Research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has caused the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic represents the greatest international biopsychosocial emergency the world has faced for a century, and psychological science has an integral role to offer in helping societies recover. The aim of this paper is to set out the shorter- and longer-term priorities for research in psychological science that will (a) frame the breadth and scope of potential contributions from across the discipline; (b) enable researchers to focus their resources on gaps in knowledge; and (c) help funders and policymakers make informed decisions about future research priorities in order to best meet the needs of societies as they emerge from the acute phase of the pandemic. The research priorities were informed by an expert panel convened by the British Psychological Society that reflects the breadth of the discipline; a wider advisory panel with international input; and a survey of 539 psychological scientists conducted early in May 2020. The most pressing need is to research the negative biopsychosocial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate immediate and longer-term recovery, not only in relation to mental health, but also in relation to behaviour change and adherence, work, education, children and families, physical health and the brain, and social cohesion and connectedness. We call on psychological scientists to work collaboratively with other scientists and stakeholders, establish consortia, and develop innovative research methods while maintaining high-quality, open, and rigorous research standards.

Beyond decomposition: Processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition.

Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of word class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g., a boat-to boat; to soak-a soak). Boat is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas soak is action-derived and is a basic verb (V). As the suffix {-ing} is only attached to verbs, deriving boating from its base, requires two steps, boat(N) > boat(V) > boating(V), while soaking can be derived in one step from soak(V). Experiments 1 to 3 used masked priming at different prime durations to test matched sets of one- and two-step verbs for morphological (soaking-SOAK) and semantic priming (jolting-SOAK). Experiment 4 employed a delayed-priming paradigm in which the full verb forms (soaking and boating) were primed by noun and verb phrases (a soak/to soak, a boat/to boat). In both paradigms, different morphological priming patterns were observed for one-step and two-step verbs, demonstrating that morphological processing cannot be reduced to surface form-based segmentation.

The time course of name retrieval during multiple-object naming: evidence from extrafoveal-on-foveal effects.

The goal of the study was to examine whether speakers naming pairs of objects would retrieve the names of the objects in parallel or in sequence. To this end, we recorded the speakers' eye movements and determined whether the difficulty of retrieving the name of the 2nd object affected the duration of the gazes to the 1st object. Two experiments, which differed in the spatial arrangement of the objects, showed that the speakers looked longer at the 1st object when the name of the 2nd object was easy than when it was more difficult to retrieve. Thus, the easy 2nd-object names interfered more with the processing of the 1st object than the more difficult 2nd-object names. In the 3rd experiment, the processing of the 1st object was rendered more difficult by presenting it upside down. No effect of 2nd-object difficulty on the gaze duration for the 1st object was found. These results suggest that speakers can retrieve the names of a foveated and an extrafoveal object in parallel, provided that the processing of the foveated object is not too demanding.

Nicotine primes attention to competing affective stimuli in the context of salient alternatives.

Despite the importance of the subject, the effects of nicotine on the interplay between affect and attentional bias are not clear. This interplay was assessed with a novel design of the Primed Attentional Competition Task (PACT). It included a 200-ms duration emotional priming picture (negative, positive, or neutral) followed by a dual-target picture of two emotional faces side-by-side. A second task included an emotional priming picture followed by a single emotional target picture in a classic affective priming (CAP) task, assessing reaction time to identify the valence. Smokers completed the tasks in a double-blind repeated measures design wearing a nicotine patch on one day and a placebo patch on the other day. Consistent with hypotheses, nicotine enhanced the effectiveness of positive primes to bias first gaze-fixations (FGFs) toward neutral pictures relative to negative pictures and attenuated the effectiveness of negative primes on FGFs toward negative pictures, but did not bias performance in the CAP task where competing target stimuli were not present. These effects of nicotine on affective priming and attentional bias toward competing reinforcers may contribute to smoking motivation.

Effects of nicotine on affect are moderated by stressor proximity and frequency, positive alternatives, and smoker status.

The Situation x Trait Adaptive Response (STAR) model hypothesizes that nicotine reduces negative and enhances positive affect to a greater degree in situations involving internally driven attention, as when stressor stimuli are distal (past or future), thereby allowing nicotine-primed biasing of attentional processing away from negative and toward positive stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the effects of nicotine were assessed in 64 smokers and 64 never-smokers, half of whom viewed emotionally negative pictures in a no-choice picture attention task that required them to focus on the picture stressors. The other half viewed the same stimuli in a two-choice picture attention task that presented stressor pictures in one visual field and simultaneously presented positive or neutral pictures in the other visual field. Participants received a nicotine patch during one session and a placebo patch during the other session. Nicotine modulated affect only in smokers. In smokers, compared with placebo, nicotine patch reduced negative affect more during the distal periods (between stressors) than during actual stressor exposure and in women reduced negative affect more when the proportion of negative stimuli was low. Nicotine also enhanced positive affect more during distal than proximal stressors. Nicotine tended to reduce eye-gaze at negative pictures, especially when the alternative picture was positive. The overall findings are consistent with the view that nicotine biases attention away from negative stimuli when equally salient positive or benign stimuli are present.

Acute psychomotor, subjective and physiological responses to smoking in depressed outpatient smokers and matched controls.

RATIONALE: Cigarette smoking is highly prevalent in people diagnosed with depression, and depressed smokers are less likely to quit. Examining depressed smokers' responses to smoking will help determine the role of depression in maintaining cigarette smoking. OBJECTIVES: To determine the psychomotor, subjective and physiological effects of cigarette smoking in currently depressed smokers versus matched controls. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Fourteen currently depressed smokers and 14 never-depressed smokers, matched in age, gender, nicotine dependence and daily cigarette consumption, smoked three cigarettes at half-hourly intervals. All smokers were non-deprived. Self-reported mood and craving for cigarettes, performance on a simple reaction time task, expired-air carbon monoxide, heart rate and blood pressure were assessed before and after smoking each cigarette. Smoking topography was also assessed. RESULTS: Depressives and controls did not differ in terms of dependence on cigarettes or expired-air carbon monoxide. Topographic and cardiovascular measures were similar in depressed and control participants, suggesting that they smoke cigarettes in a similar manner. However, depressives displayed enhanced reaction time performance after the first cigarette. Positively reinforced craving was reduced after smoking each cigarette but returned to baseline levels within 30 min in depressed but not in control smokers. Depressed smokers also displayed higher levels of negatively reinforced craving. Both depressives and controls reported improved positive mood after smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Cigarette smoking in non-deprived depressed smokers enhances psychomotor performance and the reduction of positively reinforced craving in depressed smokers after smoking is transient, suggesting that enhanced craving may play a role in the maintenance of smoking in depression.