Scalable Transdiagnostic Early Assessment of Mental Health (STREAM): a study protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Early childhood development forms the foundations for functioning later in life. Thus, accurate monitoring of developmental trajectories is critical. However, such monitoring often relies on time-intensive assessments which necessitate administration by skilled professionals. This difficulty is exacerbated in low-resource settings where such professionals are predominantly concentrated in urban and often private clinics, making them inaccessible to many. This geographic and economic inaccessibility contributes to a significant 'detection gap' where many children who might benefit from support remain undetected. The Scalable Transdiagnostic Early Assessment of Mental Health (STREAM) project aims to bridge this gap by developing an open-source, scalable, tablet-based platform administered by non-specialist workers to assess motor, social and cognitive developmental status. The goal is to deploy STREAM through public health initiatives, maximising opportunities for effective early interventions. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The STREAM project will enrol and assess 4000 children aged 0-6 years from Malawi (n=2000) and India (n=2000). It integrates three established developmental assessment tools measuring motor, social and cognitive functioning using gamified tasks, observation checklists, parent-report and audio-video recordings. Domain scores for motor, social and cognitive functioning will be developed and assessed for their validity and reliability. These domain scores will then be used to construct age-adjusted developmental reference curves. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval has been obtained from local review boards at each site (India: Sangath Institutional Review Board; All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) Ethics Committee; Indian Council of Medical Research-Health Ministry Screening Committee; Malawi: College of Medicine Research and Ethics Committee; Malawi Ministry of Health-Blantyre District Health Office). The study adheres to Good Clinical Practice standards and the ethical guidelines of the 6th (2008) Declaration of Helsinki. Findings from STREAM will be disseminated to participating families, healthcare professionals, policymakers, educators and researchers, at local, national and international levels through meetings, academic journals and conferences.

Emotion dysregulation modulates visual perspective taking and spontaneous facial mimicry.

Understanding and sharing others' emotions (i.e., empathy) requires the ability to manage one's own emotions (i.e., emotion regulation). Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that empathy and emotion regulation are related. This evidence is largely based on self-report measures of both constructs. The current study examined how task measures that assess processes related to empathy are associated with self-reported emotion dysregulation in a young adult sample. An eye-tracking-based perspective-taking task was used as a proxy measure of cognitive empathy. A spontaneous facial mimicry (SFM) task, wherein the activation of the Zygomaticus Major and the Corrugator Supercilii was measured during the passive viewing of happy and angry faces, was used as a proxy measure of affective empathy. The perspective-taking task metric showed a negative relationship with emotion dysregulation. The overall SFM metric was not significantly associated with emotion dysregulation. Follow-up analyses revealed that SFM for angry faces was inversely proportional to emotion dysregulation; no such relationship was observed for SFM for happy faces. These findings build upon prior work by demonstrating a positive relationship between adaptive emotion regulation and a behavioral measure of cognitive empathy. The findings for affective empathy are suggestive of a valence-specific relationship between SFM and emotion regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Autistic traits modulate the influence of face masks on gaze perception.

Detecting when others are looking at us is a crucial social skill. Accordingly, a range of gaze angles is perceived as self-directed; this is termed the "cone of direct gaze" (CoDG). Multiple cues, such as nose and head orientation, are integrated during gaze perception. Thus, occluding the lower portion of the face, such as with face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, may influence how gaze is perceived. Individual differences in the prioritisation of eye-region and non-eye-region cues may modulate the influence of face masks on gaze perception. Autistic individuals, who may be more reliant on non-eye-region directional cues during gaze perception, might be differentially affected by face masks. In the present study, we compared the CoDG when viewing masked and unmasked faces (N = 157) and measured self-reported autistic traits. The CoDG was wider for masked compared to unmasked faces, suggesting that reduced reliability of lower face cues increases the range of gaze angles perceived as self-directed. Additionally, autistic traits positively predicted the magnitude of CoDG difference between masked and unmasked faces. This study provides crucial insights into the effect of face masks on gaze perception, and how they may affect autistic individuals to a greater extent.

Cognitive and Affective Empathy Relate Differentially to Emotion Regulation.

The constructs of empathy (i.e., understanding and/or sharing another's emotion) and emotion regulation (i.e., the processes by which one manages emotions) have largely been studied in relative isolation of one another. To better understand the interrelationships between their various component processes, this manuscript reports two studies that examined the relationship between empathy and emotion regulation using a combination of self-report and task measures. In study 1 (N = 137), trait cognitive empathy and affective empathy were found to share divergent relationships with self-reported emotion dysregulation. Trait emotion dysregulation was negatively related to cognitive empathy but did not show a significant relationship with affective empathy. In the second study (N = 92), the magnitude of emotion interference effects (i.e., the extent to which inhibitory control was impacted by emotional relative to neutral stimuli) in variants of a Go/NoGo and Stroop task were used as proxy measures of implicit emotion regulation abilities. Trait cognitive and affective empathy were differentially related to both task metrics. Higher affective empathy was associated with increased emotional interference in the Emotional Go/NoGo task; no such relationship was observed for trait cognitive empathy. In the Emotional Stroop task, higher cognitive empathy was associated with reduced emotional interference; no such relationship was observed for affective empathy. Together, these studies demonstrate that greater cognitive empathy was broadly associated with improved emotion regulation abilities, while greater affective empathy was typically associated with increased difficulties with emotion regulation. These findings point to the need for assessing the different components of empathy in psychopathological conditions marked by difficulties in emotion regulation. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00062-w.

Empathy and emotion regulation: An integrative account.

How we understand and respond to others' emotions (i.e., empathy) may be influenced by the regulatory processes that are used to shape which emotions we and others have (i.e., emotion regulation). Empathy and emotion regulation are complex multidimensional constructs and the relationship between their component processes is not well characterized. To enable future work to examine their relationship more closely, this chapter presents an integrative framework of empathy and emotion regulation. We begin by delineating the component processes that underlie empathy and emotion regulation, and the neural underpinnings of these processes. We then present an integrative framework describing the processes of empathy and how these may be acted upon by distinct regulatory strategies. We conclude with a brief consideration of contextual influences on empathy and emotion regulation using a reward-based heuristic.

Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations.

Creative cognition requires mental exploration of remotely connected concepts while suppressing dominant ones. Across four experiments using different samples of participants, we provide evidence that right temporal alpha oscillations play a crucial role in inhibiting habitual thinking modes, thereby paving the way for accessing more remote ideas. In the first experiment, participants completed the compound remote associate task (RAT) in three separate sessions: during right temporal alpha (10 Hz) transcranial alternating current brain stimulation (tACS), left temporal alpha tACS, and sham tACS. Participants performed better under right tACS only on RAT items in which two of the three words shared misleading semantic associations. In the second experiment, we measured EEG while the participants solved RAT items with or without shared misleading associations. We observed an increase in right temporal alpha power when participants correctly solved RAT items with misleading semantic associations. The third experiment demonstrated that while solving divergent thinking tasks participants came up with more remote ideas when stimulated by right temporal alpha tACS. In the fourth experiment, we found that participants showed higher right temporal alpha power when generating more remote uses for common objects. These studies altogether indicate that right temporal alpha oscillations may support creativity by acting as a neural mechanism for an active inhibition of obvious semantic associations.