The Mediation of Family Context and Youth Depressive Symptoms by Adolescent Emotion Regulation

During adolescence, young people develop crucial capacity for emotion regulation, and family context can be a risk or protective factor for adolescents developing affective disorders. We leveraged data from the Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey ( N = 7664) to propose adolescent emotion regulation as a mediator between family conflict, family protection, and adolescent depressive symptoms in the social development model. Latent moderated structural equation modeling revealed that adolescent regulation of negative emotions mediated the relationship between family conflict and depressive symptoms—adolescents with higher family conflict had more emotion regulation difficulties and more depressive symptoms. Adolescent age was a moderator such that associations between family protective factors and reduced depression, and between family conflict and emotion regulation difficulties were weaker in high school compared to middle school. Findings highlight the importance of youth emotion regulation processes and family emotional context in reducing adolescent depressive symptoms.

The Effect of Early Life Stress on Emotional Behaviors in GPR37KO Mice

GPR37 is an orphan G-protein-coupled receptor, a substrate of parkin which is linked to Parkinson’s disease (PD) and affective disorders. In this study, we sought to address the effects of early life stress (ELS) by employing the paradigm of limited nesting material on emotional behaviors in adult GPR37 knockout (KO) mice. Our results showed that, while there was an adverse effect of ELS on various domains of emotional behaviors in wild type (WT) mice in a sex specific manner (anxiety in females, depression and context-dependent fear memory in males), GPR37KO mice subjected to ELS exhibited less deteriorated emotional behaviors. GPR37KO female mice under ELS conditions displayed reduced anxiety compared to WT mice. This was paralleled by lower plasma corticosterone in GPR37KO females and a lower increase in P-T286-CaMKII by ELS in the amygdala. GPR37KO male mice, under ELS conditions, showed better retention of hippocampal-dependent emotional processing in the passive avoidance behavioral task. GPR37KO male mice showed increased immobility in the forced swim task and increased P-T286-CaMKII in the ventral hippocampus under baseline conditions. Taken together, our data showed overall long-term effects of ELS—deleterious or beneficial depending on the genotype, sex of the mice and the emotional context.

Emotional Context and Color Perception and Recognition by 12- and 16-years-old Children

Will the emotional context in which a painting is placed impact how well adolescents remember the colors in it? Will there be differences in color perception and recognition based on age and gender? Specific materials had to be designed to answer this question: (a) an abstract, themeless painting composed of twelve colors, each covering the same area with the same number of pixels, and (b) four texts with different emotional connotations (fear, anger, happiness, and sadness) describing the lives of fictitious painters. After being pretested, the material was proposed to 142 seventh-grade students and 71 tenth-grade students. Each subject studied a painting and heard one of the four texts. Next, the painting was taken away; after this, the subjects ordered the twelve colors based on how much area they thought each one covered the painting. It was hypothesized that the subjects would give greater importance to specific colors depending on the emotional context induced by the associated text. The results confirmed this hypothesis, although the tenth graders were less affected by the emotional context than the seventh graders. There was no statistically significant effect of gender in either population.

UNDERSTANDING BY STUDENTS OF INTERNET TEXTS IN THE SITUATION OF COVID-19 IN UKRAINE

In the article we determined four main psychological peculiarities of understanding by students Internet texts. These peculiarities are: (1) understanding the Internet text by its contextuality, the predictors of which are: reality, versatility, paradigm, descriptiveness, deepness, subjectiveness and personally centered qualities; (2) understanding the Internet text by its psychological context, which includes such predictors, as: psychological justification, compressiveness, interest, entertaining, satisfaction, harmoniousness, emotiveness, expressiveness; (3) understanding the Internet text by its emotional context and predictors, such as: comfort, stylistic expressiveness, convenience, expressiveness, lightness, colloquial features, journalistic style of writing; (4) understanding the Internet text by its multifaceted paradigm, which is characterized by such predictors: paradigmatic, space, being updated, its stimulating, dialogic content, comfort characteristics of perceiving, frivolousness.

Motivation reduces positive and negative emotional distractions

<p>Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, which are often important for our biologically-determined goals of survival and reproduction. But to succeed in our daily tasks we must sometimes ignore emotional stimuli that are not relevant to current goals. In four experiments, I examine the extent to which we can ignore emotional stimuli if we are motivated to do so. I draw on the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) framework which proposes that we use two modes of control to deal with distraction: reactive control, which shifts attention back to a task after distraction has occurred; and proactive control, which allows us to anticipate and control distraction before it occurs. In non-emotional contexts, task motivation encourages use of more effective, but more effortful, proactive control to ignore emotionally-neutral distractions. But, little is known about how we can control our attention to ignore highly distracting emotional stimuli. In all experiments, participants completed a simple visual task while attempting to ignore task-irrelevant negative (mutilation scenes), positive (erotic scenes), and neutral images (scenes of people). Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor trials relative to a scrambled distractor, or no distractor, baseline. To manipulate motivation, half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward; the other half completed the task with the opportunity to earn points and/or money for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1 the images were presented centrally, so attention must be shifted from the distractor location to complete the task. Reward reduced distraction by both positive and negative emotional images. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, and measured pupil dilation to index the timecourse of cognitive effort. The aim of Experiment 2 was to determine whether motivation elicits a shift to proactive control to reduce emotional distraction, as it does in non-emotional contexts. Again, reward reduced positive and negative distraction. Pupil findings indicated that reward dynamically enhanced proactive control prior to stimulus-onset, facilitating rapid disengagement from distractors, regardless of their expected emotional value. In contrast, a sustained proactive strategy was used across blocks in which emotional distractors were expected, relative to blocks in which neutral distractors were expected. In the final two experiments, the distractors were presented peripherally and so must capture attention away from the central targets to impair performance. In Experiment 3, and in Experiment 4 – in which the points did not represent money – reward reduced attentional capture by positive and negative emotional distractors. Together, findings show that motivation can enhance control of positive and negative distractions that appear both centrally, and peripherally. Findings extend the DMC framework to an emotional context; motivation elicits a shift to proactive control, even when distractors are high arousal emotional stimuli. Further, in three out of four experiments, reward reduced emotional to a greater extent than neutral distraction, consistent with reward altering the outcome of goal-driven attentional competition between the targets and distractors. Understanding the complex interactions between motivation, emotion, and cognitive control will help to elucidate how we successfully navigate the world to achieve our goals.</p>

Motivation reduces positive and negative emotional distractions

<p>Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, which are often important for our biologically-determined goals of survival and reproduction. But to succeed in our daily tasks we must sometimes ignore emotional stimuli that are not relevant to current goals. In four experiments, I examine the extent to which we can ignore emotional stimuli if we are motivated to do so. I draw on the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) framework which proposes that we use two modes of control to deal with distraction: reactive control, which shifts attention back to a task after distraction has occurred; and proactive control, which allows us to anticipate and control distraction before it occurs. In non-emotional contexts, task motivation encourages use of more effective, but more effortful, proactive control to ignore emotionally-neutral distractions. But, little is known about how we can control our attention to ignore highly distracting emotional stimuli. In all experiments, participants completed a simple visual task while attempting to ignore task-irrelevant negative (mutilation scenes), positive (erotic scenes), and neutral images (scenes of people). Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor trials relative to a scrambled distractor, or no distractor, baseline. To manipulate motivation, half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward; the other half completed the task with the opportunity to earn points and/or money for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1 the images were presented centrally, so attention must be shifted from the distractor location to complete the task. Reward reduced distraction by both positive and negative emotional images. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, and measured pupil dilation to index the timecourse of cognitive effort. The aim of Experiment 2 was to determine whether motivation elicits a shift to proactive control to reduce emotional distraction, as it does in non-emotional contexts. Again, reward reduced positive and negative distraction. Pupil findings indicated that reward dynamically enhanced proactive control prior to stimulus-onset, facilitating rapid disengagement from distractors, regardless of their expected emotional value. In contrast, a sustained proactive strategy was used across blocks in which emotional distractors were expected, relative to blocks in which neutral distractors were expected. In the final two experiments, the distractors were presented peripherally and so must capture attention away from the central targets to impair performance. In Experiment 3, and in Experiment 4 – in which the points did not represent money – reward reduced attentional capture by positive and negative emotional distractors. Together, findings show that motivation can enhance control of positive and negative distractions that appear both centrally, and peripherally. Findings extend the DMC framework to an emotional context; motivation elicits a shift to proactive control, even when distractors are high arousal emotional stimuli. Further, in three out of four experiments, reward reduced emotional to a greater extent than neutral distraction, consistent with reward altering the outcome of goal-driven attentional competition between the targets and distractors. Understanding the complex interactions between motivation, emotion, and cognitive control will help to elucidate how we successfully navigate the world to achieve our goals.</p>