Bridging childhood to adulthood: the impact of early life stress on acute stress responses.

Background: Childhood trauma exerts enduring impacts on the physical and psychological well-being of individuals in adulthood, influencing their daily functioning. This study aims to investigate the impact of childhood trauma on stress recovery in adults, concentrating on heart rate variations during acute stress exposure. Methods: A cohort of 126 participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to elicit acute stress, with continuous heart rate (HR) monitoring for stress recovery assessment. Results: The results revealed a negative correlation between childhood trauma and stress recovery, prominently observed in instances of emotional neglect and abuse. Individuals with heightened childhood trauma exhibited protracted stress recovery following acute stress exposure. Conclusion: Childhood traumatic experiences were associated with the recovery from acute stress, as indicated by heart rate indices. These findings contribute to the foundational framework for psychological interventions tailored to individuals with a history of childhood trauma.

Neural mechanisms underlying the influence of retrieval ability on creating and recalling creative ideas.

Previous studies revealed a close relationship between retrieval ability and creative thinking; however, it is still unclear what processes of creative thinking are influenced by retrieval ability. This study applied a novel task paradigm to distinguish between different processes of creative thinking. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the differences of cortical activation and functional connectivity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and temporal cortex between high (HRA) and low (LRA) retrieval ability groups during creating original ideas (CO) and recalling original ideas (RO) tasks. The behaviour results revealed that in the CO task, the HRA group performed better than the LRA group on fluency, flexibility, and originality. Importantly, the fNIRS results further indicated that the HRA group exhibited higher activation of the l-TPJ, l-STG, l-MTG, r-FPC, r-DLPFC than the LRA group during the CO task. Moreover, the HRA group exhibited higher activation of the bilateral TPJ, l-STG, l-MTG, r-DLPFC, and r-FPC in the CO task than in the RO task, and the LRA group exhibited higher activation of the l-STG in the CO task than in the RO task. The functional connectivity between the PFC and IFG, TPJ, and MTG of the HRA group was significantly stronger than that of the LRA group in both the CO and RO tasks. The findings suggest that high retrieval ability could facilitate the generation of creative ideas by facilitating the retrieval of novel information and suppression of common information compared to low retrieval ability. This study provides neural evidence for the effect of different levels of retrieval ability on creative thinking.

Affective valence moderates the influence of thinking style on insight problem solving: Electrophysiological evidence.

The present study examined whether affective valence moderated the influence of holistic and analytic thinking styles on insight problem solving by analysing event-related potentials (ERPs). Adult participants were screened and assigned to holistic-thinking and analytic-thinking groups, 22 participants per group. They completed the insight task. The results indicated that in the initial stage of insight, the positive affect elicited larger N1 amplitudes than the negative affect in the analytic-thinking group. Moreover, for the holistic-thinking group, positive affect elicited larger P2 amplitudes than negative affect. In the subsequent stages, negative affect elicited larger N300-500 and late components than positive affect in the holistic-thinking group. In contrast, positive affect elicited larger N300-500 and late components than negative affect in the analytic-thinking group. These findings suggest that holistic-thinking individuals with negative affect and analytic-thinking individuals with positive affect were more able to abandon mental sets and reconstruct novel mental representations.