Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memory.

How do collective events shape how we remember our lives? We leveraged advances in natural language processing as well as a rich, longitudinal assessment of 1,000 Americans throughout 2020 to examine how memory is influenced by two prominent factors: surprise and emotion. Autobiographical memory for 2020 displayed a unique signature: There was a substantial bump in March, aligning with pandemic onset and lockdowns, consistent across three memory collections 1 y apart. We further investigated how emotion, using both immediate and retrieved measures, predicted the amount and content of autobiographical memory: Negative affect increased recall across all measures, whereas its more clinical indices, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, selectively increased nonepisodic recall.

Alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use have distinct associations with COVID-19 pandemic-related experiences: An exploratory Bayesian network analysis across two timepoints.

Background: Substance use trends during the COVID-19 pandemic have been extensively documented. However, relatively less is known about the associations between pandemic-related experiences and substance use.

Method: In July 2020 and January 2021, a broad U.

COVID-Dynamic: A large-scale longitudinal study of socioemotional and behavioral change across the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous societal upheaval globally. In the US, beyond the devastating toll on life and health, it triggered an economic shock unseen since the great depression and laid bare preexisting societal inequities. The full impacts of these personal, social, economic, and public-health challenges will not be known for years.

Posttraumatic stress disorder symptom trajectories in a 16-month COVID-19 pandemic period.

COVID-19 pandemic presents an unheralded opportunity to better understand trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms across a prolonged period of social disruption and stress. We tracked PTSD symptoms among trauma-exposed individuals in the United States and sought to identify population-based variability in PTSD symptom trajectories and understand what, if any, early pandemic experiences predicted membership in one trajectory versus others. As part of a longitudinal study of U.

Deconstructing Theory-of-Mind Impairment in High-Functioning Adults with Autism.

Inferring the beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people ("theory of mind," ToM) requires specialized psychological processes that represent the minds of others as distinct from our own [1-3]. ToM is engaged ubiquitously in our everyday social behavior and features a specific developmental trajectory [4] that is notably delayed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [5, 6]. In healthy individuals, model-based analyses of social learning and decision-making have successfully elucidated specific computational components of ToM processing [7-11].

Brief Online Training Enhances Competitive Performance: Findings of the BBC Lab UK Psychological Skills Intervention Study.

In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, the present study developed 12 brief psychological skill interventions for online delivery. A protocol was designed that captured data via self-report measures, used video recordings to deliver interventions, involved a competitive concentration task against an individually matched computer opponent, and provided feedback on the effects of the interventions. Three psychological skills were used; imagery, self-talk, and if-then planning, with each skill directed to one of four different foci: outcome goal, process goal, instruction, or arousal-control.

Getting to know you: general and specific neural computations for learning about people.

Learning about other peoples' attributes, e.g. whether an individual is generous or selfish, is central to human social cognition.

Implicit Social Biases in People With Autism.

Implicit social biases are ubiquitous and are known to influence social behavior. A core diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is abnormal social behavior. We investigated the extent to which individuals with ASD might show a specific attenuation of implicit social biases, using Implicit Association Tests (IATs) involving social (gender, race) and nonsocial (nature, shoes) categories.

How should I regulate my emotions if I want to run faster?

The present study investigated the effects of emotion regulation strategies on self-reported emotions and 1600 m track running performance. In stage 1 of a three-stage study, participants (N = 15) reported emotional states associated with best, worst and ideal performance. Results indicated that a best and ideal emotional state for performance composed of feeling happy, calm, energetic and moderately anxious whereas the worst emotional state for performance composed of feeling downhearted, sluggish and highly anxious.

Qualitative evaluation of a self-management intervention for people in the early stage of dementia.

Self-management programs are effective for people living with chronic illnesses. However, there has been little research addressing self-management for people with dementia in the early stages. This study presents a qualitative evaluation of the experiences of attending a novel self-management program and initial process evaluation.

Toward a neural basis for social behavior.

Nearly 25 years ago, the shared interests of psychologists and biologists in understanding the neural basis of social behavior led to the inception of social neuroscience. In the past decade, this field has exploded, in large part due to the infusion of studies that use fMRI. At the same time, tensions have arisen about how to prioritize a diverse range of questions and about the authority of neurobiological data in answering them.

Race and reputation: perceived racial group trustworthiness influences the neural correlates of trust decisions.

Decisions to trust people with whom we have no personal history can be based on their social reputation-a product of what we can observe about them (their appearance, social group membership, etc.)-and our own beliefs. The striatum and amygdala have been identified as regions of the brain involved in trust decisions and trustworthiness estimation, respectively.

Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions.

Trust lies at the heart of every social interaction. Each day we face decisions in which we must accurately assess another individual's trustworthiness or risk suffering very real consequences. In a global marketplace of increasing heterogeneity with respect to nationality, race, and multiple other social categories, it is of great value to understand how implicitly held attitudes about group membership may support or undermine social trust and thereby implicitly shape the decisions we make.

Cuing effects of faces are dependent on handedness and visual field.

Faces are unlike other visual objects we encounter, in that they alert us to potentially relevant social information. Both face processing and spatial attention are dominant in the right hemisphere of the human brain, with a stronger lateralization in right- than in left-handers. Here, we demonstrate behavioral evidence for an effect of handedness on performance in tasks using faces to direct attention.

Cluster-based analysis of FMRI data.

We propose a method for the statistical analysis of fMRI data that tests cluster units rather than voxel units for activation. The advantages of this analysis over previous ones are both conceptual and statistical. Recognizing that the fundamental units of interest are the spatially contiguous clusters of voxels that are activated together, we set out to approximate these cluster units from the data by a clustering algorithm especially tailored for fMRI data.

Rapid detection of salient regions: evidence from apparent motion.

Most studies that have used Kanizsa-type illusory figures to investigate perceptual completion have treated the crisp bounding illusory contours (ICs) and the enclosed region as nondissociable stimulus attributes. However, there is evidence that enclosed "salient regions" (SRs; Stanley & Rubin, 2003) are detected even in cases when bounding ICs are not perceptually completed. Here we used apparent motion (AM) to test whether SRs are detected in the absence of crisp bounding ICs.

fMRI activation in response to illusory contours and salient regions in the human lateral occipital complex.

Regions in the human Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC) show fMRI responses to illusory surfaces. We show that the LOC activation is due to the globally completed region and occurs even when the region is not bounded by illusory contours (ICs). Kanizsa-type stimuli were modified by rounding the corners of the "pacmen" inducers and misaligning them slightly.