Emotional Dynamics in the Development of Early Adolescent Psychopathology: A One-Year Longitudinal Study

This study examined the role of the level and variability of happiness, anger, anxiety, and sadness in the development of adolescent-reported anxiety disorder symptoms, depressive symptoms, and aggressive behavior in 452 adolescents (250 male) followed from age 13 to 14. Level and between-day variability of emotions were assessed through adolescent report at 3-month intervals across a 1 year period. Level and variability of the four emotions contributed to changes in anxiety disorder and depressive symptoms more consistently than to changes in aggressive behavior. All four emotions were predictive of changes in internalizing problems, while anger played the most prominent role in the development of aggressive behavior. Variability of emotions contributed to changes in anxiety disorder symptoms, while heightened levels of negative emotions and diminished happiness contributed to changes in depression. Results suggested somewhat stronger effects of negative affect on aggressive behavior for females than for males. Results underscore the role of emotion dysregulation in the development of psychopathology.     

Internalizing Symptoms in Female Adolescents: Associations with Emotional Awareness and Emotion Regulation

The transition into adolescence involves a number of changes that for many adolescents result in increased negative affect and internalizing symptoms, especially for females. In the current study we examined the direct and indirect effects of emotional awareness on internalizing symptoms by exploring the extent to which certain emotion regulation strategies influence this relationship. Participants were 123 female adolescents aged 13–16 years (M = 14.51 years) who completed measures of emotional awareness, emotion regulation (emotional reappraisal and expressive suppression), and symptoms of depression and social anxiety. Two multiple indirect effect models were conducted including both reappraisal and suppression (one for each of the dependent variables, depression and social anxiety) via the bootstrapping method. Results found that reappraisal accounted for the effect of emotional awareness on depressive symptoms but suppression accounted for the effect of emotional awareness on social anxiety symptoms. Results suggest that emotion regulation strategies play an important role in determining depressive and social anxiety symptoms and are associated with an adolescent’s level of emotional awareness.     

Decay uncovered in nonverbal short-term memory

Decay theory posits that memory traces gradually fade away over the passage of time unless they are actively rehearsed. Much recent work exploring verbal short-term memory has challenged this theory, but there does appear to be evidence for trace decay in nonverbal auditory short-term memory. Numerous discrimination studies have reported a performance decline as the interval separating two tones is increased, consistent with a decay process. However, most of this tone comparison research can be explained in other ways, without reference to decay, and these alternative accounts were tested in the present study. In Experiment 1, signals were employed toward the end of extended retention intervals to ensure that listeners were alert to the presence and frequency content of the memoranda. In Experiment 2, a mask stimulus was employed in an attempt to distinguish between a highly detailed sensory trace and a longer-lasting short-term memory, and the distinctiveness of the stimuli was varied. Despite these precautions, slow-acting trace decay was observed. It therefore appears that the mere passage of time can lead to forgetting in some forms of short-term memory.     

Early Childhood Care Trends and Associations with Child Health Well-being in China: Evidence from the CHNS 1991 to 2011 Data

It has become increasingly common for young children to be taken care of by multiple caregivers in China after the socio-economic reforms. Complex migration patterns and high female labour force participation have led to children receiving care from various individuals in different contexts. However, little is known about how childcare arrangements are associated with child health well-being. This study examines various early childhood caregivers and their influences on children’s physical health in China. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS 1991–2011) with 3,470 children aged 2 to 6, we first identified different types of childcare arrangements in and outside of the household based on who provides the care, where they provide the care, and the intensity of the care. Then we examined the relationship between various childcare arrangements and health outcomes for children. Overall, household members undertook early childhood care tasks in China, with an increase in grandparents as primary caregivers between 1991 and 2011. The proportion of children receiving formal childcare fluctuated around 20% during this period. The findings suggest that: 1) primary caregiver in the household other than parents is not associated with undesirable physical health outcomes; 2) formal childcare outside the household is associated with higher height and lower BMI scores; 3) primary caregivers in the household, particular grandparents, moderate the association between childcare arrangements outside the household and children’s health outcomes. It yields an implication that early childhood care policies incorporating multiple caregivers would benefit children’s well-being in China.

     

French Philosophy of Science,Structuralist Epistemology,and the Problem of the Subject

This article examines the multiple relations between the rationalist tradition of French philosophy of science exemplified by the work of Gaston Bachelard, and the rethinking of the relation between science and ideology undertaken by Louis Althusser and a young Alain Badiou in the 1960s. Both Bachelard and Althusser are interrogated for the philosophy of language that underpins their respective visions of scientificity; in turn, the problem of the subject is posed, in part through an investigation of Althusser's inheritance and transformation of Lacanian psychoanalysis.     

Performing DISCO-SCA to search for distinctive and common information in linked data

Behavioral researchers often obtain information about the same set of entities from different sources. A main challenge in the analysis of such data is to reveal, on the one hand, the mechanisms underlying all of the data blocks under study and, on the other hand, the mechanisms underlying a single data block or a few such blocks only (i.e., common and distinctive mechanisms, respectively). A method called DISCO-SCA has been proposed by which such mechanisms can be found. The goal of this article is to make the DISCO-SCA method more accessible, in particular for applied researchers. To this end, first we will illustrate the different steps in a DISCO-SCA analysis, with data stemming from the domain of psychiatric diagnosis. Second, we will present in this article the DISCO-SCA graphical user interface (GUI). The main benefits of the DISCO-SCA GUI are that it is easy to use, strongly facilitates the choice of model selection parameters (such as the number of mechanisms and their status as being common or distinctive), and is freely available.     

Hide and seek: The theory of mind of visual concealment and search

Researchers have investigated visual search behavior for almost a century. During that time, few studies have examined the cognitive processes involved in hiding items rather than finding them. To investigate this, we developed a paradigm that allowed participants to indicate where they would hide (or find) an item that was to be found (or hidden) by a friend or a foe. We found that (i) for friends more than foes, participants selected the pop-out item in the display, and (ii) when the display was homogeneous, they selected nearby and corner items. These behaviors held for both hiding and finding, although hide and find behaviors were not identical. For pop-out displays, decision times were unusually long when hiding an item from a foe. These data converge on the conclusion that the principles of search and concealment are similar, but not the same. They also suggest that this paradigm will provide researchers a powerful method for investigating theory of mind in adults.     

Memory for individual items is related to nonreinforced preference change

It is commonly assumed that memories contribute to value-based decisions. Nevertheless, most theories of value-based decision-making do not account for memory influences on choice. Recently, new interest has emerged in the interactions between these two fundamental processes, mainly using reinforcement-based paradigms. Here, we aimed to study the role memory processes play in preference change following the nonreinforced cue-approach training (CAT) paradigm. In CAT, the mere association of cued items with a speeded motor response influences choices. Previous studies with this paradigm showed that a single training session induces a long-lasting effect of enhanced preferences for high-value trained stimuli, that is maintained for several months. We hypothesized that CAT increases memory of trained items, leading to enhanced accessibility of their positive associative memories and in turn to preference changes. In two preregistered experiments, we found evidence that memory is enhanced for trained items and that better memory is correlated with enhanced preferences at the individual item level, both immediately and 1 mo following CAT. Our findings suggest that memory plays a central role in value-based decision-making following CAT, even in the absence of external reinforcements. These findings contribute to new theories relating memory and value-based decision-making and set the groundwork for the implementation of novel nonreinforced behavioral interventions that lead to long-lasting behavioral change.

Value-based decision-making and memory are both extensively studied processes in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Fellows 2017). Most theories of value-based decision-making have focused on processes related to the incremental learning of value following external reinforcement, but have not explicitly addressed the role of memory per se. Thus, fundamental questions remain regarding interactions between memory and value-based decisions, which have been gaining attention in recent years.Several recent empirical studies have demonstrated interactions between episodic memory and value-based decision-making. For example, memory for past events has been shown to bias value-based decisions (Duncan and Shohamy 2016), differently for choices of novel versus choices of familiar options (Duncan et al. 2019), and choice behavior and fMRI signals during value-based decision-making were better explained by episodic memory for individual past choices than by a standard reinforcement learning model (Bornstein et al. 2017). Another study has found that during sampling of episodic memories of previous choices, the retrieved context influenced present choices, deviating from the predictions of standard reinforcement learning models (Bornstein and Norman 2017). Other studies have demonstrated that the long time known effect of choices on future preferences is related to memory processes (Chammat et al. 2017; DuBrow et al. 2019; Luettgau et al. 2020). At the neural level, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the hippocampus both have been shown to play a role in memory processes and value-based decisions (Weilbächer and Gluth 2017) and recent studies have been further emphasizing that the hippocampus bridges between past experience and future decisions (Bakkour et al. 2019; Biderman et al. 2020).All these studies, and many others, highlighted the interaction between memory and value-based decision-making involving external reinforcements. However, everyday life involves decisions and associations that are not directly reinforced. Thus, it remains unclear whether memory plays a general role in value-based decision-making even without external reinforcements.To better understand the role of memory processes in shaping preferences independently of external reinforcements, we used a novel behavioral change paradigm, named cue-approach training (CAT). In this paradigm, associating images of items with a neutral cue and a speeded motor response results in a consistent preference enhancement without external reinforcement, which is maintained for months (Schonberg et al. 2014; Bakkour et al. 2018; Salomon et al. 2018, 2019; Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020). During CAT, images of items are consistently paired with a neutral cue and a speeded motor response (“Go items”), while other items are presented without the cue or the response (“NoGo items”). One training session with several presentations of all items leads to long-lasting preference changes, measured as the likelihood of choosing Go over NoGo items that had similar initial subjective values (Schonberg et al. 2014). Results from over 30 samples with this paradigm have demonstrated a replicable effect on various types of stimuli, including snack food items, fruits and vegetables, unfamiliar faces, fractal art images, and positive affective images (Bakkour et al. 2016, 2017; Veling et al. 2017; Zoltak et al. 2017; Bakkour et al. 2018; Salomon et al. 2018, 2019; Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020), revealing the potential of the CAT paradigm as an experimental platform for value-based decision-making without external reinforcements (Schonberg and Katz 2020).The underlying mechanisms of the change of preferences following CAT are not yet fully understood (Schonberg et al. 2014; Bakkour et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019; Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020; Schonberg and Katz 2020). The long-lasting nature of the effect, which has been shown to last for up to 6 mo following a single training session (Schonberg et al. 2014; Salomon et al. 2018, 2019; Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020), raises the hypothesis that memory processes are involved in its maintenance. Furthermore, previous studies have found enhanced memory for Go compared with NoGo items with other types of Go–NoGo tasks (Chiu and Egner 2015a,b; Yebra et al. 2019) and for items for which participants have a sense of agency (Murty et al. 2015). One recent study provided preliminary evidence suggesting that memory is involved in preference change following a similar nonreinforced Go/NoGo training task (Chen et al. 2021).We hypothesized that CAT enhances memory of Go items, which in turn leads to preferring these items over NoGo items. Previous neuroimaging findings with CAT that suggested possible interactions between hippocampal fMRI activity and subsequent preferences 1 mo following CAT, provide additional evidence in support of this hypothesis (Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020). Therefore, here we set out to test the role memory processes play in the behavioral change of preferences following CAT, in the short and in the long term.We propose an underlying mechanism for the CAT effect, in which preference change following CAT results from a boost in memory encoding of positive Go items, which in itself is a consequence of enhanced perceptual processing of Go items (Schonberg et al. 2014; Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020). We hypothesize that the enhanced encoding of Go items, as well as the greater perceptual activation in response to them, increases accessibility of attributes and associations of these specific Go items (Anderson 1983; Bhatia 2013). Furthermore, we hypothesized that preference changes, reflected in the binary choice phase, are due to the enhanced accessibility of memory associations of the Go items, which tips the scales in favor of the Go items when the associations are positive.In order to test memory for individual items, in the current work we introduced a memory recognition task following CAT. In two independent preregistered experiments and one pilot experiment, memory was evaluated following a long (16 repetitions) or short (a single exposure) CAT training session, before the probe phase that evaluated post-training preferences. We then tested our predictions that (1) memory will be stronger for Go compared with NoGo items following CAT (more accurate and faster responses in the recognition task) and (2) that memory will be related to choices (better remembered Go items will be chosen over worse remembered NoGo items). Since the link between better memory and enhanced choices is hypothesized to be related to positive associated memories, we tested the relationship between memory and choices separately for choices between low-value and choices between high-value items. These hypotheses were tested both in the short term (immediately or a few days after CAT) and in a 1-mo follow-up.