Affective control in adolescence: The influence of age and depressive symptomatology on working memory.

People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. There is some evidence that affective control undergoes significant improvement throughout adolescence, though it is unclear how adolescents deemed at risk of developing depression exercise affective control despite poor affective control being identified as a contributing factor to ongoing mental ill health in adulthood.

Perspective Taking and Memory for Self- and Town-Related Information in Male Adolescents and Young Adults.

Adolescence is a sensitive period for categorical self-concept development, which affects the ability to take others' perspectives, which might differ from one's own, and how self-related information is memorized. Little is known about whether these two processes are related in adolescence. The current study recruited 97 male participants aged 11-35 years.

Susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence in adolescence following mindfulness training.

Mindfulness training programmes have shown to encourage prosocial behaviours and reduce antisocial tendencies in adolescents. However, less is known about whether training affects susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence. The current study investigated the effect of mindfulness training (compared with an active control) on self-reported prosocial and antisocial tendencies and susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence.

Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence.

Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence.

Age-related differences in affective control and its association with mental health difficulties.

Difficulties in regulating affect are core characteristics of a wide range of mental health conditions and are associated with deficits in cognitive control, particularly in affective contexts, affective control. The current study explored how affective control relates to mental health over the course of adolescence. We developed an Affective Control Task, which was administered to young adolescents (11-14 years; n = 29); mid-adolescents (15-18 years; n = 31), and adults (22-30 years; n = 31).

The neurocognitive correlates of academic diligence in adolescent girls.

Academic diligence is the ability to regulate behavior in the service of goals, and a predictor of educational attainment. Here we combined behavioral, structural MRI, functional MRI and connectivity data to investigate the neurocognitive correlates of diligence. We assessed whether individual differences in diligence are related to the interplay between frontal control and striatal reward systems, as predicted by the dual-systems hypothesis of adolescent development.

Alexithymia in children with and without autism spectrum disorders.

Alexithymia refers to pronounced difficulty in identifying and describing one's own emotions and is associated with an externally oriented focus of thinking. Alexithymia is known to be much more common in adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared with the typically developing (TD) adult population. However, we know very little about alexithymia in young children with ASD and advancing our understanding of this topic may be of critical clinical and translational importance.