthetic experience costruct. One hundred adults, divided into 2 groups (high and low scores in alexithymia), observed 20 works of art and were then asked to give an evalutative judgment on three dimentions: cognitive, emotional, aesthetic. As hypothesized, the two groups had significant differences in their aesthetic preferences. Although subjects without affective regulation disorders preferred excitation related pictures, subjects with alexithymia appreciated works evoching emotions of pleasure inhibition. These results confirm the impact of personality traits on aesthetic preference and support the need to include emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience.