Longitudinal associations between adolescent alcohol use and parents' sources of knowledge

The aim of this study was to test the direction of effect in the relationship between parents' sources of knowledge (parental monitoring and child disclosure) and adolescent alcohol use. The participants were 215 adolescents and their mothers, randomly selected from urban and rural areas in Cyprus. A 3‐month, two‐timepoint longitudinal design was used in which adolescents completed the alcohol use disorders identification test while mothers completed a parental knowledge questionnaire. The results of this study showed that parental monitoring did not predict subsequent adolescent alcohol use. However, child disclosure at Time 1 negatively predicted adolescent alcohol use at Time 2. Moreover, adolescents' alcohol dependence symptoms at Time 1 negatively predicted both sources of parental knowledge at Time 2.     

Bold and bright: shy and supple? The effect of habitat type on personality–cognition covariance in the Aegean wall lizard (Podarcis erhardii)

Animal Cognition - Animals exhibit considerable and consistent among-individual variation in cognitive abilities, even within a population. Recent studies have attempted to address this variation...     

Cultural values as mediators between parenting styles and bullying behavior at school

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between parenting styles, cultural values and bullying behavior at school. The main objective was to test the mediating role of cultural values in these relationships. The participants were 985 pre-adolescents, aged 10–12 years old (M = 10.95, SD = .75) from Cyprus and Greece who completed the Parental Authority Questionnaire, the Cultural Values Scale and the Bullying Victimization Questionnaire. Structural equation models were applied to test the interrelations between the latent factors. It was found that horizontal individualism was positively related to victimization, whereas vertical individualism was positively related to bullying. Furthermore, cultural values partially mediated the relationships between parental styles and bullying behavior. The contextual mechanisms explaining bullying and victimization were similar for males and females. The findings support the contextual conceptualization of bullying and point out the need to consider the mediating role of cultural values in order to understand the differential pathways between familial factors and child outcomes.     

Lifelong reductions of PKMζ in ventral hippocampus of nonhuman primates exposed to early-life adversity due to unpredictable maternal care

Protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ) maintains long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term memory through persistent increases in kinase expression. Early-life adversity is a precursor to adult mood and anxiety disorders, in part, through persistent disruption of emotional memory throughout life. Here we subjected 10- to 16-wk-old male bonnet macaques to adversity by a maternal variable-foraging demand paradigm. We then examined PKMζ expression in their ventral hippocampi as 7- to 12-yr-old adults. Quantitative immunohistochemistry reveals decreased PKMζ in dentate gyrus, CA1, and subiculum of subjects who had experienced early-life adversity due to the unpredictability of maternal care. Adult animals with persistent decrements of PKMζ in ventral hippocampus express timid rather than confrontational responses to a human intruder. Persistent down-regulation of PKMζ in the ventral hippocampus might reduce the capacity for emotional memory maintenance and contribute to the long-lasting emotional effects of early-life adversity.

Early-life adversity is associated with an increased vulnerability to stress-related disorders that is maintained into adulthood, suggesting a very long-lived effect on emotional memory by the early-life event (Coplan et al. 1996). Although several structural and neurochemical sequelae of early-life adversity have been reported (Teicher et al. 2003; Jackowski et al. 2011), the direct effects of early-life adversity on the molecular substrates maintaining long-term memory storage have not been explored.Accumulating evidence supports a crucial role for the autonomously active, atypical protein kinase C (PKC) isoform protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ) in maintaining synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP), a putative physical substrate for memory, and long-term memory storage (Ling et al. 2002; Pastalkova et al. 2006; Glanzman 2013; Sacktor and Fenton 2018). The autonomous activity of PKMζ is due to its unusual structure that differs from other PKC isoforms (Sacktor et al. 1993). Most PKCs consist of two domains: a catalytic domain and an autoinhibitory regulatory domain that suppresses the catalytic domain. Therefore, most PKCs are inactive until second messengers bind to the regulatory domain and induce a conformational change that releases the autoinhibition. Because second messengers that activate PKCs such as Ca²⁺ or diacylglycerol have short half-lives, most PKCs are only transiently activated.PKMζ, in contrast, consists of an independent PKCζ catalytic domain, and the absence of an autoinhibitory regulatory domain results in autonomous and thus persistent activity once the kinase is synthesized. PKMζ mRNA is transcribed from an internal promoter within the PKCζ/PKMζ gene that is active only in neural tissue (Hernandez et al. 2003). The mRNA is translationally repressed and transported to dendrites of neurons (Muslimov et al. 2004). High-frequency afferent synaptic activity during LTP induction or learning derepresses PKMζ mRNA translation, triggering new synthesis of PKMζ protein (Osten et al. 1996; Hernandez et al. 2003; Tsokas et al. 2016; Hsieh et al. 2017).Once increased, the steady-state amount of PKMζ remains elevated during LTP or long-term memory maintenance. Recent work with quantitative immunohistochemistry (IHC) shows that spatial conditioning induces persistent increases of PKMζ in somatic and selective dendritic compartments of dorsal hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells that can last at least 1 mo (Hsieh et al. 2021). The persistent increases are preferentially expressed in CA1 pyramidal cells that were activated during the formation of the memory, specifically at the termination zone of the Schaffer collateral/commissural inputs from subfield CA3. In contrast, persistent PKMζ increases are not evident in stratum lacunosum-moleculare, the termination zone that originates in entorhinal cortex that nonetheless is capable of expressing PKMζ. Postsynaptic domain-specific PKMζ expression patterns hint at distinct circuit-specific modifications of cortical–hippocampal synaptic function by maturational and experiential factors.Persistent changes in PKMζ expression are also associated with changes in the capacity for learning and memory across the life span of animals. Decreased memory ability in aged rats is associated with decreased training-induced, persistent PKMζ expression in prelimbic cortex, and increases in PKMζ are crucial for the cognition-enhancing effects of environmental enrichment in the aged animals (Chen et al. 2016). Hara et al. extended the connection between PKMζ and cognitive function to nonhuman primates (NHPs), showing that levels of PKMζ expression in dentate gyrus (DG) axospinous synapses correlate with successful performance on cognitive tasks in young and aged monkeys (Hara et al. 2012). These studies suggest that persistent down-regulation of PKMζ may comprise an important pathophysiological mechanism for cognitive impairment.Here we used a validated NHP model of early-life adversity, maternal variable-foraging demand (VFD), to explore the links between adversity in infancy and PKMζ expression in adulthood (Coplan et al. 1996; Jackowski et al. 2011). Previous studies of the VFD paradigm have revealed that both infants and their mothers exposed to VFD show significant cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) elevations of the stress neuropeptide, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF). Moreover, the magnitude of CRF change in mothers and infants are positively correlated, suggesting synchronization of maternal–infant stress responses to the VFD stressor (Coplan et al. 2005). From a behavioral standpoint, maternal social rank plays a negligible role in determining an aggregate score of maternal–infant proximity, suggesting preferential attention of mothers to their infants. During the VFD condition, maternal social rank predicts >80% of the variance of maternal–infant proximity, suggesting mothering patterns are interrupted by preferential orientations to social rank; the latter determines food accessibility (Coplan et al. 2015). Dominant females show relative increases in maternal–infant proximity, whereas subordinate females show relative reductions in maternal–infant proximity. Neither pattern of attachment ameliorates an abnormal association between CSF oxytocin concentrations and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity (Coplan et al. 2015). Offspring exposed to VFD rearing assessed both as juveniles and as full adults demonstrate persistent increases in CSF CRF concentrations in comparison with controls reared under non-VFD conditions (Coplan et al. 1996, 2001).Our prior neurohistological studies pointed to the DG as a region particularly vulnerable to VFD exposure, as shown by reduced trophic signaling and neurogenesis (Jackowski et al. 2011; Perera et al. 2011; Schoenfeld et al. 2021). We therefore hypothesized that early-life adversity due to unpredictable maternal care (for brevity, subsequently referred to as “early-life adversity”) reduces the persistent expression of PKMζ within the DG of ventral intrahippocampal neurocircuitry that mediates affective memory processing (Fanselow and Dong 2010). We used PKMζ antisera validated by the lack of immunostaining in PKMζ-null mice (Hsieh et al. 2021) to examine PKMζ expression in ventral hippocampus (NHP anterior hippocampus) in both DG granule cell layer and the stratum moleculare of the suprapyramidal blade that receives direct input from entorhinal cortex, as well as other regions encompassing the hippocampal formation, including the hilus, CA3, CA1, and subiculum.To assess behavioral correlates of hippocampal PKMζ expression, we used a stress-inducing paradigm designed specifically for singly housed bonnet macaque male NHPs, which we refer to as the “human exposure response” (Jackowski et al. 2011; Hamel et al. 2017), which is a variation of the paradigm used in human exposure studies by Kalin et al. in rhesus macaques (Kalin and Shelton 1989). On exposure to a direct human presence, singly housed adult male bonnet macaques react with a dichotomy of responses—confrontational versus timid (see the Materials and Methods) (Jackowski et al. 2011). In our macaque colony, groups of fully adult males are necessarily housed individually to prevent injury sustained during male agonistic encounters, whereas adult females and/or juveniles are safely housed in social groups. Because group housing of nursing females and/or juveniles of both sexes elicits a range of behaviors intrinsic to the species’ social repertoire (Rosenblum et al. 2001; Coplan et al. 2015) that complicates behavioral analyses to human exposure, we restricted our current study to male macaques.     

Psychopathic traits and adolescents’ delinquency: A short-term longitudinal study

Delinquency may partly develop as a consequence of psychopathic personality. But, what is the mechanism behind this connection? 150 Cypriot students were asked to complete four questionnaires (Inventory of Parents and Peers Attachment, Bullying and Victimization Questionnaire-Revised, Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory and Delinquency Scale) in three time periods; (November 2015, February 2016, May 2016). We hypothesized that; (a) psychopathic traits will predict the increase in delinquent behaviour, (b) psychopathic traits at Time 1 will predict a poorer attachment with parents and peers, and an increase in bullying and victimization at Time 2, and this inter alias will predict an increase in delinquency at Time 3. A mediation effect is also hypothesized in this study. Results showed a direct relation between psychopathic traits and delinquency. Full mediation was found with bullying and victimization as mediators. Additionally, the quality of attachment and delinquency is not statistically significant related. The present findings suggest that bullying and victimization are part of the mechanism in the connection between psychopathy and delinquency. In conclusion, results provide important clues for understanding that psychopathic traits are not considered as a determining factor of delinquent behaviour since bullying could be controlled and modified with proper interventions.     

Is there a psychopathic element in adolescent drinking? A longitudinal study

While previous studies have examined the relationship between psychopathic traits and alcohol use in adolescents, limited empirical investigations of the longitudinal bidirectional effects of psychopathic traits and alcohol use have been conducted for this age-group. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal associations among adolescent’s psychopathic traits and their alcohol use, in order to illustrate the directional causal relationship between the two constructs, taking into account demographic effects. Participants were 334 adolescents from Cyprus. The participants responded to self-report questionnaires in two consecutive measurements within a six-month interval. Data were analyzed with cross-lagged structural equation modelling. Results indicated that the Dependence alcohol symptoms in Time 1 were significant predictors of the Interpersonal dimension of psychopathy in T2, and the Behavioural dimension of psychopathy in T1 was a significant predictor of Dependence alcohol symptoms in T2, regardless of previous levels of psychopathy and alcohol use, gender and age effects. Implications for research are discussed.     

Effects of mental workload and caffeine on catecholamines and blood pressure compared to performance variations

Caffeine is characterised as a central nervous system stimulant, also affecting metabolic and cardiovascular functions. A number of studies have demonstrated an effect of caffeine on the excretion of catecholamines and their metabolites. Urinary epinephrine and norepinephrine have been shown to increase after caffeine administration. Similar trends were observed in our study in adrenaline (ADR) and noradrenaline (NORADR) levels and additionally a dose dependent effect of caffeine. The effect of caffeine on cognitive performance, blood pressure, and catecholamines was tested under resting conditions and under mental workload. Each subject performed the test after oral administration of 1 cup and then 3 cups of coffee. Root mean square error (RMSE) for the tracking task was continuously monitored. Blood pressure was also recorded before and after each stage of the experiment. Catecholamines were collected and measured for three different conditions as: at rest, after mental stress alone, after one dose of caffeine under stress, and after triple dose of caffeine under stress. Comparison of the performance of each stage with the resting conditions revealed statistically significant differences between group of smokers/coffee drinkers compared with the other two groups of non-coffee drinkers/non-smokers and non-smokers/coffee drinkers. There was no statistically significant difference between the last two groups. There was an increase of urine adrenaline with 1 cup of coffee and statistically significant increase of urine noradrenaline. Both catecholamines were significantly increased with triple dose of caffeine. Mental workload increased catecholamines. There was a dose dependent effect of caffeine on catecholamines.     

Studying social cognition in patients with schizophrenia and patients with frontotemporal dementia: theory of mind and the perception of sarcasm

We investigated social cognition and theory of mind in patients with schizophrenia and in patients with frontotemporal dementia in order to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms involved in the breakdown of these skills in psychiatric and neurological patients. Our tasks included videotaped scenarios of social interactions depicting sincere, sarcastic and paradoxical remarks, as well as lies. We found impaired performance of the schizophrenia group on all theory of mind conditions despite their intact understanding of sincere statements. In contrast, the FTD group performed poorly only when they had to rely on paralinguistic cues indicating sarcasm or lies, and not on paradoxical remarks or sarcasm when given additional verbal cues. Our findings suggest that, while current deficits in social and interpersonal functioning in patients with FTD may reflect a decrement in previously acquired skills, similar deficits in patients with schizophrenia may reflect an altogether inadequately learned process.     

Mindfulness,impulsivity, and moral disengagement as parameters of bullying and victimization at school

The aim of the present study was to examine the existing association between mindfulness, impulsivity, moral disengagement, and bullying experiences at school. Longitudinal data were collected in three points in time (T1, T2, T3) with 6 months interval between them. Participants were 558 adolescents attending secondary schools in Cyprus, with their ages ranging from 14 to 17 years (M = 15.3; standard deviation = 0.69). Through structural equation modeling, it was found that mindfulness at T1 had a significant negative effect on both impulsivity and moral disengagement at T2 and these, in turn, had a positive effect on bullying and victimization at T3. Thus, mindfulness had an indirect effect on both bullying and victimization, fully mediated by impulsivity and moral disengagement.     

Cardiovascular Reactivity During Marital Conflict in Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings: Differential Associations with Relationship and Individual Functioning Across Contexts

Cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict is considered to be one of the main pathways for relationship distress to impact physical, mental, and relationship health. However, the magnitude of association between cardiovascular reactivity during laboratory marital conflict and relationship functioning is small and inconsistent given the scope of its importance in theoretical models of intimate relationships. This study tests the possibility that cardiovascular data collected in laboratory settings downwardly bias the magnitude of these associations when compared to measures obtained in naturalistic settings. Ambulatory cardiovascular reactivity data were collected from 20 couples during two relationship conflicts in a research laboratory, two planned relationship conflicts at couples’ homes, and two spontaneous relationship conflicts during couples’ daily lives. Associations between self‐report measures of relationship functioning, individual functioning, and cardiovascular reactivity across settings are tested using multilevel models. Cardiovascular reactivity was significantly larger during planned and spontaneous relationship conflicts in naturalistic settings than during planned relationship conflicts in the laboratory. Similarly, associations with relationship and individual functioning variables were statistically significantly larger for cardiovascular data collected in naturalistic settings than the same data collected in the laboratory. Our findings suggest that cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict in naturalistic settings is statistically significantly different from that elicited in laboratory settings both in magnitude and in the pattern of associations with a wide range of inter‐ and intrapersonal variables. These differences in findings across laboratory and naturalistic physiological responses highlight the value of testing physiological phenomena across interaction contexts in romantic relationships.