Evaluation of the association between excessive screen use, sleep patterns and behavioral and cognitive aspects in preschool population. A systematic review.

In this review, we analyzed the possible relationship between the excessive use of screens and sleep patterns, and how this may affect certain behavioral and cognitive factors in preschool children. The selection, extraction and synthesis of the data were conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. The search was carried out in the electronic databases Medline (PubMed), PsycINFO (American Psychological Association), Scopus and Web of Science (WOS). Of the 597 articles initially identified, 13 met the inclusion criteria. The risk of bias of the articles selected was evaluated using a specific scale created for this purpose. The results found indicate that excessive use of screens is associated with a negative impact on the duration and quality of sleep-in preschoolers, and this worsening of sleep in infancy is related with a greater probability of the appearance of internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems and certain cognitive problems. The results also suggest that sleep could play a mediating or moderating role as a bioregulatory system that attenuates or increases the onset of behavioral and cognitive difficulties in those children most exposed to digital devices.

An exploratory study of the effect of age and gender on face scanning during affect recognition in immersive virtual reality.

A person with impaired emotion recognition is not able to correctly identify facial expressions represented by other individuals. The aim of the present study is to assess eyes gaze and facial emotion recognition in a healthy population using dynamic avatars in immersive virtual reality (IVR). For the first time, the viewing of each area of interest of the face in IVR is studied by gender and age. This work in healthy people is conducted to assess the future usefulness of IVR in patients with deficits in the recognition of facial expressions. Seventy-four healthy volunteers participated in the study. The materials used were a laptop computer, a game controller, and a head-mounted display. Dynamic virtual faces randomly representing the six basic emotions plus neutral expression were used as stimuli. After the virtual human represented an emotion, a response panel was displayed with the seven possible options. Besides storing the hits and misses, the software program internally divided the faces into different areas of interest (AOIs) and recorded how long participants looked at each AOI. As regards the overall accuracy of the participants' responses, hits decreased from the youngest to the middle-aged and older adults. Also, all three groups spent the highest percentage of time looking at the eyes, but younger adults had the highest percentage. It is also noteworthy that attention to the face compared to the background decreased with age. Moreover, the hits between women and men were remarkably similar and, in fact, there were no statistically significant differences between them. In general, men paid more attention to the eyes than women, but women paid more attention to the forehead and mouth. In contrast to previous work, our study indicates that there are no differences between men and women in facial emotion recognition. Moreover, in line with previous work, the percentage of face viewing time for younger adults is higher than for older adults. However, contrary to earlier studies, older adults look more at the eyes than at the mouth.Consistent with other studies, the eyes are the AOI with the highest percentage of viewing time. For men the most viewed AOI is the eyes for all emotions in both hits and misses. Women look more at the eyes for all emotions, except for joy, fear, and anger on hits. On misses, they look more into the eyes for almost all emotions except surprise and fear.

Role of psychopathology on children credibility of sexual abuse testimony.

When an alleged victim has a pre-existing psychopathological diagnosis, this can affect the rating of their version of the abuse in terms of credibility. The objective of this work is to analyze the relationship between the assessment of the credibility of the testimony of a CSA victim, the psychological problems that the child may have presented prior to sexual abuse and the possible psychological sequelae that she may present as a result of the abuse. 109 cases were selected in which the credibility of the testimony could be determined. Through forensic interviews and the study of the corresponding professional reports, the following were obtained: sociodemographic data, data on their previous psychological state and data on their psychological state after the reported events. The psychological state of the child after the reported events shows no relation to the forensic evaluation of the credibility of her testimony. The existence of a relationship between the absence of previous psychopathology and the fact that the victim's testimony is valued as a credible account is confirmed. This study reveals that children who presented psychological manifestations prior to their experience of abuse receive a lower credibility rating than those without previous psychopathological symptoms or diagnoses.

Direct and indirect childhood victimization and their influence on the development of adolescents antisocial behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: Experiences of direct and indirect victimization can be very common among children and adolescents of the general population and can have an important impact on their behavior. The general aim of this study was to analyze the possible association between childhood victimization and the development of antisocial behaviors during adolescence. The prevalence of child victimization and antisocial behaviors self-reported by adolescents is shown. Therefore, the individual associations between different types of childhood victimization and antisocial behaviors were explored. METHOD: The sample comprised 459 general population adolescents. Data on six types of childhood victimization were collected using the Spanish version of the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire, and information on five types of antisocial behaviors was gathered using the short version of the Antisocial Behavior Questionnaire. RESULTS: More than 90% of the adolescents had been victimized at least once, while almost half of them had engaged in at least one type of antisocial behavior in the last 12 months. Witnessing and indirect victimization is the only type of childhood victimization associated with the antisocial behaviors analyzed. CONCLUSIONS: These results corroborate previous findings suggesting that witnessing and indirect victimization may have the same or similar impact to that of direct victimization on adolescents' social adjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Use of autobiographical stimuli as a mood manipulation procedure: Systematic mapping review.

BACKGROUND: In recent years, mood induction procedures have been developed in experimental settings that are designed to facilitate studying the impact of mood states on biological and psychological processes. The aim of the present study was to conduct a systematic mapping review with the intention of describing the state of the art in the use of different types of autobiographical stimuli for mood induction procedures. METHODS: Based on a search for publications from the period 2000-2021, conducted in four recognised databases (Scopus, Medline (PubMed), PsycINFO and Web of Science), we analysed a total of 126 published articles. Text mining techniques were used to extract the main themes related. RESULTS: The induction of emotions through autobiographical memories is an area under construction and of growing interest. The data mining approach yielded information about the main types of stimuli used in these procedures, highlighting those that only employ a single type of cue, as well as the preference for verbal cues over others such as musical, olfactory and visual cues. This type of procedure has been used to induce both positive and negative emotions through tasks that require access to personal memories of specific events from a cue, requiring the person to set in motion different cognitive processes. The use of the latest technologies (fMRI, EEG, etc.) is also shown, demonstrating that this is a cutting-edge field of study. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the study of mood induction procedures still being a growing field, the present review provides a novel overview of the current state of the art in the field, which may serve as a framework for future studies on the topic.

Relation between nighttime sleep duration and executive functioning in a nonclinical sample of preschool children.

Sleep is a support for cognitive development in childhood. Most of the studies in the field have focused on school-age children and sleep problems, but less research focuses on the relation between the normative course of sleep and executive functions in preschoolers. Thus, the aim of the present study was to analyze the association between nighttime sleep duration and executive functioning in a 158 non-clinical sample of Spanish participants (Mage = 56.35 months, SD = 11.24; ages 38-78 months; 48.1% girls). Sleep habits were measured by parents' self-reports; Shape School task was applied to assess inhibition and cognitive flexibility; Word Span task was used to assess working memory; and Vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-III was used to assess verbal ability. The findings revealed that the relation between sleep and executive functioning was only significant in the cases of inhibition and working memory. Further, age and verbal ability were related and were predictors of inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. We consider it necessary to continue researching in this area given the importance of forming a correct sleep habit during the preschool age and its impact on health, cognition, and well-being in childhood. In short, our results represent the first approach to the subject under study, which should be completed with objective sleep measures.

A multi-method comparison of autobiographical memory impairments amongst younger and older adults.

Objectives: Research indicates that, compared to younger adults, older adults have difficulty recalling memories of specific past events (those lasting less than 24 h) and this difficulty is associated with depression. These studies are largely confined to a single measure of specific memory recall and there are conflicting findings when alternative measures are used. This investigation provides the first comparison of memory specificity between younger and older adults using several different measures.Method: Older (n = 105) and younger (n = 88) adults completed the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI) and Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT) and the number of specific memories was quantified for each measure. Participants also completed the Beck Depression Inventory Version II (BDI-II).Results: Compared to younger adults, older adults recalled fewer specific memories in the AMT and more specific memories in the AMI. This latter effect was particularly pronounced for memories related to childhood. There was no group difference in responses in the SCEPT. There was no evidence of an association between memory specificity and depression for any of the measures.Conclusion: Older adults have difficulty retrieving specific memories after cuing by nouns and adjectives, as in the AMT, but they have enhanced recall of specific memories after cuing by life periods, as in the AMI, and this is particularly true of memories related to childhood. Individual differences in memory specificity are not related to depression symptoms in healthy samples.

Hereditary Leiomyomatosis and Renal Cell Cancer Syndrome in Spain: Clinical and Genetic Characterization.

Hereditary leiomyomatosis and renal cell cancer syndrome (HLRCC) is a very rare hereditary disorder characterized by cutaneous leiomyomas (CLMs), uterine leiomyomas (ULMs), renal cysts (RCys) and renal cell cancers (RCCs). We aimed to describe the genetics, clinical features and potential genotype-phenotype associations in the largest cohort of fumarate hydratase enzyme mutation carriers known from Spain using a multicentre, retrospective study of individuals with a genetic or clinical diagnosis of HLRCC. We collected clinical information from medical records, analysed genetic variants and looked for genotype-phenotype associations. Analyses were performed using R 3.6.0. software. We included 197 individuals: 74 index cases and 123 relatives. CLMs were diagnosed in 65% of patients, ULMs in 90% of women, RCys in 37% and RCC in 10.9%. Twenty-seven different pathogenic variants were detected, 12 (44%) of them not reported previously. Patients with missense pathogenic variants showed higher frequencies of CLMs, ULMs and RCys, than those with loss-of-function variants (p = 0.0380, p = 0.0015 and p = 0.024, respectively). This is the first report of patients with HLRCC from Spain. The frequency of RCCs was lower than those reported in the previously published series. Individuals with missense pathogenic variants had higher frequencies of CLMs, ULMs and RCys.

Autobiographical emotional induction in older people through popular songs: Effect of reminiscence bump and enculturation.

AIMS: This study is based on two experiments, the first, with an exploratory character. The aim of which is to assess the capacity of native vs international pop songs (NAT vs INT) from two consecutive life stages, Reminiscence bump (RB) and the immediately subsequent period (No reminiscence bump, NORB) to elicit positive emotions and autobiographical memories. METHOD: A total of 15 middle-aged adults and 15 older adults participated in Experiment 1 (E1). Emotionality, song familiarity and associated autobiographical memories were assessed. Each participant was exposed to 20 randomly selected age-specific songs. Pre-and post-test measures of mood state were also included. Experiment 2 (E2) focused on late adulthood, using a sample of 35 persons. The experimental design was similar to that used in E1. However, this second experiment also included an analysis of the types of autobiographical memories generated by the experimental task and a study of their relationship with the characteristics of the songs, their familiarity and the emotions they produced, and the number of trials. The aim was to delve into the effects that influence the effectiveness of the induction procedure, particularly as regards emotional positivity and memory specificity. RESULTS: Regarding age effect, E1 results varied: under some conditions, emotionality showed no difference between groups, others showed positive older adult bias. In E2, the analysis of the relationships between memory types and the selected variables suggests the latter are not useful predictors of differences between memory types. The study design yielded a relatively high level of memory specificity and emotional positivity. CONCLUSION: The findings question positivity bias in the elderly. RB music produces different effects depending on age. Enculturation can be an important mediating factor in emotionality and memory. Finally, experimental design improves specific memory and positivity.

Differences between young and older adults in physiological and subjective responses to emotion induction using films.

Emotional response in aging is typically studied using the dimensional or the discrete models of emotion. Moreover, it is typically studied using subjective or physiological variables but not using both perspectives simultaneously. Additionally, tenderness is neglected in emotion induction procedures with older adults, with the present work being the first to include the study of physiological tenderness using film clips. This study integrated two separate approaches to emotion research, comparing 68 younger and 39 older adults and using a popular set of film clips to induce tenderness, amusement, anger, fear, sadness and disgust emotions. The direction of subjective emotional patterns was evaluated with self-reports and that of physiological emotional patterns was evaluated with a wearable emotion detection system. The findings suggest a dual-process framework between subjective and physiological responses, manifested differently in young and older adults. In terms of arousal, the older adults exhibited higher levels of subjective arousal in negative emotions and tenderness while young adults showed higher levels of physiological arousal in these emotions. These findings yield information on the multidirectionality of positive and negative emotions, corroborating that emotional changes in the adult lifespan appear to be subject to the relevance of the emotion elicitor to each age group.

The fear of COVID-19 scale: Validation in spanish university students.

The emergence of the COVID-19 and its consequences has led to fears, worries, and anxiety among individuals worldwide. Recently, Ahorsu et al. (2020) developed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S). The present study aimed to translate and validate the FCV-19S in Spanish university students. The sample comprised 606 Spanish´undergraduates with a mean age of 21.59 years old. We also used a six items from the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) by van Knippenberg, Duivenvoorden, Bonke & Passchiner (1990). The Fear of COVID-19 scale used for the present survey evidenced a good alpha measure of internal consistency or reliability analysis with ordinal alpha and ordinal omega. Seven items with acceptable corrected item-total correlation were retained and further confirmed by significant and strong factor loadings. Concurrent validity was supported by the six items of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The Fear of COVID-19 Scale, a seven-item scale, has a stable unidimensional structure with robust psychometric properties. It is reliable and valid in assessing fear of COVID-19 among the Spanish university students.

Ruminative and mood associations for age differences in social and directive reasons to think and talk about life experiences.

Reminiscing, or thinking and talking about our past experiences, can have mood enhancing effects. Rumination is implicated in reminiscence and yet has been shown to have negative effects on mood, with important differences between age groups. However, age differences in the effects of reminiscing on mood, and particularly the effects of rumination within reminiscence, are less explored. Two different age groups completed self-report measures of the positive directive (planning for present and future behaviors) and social (communication) uses of autobiographical memory, as well as maladaptive rumination and depression symptom severity. Young participants (Mean age: 21.82) ruminated more and reported greater frequency of using the directive and social functions of thinking and talking about past experiences than older adults (Mean age: 71.82). These reminiscence processes were also differentially associated with depression symptoms between age groups when tested in structural equation models. In older participants, but not young participants, the directive function was negatively associated with depression severity; in young participants, but not old participants, the social function was negatively associated with depression severity. Furthermore, although depressive and abstract rumination was directly positively related to depression scores in both samples, this association was inverted when the effect of rumination on depression was calculated through functions of reminiscence. The implications of these results for intervention development in older versus young adults, is discussed.

Ability emotional intelligence in young people and older adults with and without depressive symptoms, considering gender and educational level.

BACKGROUND: There is little research on differences in Emotional Intelligence (EI) ability at different stages of adult development. The few published studies tend not to use older adult samples. Previous studies on EI ability and age have shown contradictory results. Our main objective was to evaluate results in EI ability across different stages of adult development, taking into account gender, depressive symptoms, and educational level. METHODS: We interviewed 166 participants (108 women), 66 of whom were aged 18-30 years, 53 aged 31-60 years, and 40 aged 61-76 years. All were either working or enrolled in colleges at the time of the study. The assessment tools used were the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), a test that assesses performance-based EI, and the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale, a tool to evaluate depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Young people, women, and participants with a higher educational level achieved higher scores on the MSCEIT. Additionally, depressive symptomatology was only partially associated with the MSCEIT (i.e., with the using emotions branch). However, a subsequent joint analysis of the independent effects of variables age, gender, educational level, and depressive symptomatology and their interactions on MSCEIT total suggests that only educational level and depressive symptomatology were associated with EI ability, with the direct relationship between age and gender with MSCEIT disappearing. Additionally, our study indicated an interaction effect between age and depressive symptoms, showing that participants in age cohorts 18-30 and 31-60 and without depressive symptoms have a higher EI ability. DISCUSSION: Our study suggests that the direct effects of age and gender on EI ability across adult development, using a wide age range, can change or disappear when effects of educational level and depressive symptomatology, and their interactions, are controlled for. Our results also suggest that EI ability is a protective factor against depression in some age cohorts. This novel aspect of our study does not appear in the previous literature. However, prospective studies are needed to verify these findings and examine whether other psychological variables could determine the relations between age, gender and EI ability across adult development.

Formin Homology 2 Domain Containing 3 (FHOD3) Is a Genetic Basis for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.

BACKGROUND: The genetic cause of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy remains unexplained in a substantial proportion of cases. Formin homology 2 domain containing 3 (FHOD3) may have a role in the pathogenesis of cardiac hypertrophy but has not been implicated in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. OBJECTIVES: This study sought to investigate the relation between FHOD3 mutations and the development of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. METHODS: FHOD3 was sequenced by massive parallel sequencing in 3,189 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy unrelated probands and 2,777 patients with no evidence of cardiomyopathy (disease control subjects). The authors evaluated protein-altering candidate variants in FHOD3 for cosegregation, clinical characteristics, and outcomes. RESULTS: The authors identified 94 candidate variants in 132 probands. The variants' frequencies were significantly higher in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (74 of 3,189 [2.32%]) than in disease control subjects (18 of 2,777 [0.65%]; p < 0.001) or in the gnomAD database (1,049 of 138,606 [0.76%]; p < 0.001). FHOD3 mutations cosegregated with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in 17 families, with a combined logarithm of the odds score of 7.92, indicative of very strong segregation. One-half of the disease-causing variants were clustered in a small conserved coiled-coil domain (amino acids 622 to 655); odds ratio for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was 21.8 versus disease control subjects (95% confidence interval: 1.3 to 37.9; p < 0.001) and 14.1 against gnomAD (95% confidence interval: 6.9 to 28.7; p < 0.001). Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients carrying (likely) pathogenic mutations in FHOD3 (n = 70) were diagnosed after age 30 years (mean 46.1 ± 18.7 years), and two-thirds (66%) were males. Of the patients, 82% had asymmetric septal hypertrophy (mean 18.8 ± 5 mm); left ventricular ejection fraction <50% was present in 14% and hypertrabeculation in 16%. Events were rare before age 30 years, with an annual cardiovascular death incidence of 1% during follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: FHOD3 is a novel disease gene in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, accounting for approximately 1% to 2% of cases. The phenotype and the rate of cardiovascular events are similar to those reported in unselected cohorts. The FHOD3 gene should be routinely included in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy genetic testing panels.

Emotional Differences in Young and Older Adults: Films as Mood Induction Procedure.

Film clips are proven to be one of the most efficient techniques in emotional induction. However, there is scant literature on the effect of this procedure in older adults and, specifically, the effect of using different positive stimuli. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine emotional differences between young and older adults and to know how a set of film clips works as mood induction procedure in older adults, especially, when trying to elicit attachment-related emotions. To this end, we use this procedure to analyze differences in subjective emotional response between young and older adults. A sample of 57 older adults and 83 young adults watched a film set previously validated in young population. Their responses were studied in an individual laboratory session to elicit 6 target emotions (disgust, fear, sadness, anger, amusement and tenderness) and neutral state. Self-reported emotional experience was measured using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Our results show that film clips are capable of evoking positive and negative emotions in older adults. Furthermore, older adults experienced more intensely negative emotions than young adults, especially in response to disgust and fear clips. They also reported higher arousal than young adults, especially in the case of sadness, anger and tenderness clips. Nevertheless, the older adults recovered more easily from the effects of the emotion induction. The young adults reported higher arousal ratings than older adults in response to amusement film clips. On the other hand, this study reflects the importance of controlling the baseline state to study the real strength of mood induction. Overall, current data suggests significant differences occur in emotional response in adult age and that film clips are an effective tool for studying positive and negative emotions in aging research.

Measurement of overgeneral autobiographical memory: Psychometric properties of the autobiographical memory test in young and older populations.

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) is the most widely used measure of overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM). The AMT appears to have good psychometric properties, but more research is needed on the influence and applicability of individual cue words in different languages and populations. To date, no studies have evaluated its usefulness as a measure of OMG in Spanish or older populations. This work aims to analyze the applicability of the AMT in young and older Spanish samples. We administered a Spanish version of the AMT to samples of young (N = 520) and older adults (N = 155). We conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), item response theory-based analysis (IRT) and differential item functioning (DIF). Results confirm the one-factor structure for the AMT. IRT analysis suggests that both groups find the AMT easy given that they generally perform well, and that it is more precise in individuals who score low on memory specificity. DIF analysis finds three items differ in their functioning depending on age group. This differential functioning of these items affects the overall AMT scores and, thus, they should be excluded from the AMT in studies comparing young and older samples. We discuss the possible implications of the samples and cue words used.

Human-Avatar Symbiosis for the Treatment of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Schizophrenia through Virtual/Augmented Reality and Brain-Computer Interfaces.

This perspective paper faces the future of alternative treatments that take advantage of a social and cognitive approach with regards to pharmacological therapy of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in patients with schizophrenia. AVH are the perception of voices in the absence of auditory stimulation and represents a severe mental health symptom. Virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) and brain computer interfaces (BCI) are technologies that are growing more and more in different medical and psychological applications. Our position is that their combined use in computer-based therapies offers still unforeseen possibilities for the treatment of physical and mental disabilities. This is why, the paper expects that researchers and clinicians undergo a pathway toward human-avatar symbiosis for AVH by taking full advantage of new technologies. This outlook supposes to address challenging issues in the understanding of non-pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia-related disorders and the exploitation of VR/AR and BCI to achieve a real human-avatar symbiosis.

Overgeneral autobiographical memory in healthy young and older adults: Differential age effects on components of the capture and rumination, functional avoidance, and impaired executive control (CaRFAX) model.

The CaRFAX model (Williams et al., 2007) has been used to explain the causes of overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM; the difficulty to retrieve specific autobiographical memories), a cognitive phenomenon generally related with different psychopathologies. This model proposes 3 different mechanisms to explain OGM: capture and rumination (CaR), functional avoidance (FA) and impaired executive functions (X). However, the complete CaRFAX model has not been tested in nonclinical populations. This study aims to assess the usefulness of the CaRFAX model to explain OGM in 2 healthy samples: a young sample and an older sample, to test for possible age-related differences in the underlying causes of OGM. A total of 175 young (age range: 19-36 years) and 175 older (age range: 53-88 years) participants completed measures of brooding rumination (CaR), functional avoidance (FA), and executive tasks (X). Using structural equation modeling, we found that memory specificity is mainly associated with lower functional avoidance and higher executive functions in the older group, but only with executive functions in young participants. We discuss the different roles of emotional regulation strategies used by young and older people and their relation to the CaRFAX model to explain OGM in healthy people. (PsycINFO Database Record