Validating the Unmind Index as a measure of mental health and wellbeing among adults in USA, Australia, and New Zealand.

Background: The Unmind Index is a 26-item, 7-subscale measure of mental health and wellbeing designed for use on the Unmind digital workplace mental health platform. The Unmind Index was developed and validated in the UK but is used internationally. This paper reports further psychometric validation of this measure for use in USA, Australia, and New Zealand (ANZ).

Aesthetic experience enhances first-person spatial representation.

Episodic autobiographical memories are characterized by a spatial context and an affective component. But how do affective and spatial aspects interact? Does affect modulate the way we encode the spatial context of events? We investigated how one element of affect, namely aesthetic liking, modulates memory for location, in three online experiments ( = 124, 79, and 80). Participants visited a professionally curated virtual art exhibition.

A New Digital Assessment of Mental Health and Well-being in the Workplace: Development and Validation of the Unmind Index.

Background: Unmind is a workplace, digital, mental health platform with tools to help users track, maintain, and improve their mental health and well-being (MHWB). Psychological measurement plays a key role on this platform, providing users with insights on their current MHWB, the ability to track it over time, and personalized recommendations, while providing employers with aggregate information about the MHWB of their workforce.

Objective: Due to the limitations of existing measures for this purpose, we aimed to develop and validate a novel well-being index for digital use, to capture symptoms of common mental health problems and key aspects of positive well-being.

Leadership and tempo perturbation affect coordination in medium-sized groups.

In marching bands, sports, dance and virtually all human group behaviour, we coordinate our actions with others. Coordinating actions in time and space can act as a social glue, facilitating bonding among people. However, much of our understanding about coordination dynamics is based on research into dyadic interactions.

Evidence accumulation under uncertainty - a neural marker of emerging choice and urgency.

To interact meaningfully with its environment, an agent must integrate external information with its own internal states. However, information about the environment is often noisy. In this study, we identify a neural correlate that tracks how asymmetries between competing alternatives evolve over the course of a decision.

The Readiness Potential reflects the internal source of action, rather than decision uncertainty.

Voluntary actions are preceded by a Readiness Potential (RP), a slow EEG (electroencephalogram) component generated in medial frontal cortical areas. The RP is classically thought to be specific to internally-driven decisions to act, and to reflect post-decision motor preparation. Recent work suggests instead that it may reflect noise or conflict during the decision itself, with internally driven decisions tending to be more random, more conflicted and thus more uncertain than externally driven actions.

The Readiness Potential reflects planning-based expectation, not uncertainty, in the timing of action.

Actions are guided by a combination of external cues, internal intentions, and stored knowledge. Self-initiated  produced without immediate external cues, may be preceded by a slow EEG Readiness Potential (RP) that progressively increases prior to action. The cognitive significance of this neural event is controversial.

Racial bias in face perception is sensitive to instructions but not introspection.

Faces with typically African features are perceived as darker than they really are. We investigated how early in processing the bias emerges, whether participants are aware of it, and whether it can be altered by explicit instructions. We presented pairs of faces sequentially, manipulated the luminance and morphological features of each, and asked participants which was lighter, and how confident they were in their responses.

Do readiness potentials happen all the time?

The Readiness Potential (RP) is a slow negative EEG potential found in the seconds preceding voluntary actions. Here, we explore whether the RP is found only at this time, or if it also occurs when no action is produced. Recent theories suggest the RP reflects the average of accumulated stochastic fluctuations in neural activity, rather than a specific signal related to self-initiated action: RP-like events should then be widely present, even in the absence of actions.

Confidence is higher in touch than in vision in cases of perceptual ambiguity.

The inclination to touch objects that we can see is a surprising behaviour, given that vision often supplies relevant and sufficiently accurate sensory evidence. Here we suggest that this 'fact-checking' phenomenon could be explained if touch provides a higher level of perceptual certainty than vision. Testing this hypothesis, observers explored inverted T-shaped stimuli eliciting the Vertical-horizontal illusion in vision and touch, which included clear-cut and ambiguous cases.

Learning rapidly about the relevance of visual cues requires conscious awareness.

Humans have been shown to be capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness and how this differs from learning about conscious cues.

Knowing when to hold 'em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children, adolescents and adults.

Regret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available.

The time course of conflict on the Cognitive Reflection Test.

Reasoning that is deliberative and reflective often requires the inhibition of intuitive responses. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is designed to assess people's ability to suppress incorrect heuristic responses in favour of deliberation. Correct responding on the CRT predicts performance on a range of tasks in which intuitive processes lead to incorrect responses, suggesting indirectly that CRT performance is related to cognitive control.