Collaborative Recognition of Wellbeing Needs: A Novel Approach to Universal Psychosocial Screening on the Neonatal Unit.

Universal screening for the psychological needs of families in neonatal care is internationally recommended, but is not routinely practiced in the United Kingdom (UK). The present quality improvement project explores the clinical and operational feasibility of a novel approach to universal screening on a neonatal intensive care unit in the UK. The approach to screening taken adopts collaborative, strengths-based and dialogical methods for recognising the psychological needs of families whose baby is in hospital.

Amygdala and dlPFC abnormalities, with aberrant connectivity and habituation in response to emotional stimuli in females with BPD.

Background: Little is known about the frontolimbic abnormalities thought to underlie borderline personality disorder (BPD). We endeavoured to study regional responses, as well as their connectivity and habituation during emotion processing.

Methods: 14 BPD patients and 14 normal female controls (NC) controlled for menstrual phase underwent emotion-induction during an fMRI task using standardised images in a block design.

Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism.

Moral perceptions of harm and fairness are instrumental in guiding how an individual navigates moral challenges. Classic research documents that the gender of a target can affect how people deploy these perceptions of harm and fairness. Across multiple studies, we explore the effect of an individual's moral orientations (their considerations of harm and justice) and a target's gender on altruistic behavior.

Empathic concern drives costly altruism.

Why do we self-sacrifice to help others in distress? Two competing theories have emerged, one suggesting that prosocial behavior is primarily motivated by feelings of empathic other-oriented concern, the other that we help mainly because we are egoistically focused on reducing our own discomfort. Here we explore the relationship between costly altruism and these two sub-processes of empathy, specifically drawing on the caregiving model to test the theory that trait empathic concern (e.g.

Differential neural circuitry and self-interest in real vs hypothetical moral decisions.

Classic social psychology studies demonstrate that people can behave in ways that contradict their intentions--especially within the moral domain. We measured brain activity while subjects decided between financial self-benefit (earning money) and preventing physical harm (applying an electric shock) to a confederate under both real and hypothetical conditions. We found a shared neural network associated with empathic concern for both types of decisions.

Gut feelings and the reaction to perceived inequity: the interplay between bodily responses, regulation, and perception shapes the rejection of unfair offers on the ultimatum game.

It has been robustly demonstrated using the ultimatum game (UG) that individuals frequently reject unfair financial offers even if this results in a personal cost. One influential hypothesis for these rejections is that they reflect an emotional reaction to unfairness that overrides purely economic decision processes. In the present study, we examined whether the interplay between bodily responses, bodily regulation, and bodily perception ("interoception") contributes to emotionally driven rejection behavior on the UG.

What we say and what we do: the relationship between real and hypothetical moral choices.

Moral ideals are strongly ingrained within society and individuals alike, but actual moral choices are profoundly influenced by tangible rewards and consequences. Across two studies we show that real moral decisions can dramatically contradict moral choices made in hypothetical scenarios (Study 1). However, by systematically enhancing the contextual information available to subjects when addressing a hypothetical moral problem-thereby reducing the opportunity for mental simulation-we were able to incrementally bring subjects' responses in line with their moral behaviour in real situations (Study 2).

Listening to your heart. How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision making.

Theories proposing that how one thinks and feels is influenced by feedback from the body remain controversial. A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In Study 1, we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images.

Can you feel the beat? Interoceptive awareness is an interactive function of anxiety- and depression-specific symptom dimensions.

Delineating the differential effects of anxiety versus depression on patterns of information processing has proved challenging. The tripartite model of mood disorders (Clark & Watson, 1991) suggests that one way forward is to adopt a dimensional rather than categorical approach, making it possible to explore the main and interaction effects of depression- and anxiety-specific symptoms on a given cognitive-affective process. Here we examined how the interplay of anxiety-specific arousal and depression-specific anhedonia symptoms in the same individuals relate to interoceptive (bodily) awareness.