Chinese college students' mental health during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic: the protective role of family functioning.

Background: Various psychological theories suggest that a supportive family environment protects the mental health of young adults during stressful life events. However, evidence is limited regarding the protective role of family support during a major public health crisis. Objective: To examine the role of family functioning on mental health among Chinese college students during first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Between January-March 2020, 1,555 college students (44% female, on average 19 years old) from five Chinese universities participated. Participants rated their family functioning on the Family APGAR Index and their mental health on the Psychological Questionnaires for Emergent Events of Public Health, measuring depression, neurasthenia, fear, obsessive-anxiety and hypochondriasis. Results: Better family functioning was associated with having fewer psychological symptoms. In addition, we identified three mental health profiles related to the severity across the psychological symptoms: Low-level, medium-level and high-level symptom clusters. Latent profile analysis showed that as family function improved, students were, respectively, 16 to 24% more likely to be in the low-level symptom group, compared to being in the medium symptom group or the high-level symptom group. Conclusion: These results support the notion that family support may act as a psychological buffer for young adults during a large-scale public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modeling Emerging Interpersonal Synchrony and its Related Adaptive Short-Term Affiliation and Long-Term Bonding: A Second-Order Multi-Adaptive Neural Agent Model.

When people interact, their behavior tends to become synchronized, a mutual coordination process that fosters short-term adaptations, like increased affiliation, and long-term adaptations, like increased bonding. This paper addresses for the first time how such short-term and long-term adaptivity induced by synchronization can be modeled computationally by a second-order multi-adaptive neural agent model. It addresses movement, affect and verbal modalities and both intrapersonal synchrony and interpersonal synchrony. The behavior of the introduced neural agent model was evaluated in a simulation paradigm with different stimuli and communication-enabling conditions. Moreover, in this paper, mathematical analysis is also addressed for adaptive network models and their positioning within the landscape of adaptive dynamical systems. The first type of analysis addressed shows that any smooth adaptive dynamical system has a canonical representation by a self-modeling network. This implies theoretically that the self-modeling network format is widely applicable, which also has been found in many practical applications using this approach. Furthermore, stationary point and equilibrium analysis was addressed and applied to the introduced self-modeling network model. It was used to obtain verification of the model providing evidence that the implemented model is correct with respect to its design specifications.

Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony in the Prefrontal and Temporoparietal Cortex: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of fNIRS Hyperscanning Studies.

Single-brain neuroimaging studies have shown that human cooperation is associated with neural activity in frontal and temporoparietal regions. However, it remains unclear whether single-brain studies are informative about cooperation in real life, where people interact dynamically. Such dynamic interactions have become the focus of interbrain studies. An advantageous technique in this regard is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) because it is less susceptible to movement artifacts than more conventional techniques like electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We conducted a systematic review and the first quantitative meta-analysis of fNIRS hyperscanning of cooperation, based on thirteen studies with 890 human participants. Overall, the meta-analysis revealed evidence of statistically significant interbrain synchrony while people were cooperating, with large overall effect sizes in both frontal and temporoparietal areas. All thirteen studies observed significant interbrain synchrony in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), suggesting that this region is particularly relevant for cooperative behavior. The consistency in these findings is unlikely to be because of task-related activations, given that the relevant studies used diverse cooperation tasks. Together, the present findings support the importance of interbrain synchronization of frontal and temporoparietal regions in interpersonal cooperation. Moreover, the present article highlights the usefulness of meta-analyses as a tool for discerning patterns in interbrain dynamics.

Coping with COVID-19: Insights from cognition and emotion research.

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing efforts to contain its spread have caused major problems with public health, along with social and economic disruptions. This Special Issue addresses how coping with the pandemic has been shaped by the interplay between cognition and emotion. The various contributions to this Special Issue explore the impacts of the pandemic on: (a) How people were confronted with new risks and realities; (b) Active processes of emotional resilience and ruminative coping; and c) Moral decision-making. Taken together, this work shows how research on cognition and emotion can illuminate the social and emotional strains of the pandemic, while helping to identify risk factors that exacerbate these problems and pointing to ways to successfully address and mitigate these problems, such as emotion regulation, social support, and perspective taking. The editorial closes by briefly reporting on the present state of the journal and changes in the editorial team.

Pandemic reminders as psychological threat: thinking about COVID-19 lowers coping self-Efficacy among trauma-exposed adults.

Reminders of COVID-related problems have been pervasive throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Such reminders could have negative mental health impacts, especially among psychologically vulnerable people, including those with trauma-related problems. We experimentally examined the effects of pandemic reminders among trauma-exposed participants sampled from Prolific (N = 238). Participants were induced to think about health-related or social isolation-related aspects of COVID-19 or their favourite TV show and existential anxiety and coping self-efficacy (CSE) were then assessed. Posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) related to a prior stressor and COVID-related functional impairment were assessed as potential moderators of reactions to pandemic reminders. Results showed that both types of pandemic reminders lowered CSE among participants with either higher PTSS or COVID-related functional impairment. Pandemic reminders did not significantly affect existential anxiety. These findings suggest that reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic may undermine the mental health of psychologically vulnerable populations.

Testing the Effects of a Virtual Reality Game for Aggressive Impulse Management: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial among Forensic Psychiatric Outpatients.

Prior laboratory experiments among healthy samples found that training avoidance movements to angry faces may lower anger and aggression, especially people high in trait anger. To enrich this training and make it more suitable for clinical applications, the present researchers developed it into a Virtual Reality Game for Aggressive Impulse Management (VR-GAIME). The current study examined the effects of this training in a randomized controlled trial among forensic psychiatric outpatients with aggression regulation problems (N = 30). In addition to the aggression replacement training, patients played either the VR-GAIME or a control game. Aggressive behavior was measured pre-, half-way, and post-treatment via self-report and clinicians ratings. No difference was found between the VR-GAIME and the control game. However, the participants reported gaining more insight into their own behavior and that of others. Future VR intervention tools in clinical settings may capitalize more on their benefits for self-reflection within interpersonal settings.

Getting lost in a story: how narrative engagement emerges from narrative perspective and individual differences in alexithymia.

The present research examines how narrative engagement, or the extent to which people immerse themselves into the world of a story, varies as a function of narrative perspective and individual differences in alexithymia. The authors hypothesised that narrative engagement would be higher when people assume a first-person (rather than third-person) perspective and for people lower (rather than higher) on alexithymia. In an online study (N = 541) and a lab study (N = 55), participants with varying levels of alexithymia read first- and/or third-person narrated texts and then rated their narrative engagement. As expected, first-person stories evoked more narrative engagement than third-person stories, and global alexithymia was negatively correlated with narrative engagement. Narrative perspective did not interact with cognitive facets of alexithymia (i.e. difficulties identifying, verbalising, and understanding feelings). However, narrative perspective did interact with affective facets of alexithymia (i.e. emotionalising and fantasising): First-person (rather than third-person) stories elicited more narrative engagement at lower levels of affective alexithymia, but not at higher levels of affective alexithymia. The interaction effect was significant in Study 1; the interaction was significant in Study 2 after controlling for trait absorption. Together, these findings suggest that alexithymia is linked to difficulties in mentally simulating narrative worlds.

Nature in the indoor and outdoor study environment and secondary and tertiary education students' well-being, academic outcomes, and possible mediating pathways: A systematic review with recommendations for science and practice.

This study reviews the evidence on the effects of nature in the study environment on well-being, academic outcomes, and outcomes related to possible explanatory pathways among students in secondary and tertiary education. The protocol was preregistered at Prospero (CRD42019126718). A systematic search of two databases yielded 3410 articles, of which 37 studies were included in the review. Most studies had a high risk of bias and there were heterogeneous outcome and exposure measures. Hence, no firm conclusions could be drawn. However, potentially promising leads were found on the associations between campus green space and improved quality of life, perceived restoration, lower outdoor temperature, and between indoor nature and improved indoor climate.

Rethinking emotion science: new theory section for Cognition & Emotion.

A cumulative emotion science requires sustained investments in theory development. To encourage such investments, a new section will be added to Cognition & Emotion that is specifically devoted to theory. In this Editorial, we first lay out the rationale for the new Theory section. Next, we consider the added value of theory for research on cognition and emotion. Building on these notions, we outline the kinds of articles that are to be published in the new Theory section, with Klaus Scherer being the inaugural Editor of the Theory section.

Preoccupied with the body: mild stress amplifies the relation between rumination and interoception.

Classic and modern emotion theories suggest that the perception of bodily sensations, or interoception, is foundational to emotion processing. The present research examined whether interoception is enhanced among people high in ruminative tendencies, especially under stress. To test this notion, the present research examined the effects of a mild stressor on subjective and objective measures of interoception among people varying in ruminative tendencies. Under conditions of mild stress, rumination was positively associated with self-reported private body consciousness -a marker of interoceptive sensibility- in Study 1 (N = 312) and with heartbeat detection accuracy (especially in the presence of auditory interference) in Study 2 (N = 180). In both studies, rumination was not significantly associated with interoceptive sensibility or accuracy in the absence of stress. These findings suggest that stress-induced amplification of bodily sensations may be important in explaining emotional dysregulation among chronic ruminators.

The language of intuition: a thematic integration model of intuitive coherence judgments.

People can intuitively distinguish semantically coherent from incoherent word triads, even without knowing the common denominator. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, the present authors suggest that intuitive coherence judgments are driven by the thematic relations of the triad words. Words are thematically related when they perform different roles in the same scenario (e.g. CHICKEN and EGG are related via a production theme). Thematic relations differ from associations (CHICKEN and LITTLE are associated with a Disney movie) and taxonomic relations, which specify common attributes between concepts (CHICKEN and SPARROW are both birds). Consistent with the thematic integration model, word triads with thematic (rather than taxonomic) relations were more often judged as coherent (Study 1). Moreover, priming thematic (rather than taxonomic) processing led to more intuitive coherence judgments of word triads (Study 2). In three published datasets, thematic relations between triads' word pairs predicted over half of the variance in intuitive coherence judgments (Study 3). Finally, when the existence of a common denominator and thematic relations were independently manipulated, thematic relations drove intuitive coherence judgments (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that intuition draws on people's thematic knowledge about the world.

Listening to your intuition in the face of distraction: Effects of taxing working memory on accuracy and bias of intuitive judgments of semantic coherence.

People can intuitively estimate the semantic coherence of word triads, even when they are unable to state the triads' common denominator. The present research examines the role of working memory in such intuitive coherence judgments. Dual-process models of information processing suggest that intuition does not depend on working memory. Consistent with this, the authors predicted that taxing working memory capacity will not lower the accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments. Nevertheless, taxing working memory may impede metacognitive processing, which may lead people to become more conservative in judging triads as coherent. Two studies (combined N = 307) tested these predictions by asking participants to memorize letter-number combinations of varying lengths while providing intuitive coherence judgments. As expected, working memory load had no effect on the accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments (Studies 1 & 2). Effects on judgment bias were less consistent. In Study 1, participants became slightly more conservative in judging triads as coherent under moderate (compared to low) working memory load. In Study 2, which was preregistered, working memory load led to more conservative intuitive coherence judgments, but only when participants prioritized a highly demanding load task. Unexpectedly, when focusing on a moderate (compared to a low) working memory load, participants were more liberal in judging triads as coherent. Together, these findings indicate that taxing working memory may interfere with people's inclination to trust their intuition, even when it leaves the accuracy of people's intuition intact.

Testing the Effects of a Virtual Reality Game for Aggressive Impulse Management (VR-GAIME): Study Protocol.

Background: Prior laboratory findings indicate that training avoidance movements to angry faces may lower anger and aggression among healthy participants, especially those high in trait anger. To enrich this training and make it more suitable for clinical applications, it has been developed into a Virtual Reality Game for Aggressive Impulse Management (VR-GAIME). Methods: The proposed study will examine the effects of this training in a randomized controlled trial among forensic psychiatric outpatients with aggression regulation problems (N = 60). In addition to the aggression replacement training, participants will play either the VR-GAIME or a control game. Anger will be assessed using self-report. Aggressive impulses will be measured via self-report, a validated laboratory paradigm, and rated by clinicians. Discussion: The authors hypothesize that the combination of the VR-GAIME and regular aggression treatment will be more successful in reducing aggressive behavior. One of the strengths of the proposed study is that it is the first to examine the effects of a motivational intervention in a clinical sample characterized by problems in regulating anger and aggression. Another strength of the proposed study is that the VR-GAIME will be implemented as a multi-session intervention. Additionally, the VR-GAIME applies, for the first time, serious gaming and virtual reality on an avoidance motivation intervention. If positive results are found, the VR-GAIME may be systematically deployed in forensic psychiatric settings. Trial registration: The trial is registered with The Netherlands National Trial Register, number: NTR6986.

Revisiting the past and back to the future: Horizons of cognition and emotion research.

To commemorate that Cognition & Emotion was established three decades ago, we asked some distinguished scholars to reflect on past research on the interface of cognition and emotion and prospects for the future. The resulting papers form the Special Issue on Horizons in Cognition and Emotion Research. The contributions to Horizons cover both the field in general and a diversity of specific topics, including affective neuroscience, appraisal theory, automatic evaluation, embodied emotion, emotional disorders, emotion-linked attentional bias, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, lifespan development, motivation, and social emotions. We hope that Horizons will spark constructive debates, while offering guidance for the future growth and development of research on the interface between cognition and emotion. Finally, we provide an update on how Cognition & Emotion has fared over the past year, and announce some changes in editorial policies and the editorial board.

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self-determination theory and personality systems interactions theory.

One of the enduring missions of personality science is to unravel what it takes to become a fully functioning person. In the present article, the authors address this matter from the perspectives of self-determination theory (SDT) and personality systems interactions (PSI) theory. SDT (a) is rooted in humanistic psychology; (b) has emphasized a first-person perspective on motivation and personality; (c) posits that the person, supported by the social environment, naturally moves toward growth through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. PSI theory (a) is rooted in German volition psychology; (b) has emphasized a third-person perspective on motivation and personality; and (c) posits that a fully functioning person can form and enact difficult intentions and integrate new experiences, and that such competencies are facilitated by affect regulation. The authors review empirical support for SDT and PSI theory, their convergences and divergences, and how the theories bear on recent empirical research on internalization, vitality, and achievement flow. The authors conclude that SDT and PSI theory offer complementary insights into developing a person's full potential.

Cross-Cultural Analysis of Volition: Action Orientation Is Associated With Less Anxious Motive Enactment and Greater Well-Being in Germany, New Zealand, and Bangladesh.

Background: People differ in action vs. state orientation, that is, in the capacity for volitional action control. Prior research has shown that people who are action-rather than state-oriented are better able to perceive and satisfy own motives (e.g., affiliation, achievement, power), which translates into greater psychological well-being (Baumann et al., 2005; Baumann and Quirin, 2006). However, most of the extant literature has been limited to samples from European countries or the US. To address this shortcoming, the present paper investigated the associations between action vs. state orientation, psychological well-being, and anxious style of motive enactment among samples in Germany, New Zealand, and Bangladesh (combined N = 862). Methods: To examine the consistency of our results across countries, a multi-group structural equation model (SEM) was used to examine the associations between action orientation, anxious motive enactment, and well-being. Subsequent mediation analyses assessed whether anxious motive enactment mediated the relationship between action orientation and well-being across each of the three samples. Results: Across all three cultural groups, action orientation was associated with less anxious motive enactment and higher well-being. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed significant indirect paths from action orientation through less anxious motive enactment to well-being that were similar across the three samples. Conclusions: These findings suggest that individual differences in action vs. state orientation have a similar psychological meaning across Western and non-Western cultures.

Emotionally aligned: Preliminary results on the effects of a mindfulness-based intervention for depression on congruence between implicit and explicit mood.

BACKGROUND: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are effective in treating major depression. Because mindfulness involves monitoring and accepting current experiences, it may lead people resolve incongruencies between emotional responses that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Mindfulness may thus foster congruence between implicit and explicit emotions. The current randomized controlled trial tested this notion. METHODS: N = 39 patients with an acute depressive episode were randomly assigned to an 8-week MBI (n = 24) or a psychopharmacological consultation condition (n = 15). Explicit and implicit mood and depressive symptoms were assessed before treatment and at the end of treatment. RESULTS: Compared with the control condition, patients receiving MBI demonstrated higher congruence between implicit and explicit negative mood after treatment. There was no such difference in congruence of implicit and explicit positive mood. Additional analyses showed that only within the MBI group, individual differences in explicit mood became less stable. In contrast, individual differences in implicit mood remained stable in both groups. LIMITATIONS: There was no control group including an active psychological intervention, the sample was small, and emotional congruence was not assessed within persons. CONCLUSIONS: These findings correspond with the idea that mindfulness reduces incongruencies between implicit and explicit emotional responses. We found preliminary evidence for this effect for negative emotional responses. There was suggestive evidence that congruence arose from the alignment of explicit responses (which became less stable) to implicit responses (which remained stable). Studying the interplay between implicit and explicit processes may shed light on the working mechanisms of clinical-psychological interventions.

Three decades of Cognition & Emotion: A brief review of past highlights and future prospects.

Over the past three decades, Cognition & Emotion has been one of the world's leading outlets for emotion research. In this article, we review past highlights of and future prospects for the journal. Our tour of history covers three periods: The first period, from 1987 to 1999, was a pioneering era in which cognitive theories began to be applied to the scientific analysis of emotion. The second period, from 2000 to 2007, was characterised by a sharp increase in the number of empirical research papers, a lot of which were concerned with automatic processing biases and their implications for clinical psychology. During the third period, from 2008 to 2017, a new focus emerged on self-regulatory processes and their implications for emotion. We then turn to the present profile of Cognition & Emotion and introduce our new editorial team. Finally, we consider how the journal's future success can be continued and increased by a) providing authors with fast and high-quality feedback; b) offering attractive publication formats, including the newly introduced Registered Reports for pre-registered studies; and c) consolidating key methodological paradigms with reproducible findings.

Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013).

Prior experiments indicated that reading literary fiction improves mentalising performance relative to reading popular fiction, non-fiction, or not reading. However, the experiments had relatively small sample sizes and hence low statistical power. To address this limitation, the present authors conducted four high-powered replication experiments (combined N = 1006) testing the causal impact of reading literary fiction on mentalising. Relative to the original research, the present experiments used the same literary texts in the reading manipulation; the same mentalising task; and the same kind of participant samples. Moreover, one experiment was pre-registered as a direct replication. In none of the experiments did reading literary fiction have any effect on mentalising relative to control conditions. The results replicate earlier findings that familiarity with fiction is positively correlated with mentalising. Taken together, the present findings call into question whether a single session of reading fiction leads to immediate improvements in mentalising.

Sharing the Now in the Social Present: Duration of Nonverbal Synchrony Is Linked With Personality.

OBJECTIVE: The social present is a novel descriptor of dyadic nowness and social sharing, extending research on individual nowness (James's [1890] specious present) to the interpersonal and intersubjective domain. We wished to connect this descriptor to personality attributes. METHOD: We define the social present by the duration of significant nonverbal synchrony, based on the phenomenon of movement synchrony that generally emerges in social interactions. It is thus an implicit and objective measure that can be implemented by automated video analyses. In this study, 168 healthy participants were invited to verbal conversations in same-sex dyads. We analyzed the associations of the social present with personality attributes and interaction types (competition, cooperation, fun task). RESULTS: The average duration of the social present was 6.0 seconds, highest in competitive interactions and in male-male dyads. People with higher Openness to Experience, higher avoidant attachment, and lower narcissistic interpersonal styles showed extended social present in their interactions. CONCLUSIONS: The concept of the social present extends personality attributes to the interpersonal domain and to intersubjectivity. The social present may be computed based on movement synchrony but also prosodic or physiological synchronies. We foresee implications for health-related interactions such as psychotherapy, where therapeutic presence is an essential property of alliance.