The influence of expectations and attention on conditioned pain modulation: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Conditioned pain modulation (CPM) is a psychophysical experimental measure of endogenous pain inhibition in humans. Within this paradigm, one noxious stimulus, the conditioning stimulus (CS), reduces the pain perception from another heterotopic noxious stimulus, the test stimulus (TS). Cognitive processes are known to influence pain perception and might impact the underlying mechanisms of CPM.

Hypervigilance strikes a balance between external and internal attention: behavioral and modeling evidence from the switching attention task.

Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a corollary, it might be detrimental to internal attention and further affect attentional balance defined as the ability to switch dynamically between these two domains. In the current study, we aimed to address this question and induced hypervigilance in 49 healthy participants through the presentation of a task-unrelated aversive sound while they performed the switching attention task (SAT), which was previously devised to study attentional balance.

Uncovering the Daily Experiences of People Living With Advanced Cancer Using an Experience Sampling Method Questionnaire: Development, Content Validation, and Optimization Study.

Background: The experience sampling method (ESM), a self-report method that typically uses multiple assessments per day, can provide detailed knowledge of the daily experiences of people with cancer, potentially informing oncological care. The use of the ESM among people with advanced cancer is limited, and no validated ESM questionnaires have been developed specifically for oncology.

Objective: This study aims to develop, content validate, and optimize the digital Experience Sampling Method for People Living With Advanced Cancer (ESM-AC) questionnaire, covering multidimensional domains and contextual factors.

Exploring Personality Profiles as a Source of Phenotypic Diversity in Autistic Children and Adolescents.

This study adopts a person-centered approach to evaluate personality diversity as a source of interpersonal variability in autistic children and adolescents, and how personality subgroup membership relates to variability in autistic characteristics, social-emotional presentations, and parenting outcomes. Latent Profile Analysis was used to analyze 569 parent reports on a child-based Five-Factor-Model personality measure (aged 6-18 years; M = 11.8 years, SD = 3.

Brain networks in newborns and infants with and without sensorineural hearing loss: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

Background: Understanding the impact of early sensory deficits on brain development is essential for understanding developmental processes and developing potential interventions. While previous studies have looked into the impact of prenatal experiences on language development, there is a lack of research on how these experiences affect early language and brain function development in individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL).

Aim: To investigate SNHL effects on early brain development and connectivity in 4-month-olds healthy newborns and controls.

Attention and nocebo hyperalgesia: Testing a novel virtual reality attention bias modification paradigm.

Nocebo effects in pain (nocebo hyperalgesia) have received significant attention recently, with negative expectancies and anxiety proposed to be explanatory factors. While both expectancy and anxiety can bias attention, attention has been rarely explored as a potential mechanism involved in nocebo hyperalgesia. The present study aimed to explore whether attention bias modification (ABM) using an immersive, ecologically valid VR paradigm successfully induced attention biases (AB) and subsequently influenced nocebo hyperalgesia.

Compensating for the mobile menace with extra effort: A pupillometry investigation of the mere presence effect of smartphones.

Previous research suggests that the mere presence of a smartphone can detrimentally affect performance. However, other studies failed to observe such detrimental effects. A limitation of existing studies is that no indexes of (potentially compensating) effort were included.

Investigating the Predictive Validity of the Quantitative Checklist for Autism in Toddlers and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2 in Children at Elevated Likelihood for Autism.

This study examined the recurrence rate of autism in siblings at elevated likelihood (EL) and the predictive validity of the Q-CHAT and ADOS-2 at 14 and 24 months (m) for a clinical best estimate (CBE) autism diagnosis at 3 years. 331 EL-siblings (47.9% girls) from the prospective longitudinal EuroSibs study underwent ADOS-2 assessments and caregivers completed the Q-CHAT at 14 m and 24 m.

and in autism: The case of hesitation marker usage in Dutch-speaking autistic preschoolers.

English-speaking autistic children use the hesitation marker less often than non-autistic children but use at a similar rate. It is unclear why this is the case. We employed a sample of Dutch-speaking children from the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behavior Project to examine hesitation markers in autistic and non-autistic preschoolers with the aim to 1) make a crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation marker usage and 2) examine hypotheses regarding the underlying linguistic mechanisms of hesitation markers: the symptom hypothesis and the signal hypothesis.

How Well Can We Measure Chronic Pain Impact in Existing Longitudinal Cohort Studies? Lessons Learned.

Multiple large longitudinal cohorts provide opportunities to address questions about predictors of pain and pain trajectories, even when not anticipated in the design of the historical databases. This focus article uses 2 empirical examples to illustrate the processes of assessing the measurement properties of data from large cohort studies to answer questions about pain. In both examples, data were screened to select candidate variables that captured the impact of chronic pain on self-care activities, productivity, and social activities.

Parent-child interaction at age 5 months: genetic and environmental contributions and associations with later socio-communicative development.

Background: Characteristics of parent-child interaction (PCI) early in life have been associated with later development in the child. Twin studies can help to disentangle child contributions to parent-child interaction, for example, by assessing the influence of the child's genetics on his/her social environment, which includes parental behaviour.

Methods: Infant twins from a community sample [354 monozygotic (MZ), 268 same-sex dizygotic (DZ)] were assessed in terms of PCI at age 5 months.

An EEG frequency tagging study on biological motion perception in children with DCD.

Background: The perception of biological motion requires accurate prediction of the spatiotemporal dynamics of human movement. Research on Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) suggests deficits in accurate motor prediction, raising the question whether not just action execution, but also action perception is perturbed in this disorder.

Aims: To examine action perception by comparing the neural response to the observation of apparent biological motion in children with and without DCD.

Action Interpretation Determines the Effects of Go/No-Go and Approach/Avoidance Actions on Stimulus Evaluation.

Executing go/no-go or approach/avoidance responses toward a stimulus can change its evaluation. To explain these effects, some theoretical accounts propose that executing these responses inherently triggers affective reactions (i.e.

Stochastic resonance is not required for pink noise to have beneficial effects on ADHD-related performance? The moderate brain arousal model challenged.

Objective: Random noise, such as white or pink noise, has been shown to have beneficial effects on the performance of individuals with (elevated traits of) ADHD. Both the state regulation deficit (SRD) account and the moderate brain arousal (MBA) model argue that this effect is due to enhanced cognitive arousal. The MBA model specifically attributes this to random noise affecting dopaminergic (DA) transmission via stochastic resonance (SR).

Mind the instructions: Reward cues are liked first, wanted later.

Current theories propose that mental effort is invested only when the anticipated benefits, such as rewards, outweigh the associated costs, like task difficulty. Yet, it remains unclear whether this motivational and mitigating aspect of reward processing is reflected in the evaluation of reward/difficulty cues as such, and to what extent it depends on task experience. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 84), we used the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) to gauge affective evaluations of nonword cues predicting reward and task difficulty levels.

Unraveling the temporal interplay of slow-paced breathing and prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation on cardiac indices of autonomic activity.

The neurovisceral integration model proposes that information flows bidirectionally between the brain and the heart via the vagus nerve, indexed by vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV). Voluntary reduction in breathing rate (slow-paced breathing, SPB, 5.5 Breathing Per Minute (BPM)) can enhance vmHRV.