Understanding the mechanisms underlying cognitive control in psychosis.

Background: Cognitive control (CC) involves a top-down mechanism to flexibly respond to complex stimuli and is impaired in schizophrenia.

Methods: This study investigated the impact of increasing complexity of CC processing in 140 subjects with psychosis and 39 healthy adults, with assessments of behavioral performance, neural regions of interest and symptom severity.

Results: The lowest level of CC (Stroop task) was impaired in all patients; the intermediate level of CC (Faces task) with explicit emotional information was most impaired in patients with first episode psychosis.

Smoking cessation in pregnant women: A randomized controlled trial investigating the effectiveness of an eHealth intervention including heart rate variability-biofeedback training.

Background: Prenatal smoking and stress are associated with adverse health effects for women themselves and are risk factors for adverse outcomes of the child. Effective interventions are needed to support women with smoking cessation and reducing stress. The aims were (1) to test the effectiveness of an 8-week eHealth intervention targeting stress reduction and smoking cessation; (2) to examine whether stress reduction mediated the intervention effect on smoking behavior; (3) to test motivation to quit as a moderator; and (4) to investigate a dose-response effect of program usage.

Validation of Photoplethysmography Using a Mobile Phone Application for the Assessment of Heart Rate Variability in the Context of Heart Rate Variability-Biofeedback.

Objective: Heart rate variability-biofeedback (HRV-BF) is an effective intervention to reduce stress and anxiety and requires accurate measures of real-time HRV. HRV can be measured through photoplethysmography (PPG) using the camera of a mobile phone. No studies have directly compared HRV-BF supported through PPG against classical electrocardiogram (ECG).

Adolescent development: From neurobiology to psychopathology.

Adolescence is a time of major psychological development in the cognitive, affective, and social domains. Development in these domains can also show interactions with each other. One way in which these interactions between these domains become apparent is in the form of risk-taking behavior in adolescence.

Corrupt third parties undermine trust and prosocial behaviour between people.

Corruption is a pervasive phenomenon that affects the quality of institutions, undermines economic growth and exacerbates inequalities around the globe. Here we tested whether perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt undermines trust and subsequent prosocial behaviour among strangers. We developed an experimental game paradigm modelling representatives as third-party punishers to manipulate or assess corruption and examine its relationship with trust and prosociality (trust behaviour, cooperation and generosity).

Lower class people suffered more (but perceived fewer risk disadvantages) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Does COVID-19 affect people of all classes equally? In the current research, we focus on the social issue of risk inequality during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a nationwide survey conducted in China ( = 1,137), we predicted and found that compared to higher-class individuals, lower-class participants reported a stronger decline in self-rated health as well as economic well-being due to the COVID-19 outbreak. At the same time, we examined participants' beliefs regarding the distribution of risks.

The Cooperation Databank: Machine-Readable Science Accelerates Research Synthesis.

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)-a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958-2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies along 312 variables, including the quantitative results (13,959 effects).

Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation.

Contemporary society is facing many social dilemmas-including climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation-characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interest. The climate crisis requires paying costs today to reduce climate-related harms and risks that we face in the future. The COVID-19 crisis requires the less vulnerable to pay costs to benefit the more vulnerable in the face of great uncertainty.

Perceptions of the appropriate response to norm violation in 57 societies.

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors.

Spatial suppression due to statistical learning tracks the estimated spatial probability.

People are sensitive to regularities in the environment. Recent studies employing the additional singleton paradigm showed that a singleton distractor that appeared more often in one specific location than in all other locations may lead to attentional suppression of high-probability distractor locations. This in turn effectively reduced the attentional capture effect by the salient distractor singleton.

Direct and indirect punishment of norm violations in daily life.

Across societies, humans punish norm violations. To date, research on the antecedents and consequences of punishment has largely relied upon agent-based modeling and laboratory experiments. Here, we report a longitudinal study documenting punishment responses to norm violations in daily life (k = 1507; N = 257) and test pre-registered hypotheses about the antecedents of direct punishment (i.

Conscious perception and the modulatory role of dopamine: no effect of the dopamine D2 agonist cabergoline on visual masking, the attentional blink, and probabilistic discrimination.

Rationale: Conscious perception is thought to depend on global amplification of sensory input. In recent years, striatal dopamine has been proposed to be involved in gating information and conscious access, due to its modulatory influence on thalamocortical connectivity.

Objectives: Since much of the evidence that implicates striatal dopamine is correlational, we conducted a double-blind crossover pharmacological study in which we administered cabergoline-a dopamine D2 agonist-and placebo to 30 healthy participants.

Acute hunger does not always undermine prosociality.

It has been argued that, when they are acutely hungry, people act in self-protective ways by keeping resources to themselves rather than sharing them. In four studies, using experimental, quasi-experimental, and correlational designs (total N = 795), we examine the effects of acute hunger on prosociality in a wide variety of non-interdependent tasks (e.g.

The Dialectics of Free Energy Minimization.

Karl Friston's free energy minimization has been received with great enthusiasm. With good reason: it not only makes the bold claim to a unifying theory of the brain, but it is presented as an principle applicable to living systems in general. In this article, we set out to show how the breadth of scope of Friston's framework converges with the dialectics of Georg Hegel.

Author Correction: Multivariate EEG analyses support high-resolution tracking of feature-based attentional selection.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Neuroimaging of learning and development: improving ecological validity.

Modern neuroscience research, including neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has provided valuable insights that advanced our understanding of brain development and learning processes significantly. However, there is a lively discussion about whether and how these insights can be meaningful to the educational practice. One of the main challenges is the low ecological validity of neuroimaging studies, making it hard to translate neuroimaging findings to real-life learning situations.

Multivariate EEG analyses support high-resolution tracking of feature-based attentional selection.

The primary electrophysiological marker of feature-based selection is the N2pc, a lateralized posterior negativity emerging around 180-200 ms. As it relies on hemispheric differences, its ability to discriminate the locus of focal attention is severely limited. Here we demonstrate that multivariate analyses of raw EEG data provide a much more fine-grained spatial profile of feature-based target selection.