EARLY REGULATION IN CHILDREN WHO ARE LATER DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER. A LONGITUDINAL STUDY WITHIN THE DANISH NATIONAL BIRTH COHORT

Studies have shown that children later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in their first years of life might show symptoms in main developmental areas and that these signs might be sensed by the parents. The present study investigated in a large birth cohort if children later diagnosed with ASD had deviations at 6 and 18 months in areas such as the ability to self‐regulate emotions, feeding, and sleeping. The study was based on prospective information collected from 76,322 mothers who participated in the Danish National Birth Cohort. When the children reached an average age of 11 years, 973 children with ASD and a control group of 300 children with intellectual disability (IDnoASD) were identified via Danish health registries. Associations were found between short periods of breast‐feeding and the children later diagnosed with ASD and IDnoASD as well as associations at 18 months to deviations in regulation of emotions and activity. The similarities in these associations emphasize how difficult it is to distinguish between diagnoses early in life.     

Latent constructs model explaining the attachment-linked variation in autobiographical remembering

In the current study, we proposed a latent constructs model to characterise the qualitative aspects of autobiographical remembering and investigated the structural relations in the model that may vary across individuals. Primarily, we focused on the memories of romantic relationships and argued that attachment anxiety and avoidance would be reflected in the ways that individuals encode, rehearse, or remember autobiographical memories in close relationships. Participants reported two positive and two negative relationship-specific memories and rated the characteristics for each memory. As predicted, the basic memory model yielded appropriate fit, indicating that event characteristics (EC) predicted the frequency of rehearsal (RC) and phenomenology at retrieval (PC). When attachment variables were integrated, the model showed that rehearsal mediated the link between anxiety and PC, especially for negative memories. On the other hand, for avoidance EC was the key factor mediating the link between avoidance and RC, as well as PC. Findings were discussed with respect to autobiographical memory functions emphasising a systematically, integrated framework.     

Reading Development in Typically Developing Children and Children With Prenatal or Perinatal Brain Lesions: Differential School Year and Summer Growth

Summer slide, uneven growth of academic skills during the calendar year, captures the fact that the learning gains children make during the school year do not continue at the same pace over the summer, when children are typically not in school. We compared growth of reading skills during the school year and during the summer months in children with prenatal or perinatal brain lesions (PL) and typically developing (TD) children from varying socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds as a new way to probe the role of structured environmental support in functional plasticity for reading skills in children with PL. Results showed that children with PL performed worse than TD children on both reading decoding and reading comprehension. Group differences were primarily driven by children with larger lesions and children with right-hemisphere lesions (RH). For reading comprehension, children with RH showed greater growth during the school year but more slide during the summer months than both TD children and children with left-hemisphere lesions, implicating a particularly strong role of structured input in supporting reading comprehension in this group. TD children from lower-SES backgrounds fell behind their TD peers from higher-SES backgrounds on decoding and reading comprehension but did not show differential patterns of school year and summer growth. Overall, results highlight the importance of considering the role of a host of factors interacting at multiple levels of analyses, including biological and environmental, in influencing developmental trajectories of TD children and atypically developing children.     

Happiness Revisited: Ontological Well-Being as a Theory-Based Construct of Subjective Well-Being

The current model of subjective well-being (SWB) has been operationalized as the unity of affective and cognitive dimensions concerning the evaluation of one’s life, called emotional well-being and life satisfaction, respectively. There has been no theoretical framework, however, by which the unity is explained. The present paper offers a new construct of subjective well-being in an attempt to show that the cognitive and affective dimensions of SWB can be unified using the concept of goal. The concept of goal refers to the life as a project when the concern is the evaluation of life as a whole. The evaluation of the whole life, moreover, should take a whole-time perspective into account if it is supposed to be ‘whole’. Ontological well-being (OWB) construct is structured in a theoretical framework by which the cognitive and affective components of the current conceptualization of SWB are reframed and interpreted in a whole time perspective. By taking as base the historical and philosophical resources of the affective and cognitive dimensions of subjective well-being, this new construct defines subjective well-being as one’s evaluation of life in both past and future time perspectives in addition to the present.     

Some animal specific fears are more specific than others: Evidence from attention and emotion measures

Using a visual search methodology we investigated the effect of feared animal stimuli on attention. Our results confirmed the important role of emotion on attention. All participants detected fear-relevant stimuli (snakes and spiders) faster than neutral (mushrooms) ones against a background of fruits. In addition, spider fearful participants were sensitized specifically to detect their feared stimulus (spiders), compared to their fear-relevant but non-feared (snakes) and neutral stimuli. However, for participants fearful of snakes there was no significant difference in detection latencies between the feared (snakes) and the fear-relevant but non-feared animal stimuli (spiders). The results from the attention task were mirrored in the emotional ratings, which showed that spider fear was highly specific, whereas snake fear was associated with a more generalized enhanced evaluation of all negative stimuli.     

The dark side of bodybuilding: the role of bodybuilding activities in compensation of frustrated basic psychological needs

The main purpose of the current study was to investigate the explanatory mechanism of the drive for muscularity on the relations between frustrated basic needs and diverse indicators of muscle dysmorphia. To achieve this purpose, in the first place, as a pilot study needed to pursue the hypotheses of the main study, Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Frustration Scale was adapted to Turkish and its psychometric properties were examined. In the main study, data were collected from 245 men with a mean age of 22.73 (SD = 3.86), who were engaged in regular bodybuilding activities. After the adaptation of Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale, the indirect predictive effects of frustrated basic needs on muscle dysmorphia symptoms through the drive for muscularity were examined via two structural equation models. Also, the moderating role of the drive for muscularity in the associations between each of the frustrated needs and muscle dysmorphia symptoms was tested via another structural equation model. Results revealed that (1) both the composite score of frustrated basic needs and frustrated relatedness are indirect predictors of all muscle dysmorphia symptoms through drive for muscularity and (2) drive for muscularity has a moderating role only in the relation between frustrated relatedness and muscle dissatisfaction (i.e., an indicator of muscle dysmorphia). These findings did not only support the assumptions of Self Determination Theory (SDT) indicating the link between frustrated needs and ill-being situations but also provided preliminary evidence for a new direction of SDT studies.

     

Analyzing Negative Experiences Without Ruminating: The Role of Self-Distancing in Enabling Adaptive Self-Reflection

Both common intuition and findings from multiple areas of research suggest that when faced with distressing experiences, it is helpful to understand one’s feelings. However, a large body of research also indicates that people’s attempts to make sense of their feelings often backfire, leading them to ruminate and feel worse. In this article, we describe a program of research that focuses on disentangling these seemingly contradictory sets of findings. The research program we describe proposes that psychological distance from the self plays a key role in determining whether people’s attempts to understand their feelings lead to adaptive or maladaptive self-reflection. It suggests that people’s attempts to understand their feelings often fail because they analyze their feelings from a self-immersed perspective rather than a self-distanced perspective. Empirical evidence from multiple levels of analysis is presented to support this prediction. The basic science and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.