Age Effect on the Bidirectional Relations Between Alcohol Consumption and Pain

Alcohol consumption reduces but pain rises over the life course. Thus, we hypothesized that developmental variability in the bidirectional association between alcohol consumption and pain would vary as a function of age. This hypothesis was tested across three age groups – younger (<29), middle (29-65), and older (>65) using NESARC wave 1 and 2 data (N=34,653). The effect of pain interference at baseline on alcohol consumption at follow-up was non-significant across the age groups, indicating that self-medication theory was unsupported. The effect of alcohol consumption at baseline on pain interference at follow-up was significant among the middle (Estimate -.007, p=.002) and older (Estimate -.019, p<.001) groups, but non-significant among the younger group. This latter effect differed significantly between the younger and older groups (p =.005) and the middle and older groups (p=.041). Results show that alcohol consumption reduces pain interference, especially later in life.

Reciprocity of Cognitive and Emotional Antecedents to Bullying: Bidirectional Relations Between Cognitive Impulsivity and Anger

The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility that cognitive and affective variables form a reciprocal relationship when it comes to predicting future bullying perpetration. To this end, the bidirectional relationship between cognitive impulsivity and anger was evaluated in an effort to determine whether both cross-lagged pathways contributed to a rise in bullying behavior. The reciprocal hypothesis was tested in a sample of 1,160 early adolescents (567 boys, 593 girls) from the Illinois Study of Bullying and Sexual Violence (ISBSV). Cognitive impulsivity and anger were cross-lagged at Waves 1 and 2 of the ISBSV, after which they were correlated with bullying perpetration at Wave 3 in a three-wave longitudinal path analysis. Results from the path analysis identified the presence of a significant bidirectional association between Cognitive Impulsivity-1 and Anger-2 and between Anger-1 and Cognitive Impulsivity-2, with both cross-lags effectively predicting future bullying behavior.

Developmental associations between bullying victimization and suicidal ideation and direct self-injurious behavior in adolescence and early adulthood

Background: Bullying, suicide, and self-injury are significant public health issues among young people. Extensive research has documented bullying victimization associations with suicidal ideation and self-injury; however, the modeling approaches used have mostly not addressed the relations between these constructs at the within-person level and it is these links that are critical for testing developmental theories and guiding intervention efforts. This study thus aimed to examine the within-person, bidirectional relations between these constructs in adolescence and early adulthood. Methods: Participants were from the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood (z-proso). Random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs) were employed to evaluate the within-person associations between general and sexual bullying victimization and suicidal ideation and direct self-injurious behavior (D-SIB). Results: There was a positive within-person effect of age 15 general bullying victimization on age 17 suicidal ideation (β=.10) and age 17 suicidal ideation on age 20 general bullying victimization (β=.14), suggesting that these constructs may be reciprocally related. Conclusions: Results imply that general bullying victimization and suicidal ideation can have detrimental effects on each other over developmental time but at different stages. Future studies employing briefer intervals will be needed to investigate short-term dynamics between bullying victimization and suicidality/self-injury.

Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality

Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the degree of metaphor unidirectionality in two languages: Hebrew and Abui (spoken by some 16 000 people on the island of Alor in Indonesia). The results of the experiment show that metaphor unidirectionality is significantly higher in Hebrew than in Abui. Whereas Hebrew is a national language, Abui is a regional language of relatively low socio-political complexity. In accordance with the Evolutionary Inference Principle, the lower degree of metaphor unidirectionality of Abui may accordingly be reconstructed to an earlier stage in the evolution of language. The evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality in metaphors argued for here may be viewed as part of a larger package, whereby the development of grammatical complexity in various domains is driven by the incremental increases in socio-political complexity that characterize the course of human prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

The Interplay of Parental Response to Anger, Adolescent Anger Regulation, and Externalizing and Internalizing Problems: A Longitudinal Study

Numerous studies have reported substantive correlations between anger socialization, children’s anger regulation, and internalizing/externalizing problems. However, substantially less is known about the interplay among these constructs during the developmental stage of adolescence, and longitudinal studies on causal relations (i.e., parent-directed, adolescent-directed, or reciprocal effects) are rare. It is also unclear whether the development of internalizing and externalizing problems have similar causal relations. We collected three waves of longitudinal data (Grade 6, Grade 7, Grade 9) from multiple informants. A sample of N = 634 adolescents (mostly 11–12 years at Time 1; 50.6% male) and their parents (predominantly Caucasian with German nationality) completed questionnaires assessing parents’ responses to anger, adolescents’ anger regulation, and adolescents’ internalizing/externalizing problems at each wave. Comparisons of different cross-lagged models revealed reciprocal rather than unidirectional effects. However, we found more parent-directed effects with respect to the development of internalizing problems, whereas relations regarding externalizing problems were more adolescent-directed, i.e., adolescents’ externalizing problems and their anger regulation predicted changes in their parents’ responses to anger across time. Adolescent anger regulation was an important maintaining factor of parents’ responses to anger in later adolescence. Our findings suggest that assumptions regarding bidirectional relations should be emphasized much more in emotion socialization frameworks, particularly for the period of adolescence. Moreover, our study emphasizes the transdiagnostic importance of parents’ responses to anger for both externalizing and internalizing problems and also suggests different underlying mechanisms.

Brain-Behavior Dynamics Between The Left Fusiform and Reading

The visual word form area (VWFA) plays a significant role in the development of reading skills. However, the developmental course and anatomical properties of the VWFA have only limitedly been investigated. The aim of the current longitudinal MRI study was to investigate dynamic, bidirectional relations between reading and the structure of the left fusiform gyrus at the early-to-advanced reading stage. More specifically, by means of bivariate correlations and a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM), the interrelations between the size of the left fusiform gyrus and reading skills (a composite score of a word and pseudo-word reading task) were studied in a longitudinal cohort of 43 Flemish children (29M, 14F) with variable reading skills in grade 2 (the early stage of reading) and grade 5 (the advanced stage of reading) of primary school. Results revealed that better reading skills at grade 2 lead to a larger size of the left fusiform gyrus at grade 5, whereas there are no directional effects between the size of the left fusiform gyrus at grade 2 and reading skills at grade 5. Hence, according to our results there is behavior-driven brain plasticity and no brain-driven reading change between the early and advanced stage of reading. Together with pre-reading brain studies showing predictive relations to later reading scores, our results suggest that the direction of brain-behavioral influences changes throughout the course of reading development.