The effect of social anxiety on top-down attentional orienting to emotional faces.

One of the fundamental factors maintaining social anxiety is biased attention toward threatening facial expressions. Typically, this bias has been conceptualized as driven by an overactive bottom-up attentional system; however, this potentially overlooks the role of top-down attention in being able to modulate this bottom-up bias. Here, the role of top-down mechanisms in directing attention toward emotional faces was assessed with a modified dot-probe task, in which participants were given a top-down cue ("happy" or "angry") to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial, and the cued face was either presented with a face of the other emotion (angry, happy) or a neutral face.

A social identity perspective on COVID-19: Health risk is affected by shared group membership.

In the face of a novel infectious disease, changing our collective behaviour is critical to saving lives. One determinant of risk perception and risk behaviour that is often overlooked is the degree to which we share psychological group membership with others. We outline, and summarize supporting evidence for, a theoretical model that articulates the role of shared group membership in attenuating health risk perception and increasing health risk behaviour.

Impact of uncertainty and ambiguous outcome phrasing on moral decision-making.

The literature has shown that different types of moral dilemmas elicit discrepant decision patterns. The present research investigated the role of uncertainty in contributing to these decision patterns. Two studies were conducted to examine participants' choices in commonly used dilemmas.

The role of Experiential Avoidance in transdiagnostic compulsive behavior: A structural model analysis.

Compulsivity is recognized as a transdiagnostic phenotype, underlying a variety of addictive and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. However, current understanding of how it should be operationalized and the processes contributing to its development and maintenance is limited. The present study investigated if there was a relationship between the affective process Experiential Avoidance (EA), an unwillingness to tolerate negative internal experiences, and the frequency and severity of transdiagnostic compulsive behaviors.

The impact of sleep loss on sustained and transient attention: an EEG study.

Sleep is one of our most important physiological functions that maintains physical and mental health. Two studies examined whether discrete areas of attention are equally affected by sleep loss. This was achieved using a repeated-measures within-subjects design, with two contrasting conditions: normal sleep and partial sleep restriction of 5-h.

Are Fitbits implicated in body image concerns and disordered eating in women?

Objective: Using a daily monitoring framework, we examined the psychological consequences of Fitbit self-tracking on state body satisfaction, disordered eating (DE; i.e., binge eating and dietary restraint), levels of exercise engagement, and motivations (appearance vs.

Social support facilitates physical activity by reducing pain.

Objectives The link between social support and physical activity has primarily been examined cross-sectionally, with a focus on the direct association between the two variables. In a distinct body of work, there has been growing interest in the role of social support in reducing pain (emotional and physical). We examined the relationship between social support and physical activity over time.

When cognitive control harms rather than helps: individuals with high working memory capacity are less efficient at infrequent contraction of attentional breadth.

Different attentional breadths facilitate performance on different types of perceptual tasks. For instance, a narrow attentional breadth improves spatial resolution; whereas a broad attentional breath enhances face perception. This means that to optimise attention for the dynamic demands of real-world vision, it is necessary to efficiently resize attentional breadth.

Standardizing measurement in psychological studies: On why one second has different value in a sprint versus a marathon.

Here we highlight the importance of considering relative performance and the standardization of measurement in psychological research. In particular, we highlight three key analytic issues. The first is the fact that the popular method of calculating difference scores can be misleading because current approaches rely on absolute differences, neglecting what proportion of baseline performance this change reflects.

Bliss is blue and bleak is grey: Abstract word-colour associations influence objective performance even when not task relevant.

Humans associate abstract words with physical stimulus dimensions, such as linking upward locations with positive concepts (e.g., happy = up).

"An Important Part of Who I am": The Predictors of Dietary Adherence among Weight-Loss, Vegetarian, Vegan, Paleo, and Gluten-Free Dietary Groups.

Weight-loss diets are notorious for their low adherence, which is a barrier to efforts to reduce population rates of overweight and obesity. However, there is some evidence that adherence is better among people on other kinds of diets, such as vegan and gluten free. This study aimed to explore the predictors of dietary adherence across five restrictive dietary patterns (vegan, vegetarian, paleo, gluten free, and weight loss).

What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help-seeking for eating disorder symptomatology.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate help-seeking attitudes, intentions, and behaviors, and to systematically explore perceived barriers to help-seeking for eating, weight, or shape concerns among young adults. Differences in perceived barriers as a function of type of eating disorder symptomatology were also examined.

Method: Data were collected using an online survey among individuals (aged 18-25 years) in Australia.

Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Across 45 Countries: A Large-Scale Replication.

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives-an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective-offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions.

Temporal predictability does not impact attentional blink performance: effects of fixed vs. random inter-trial intervals.

Background: Does the inclusion of a randomized inter-trial interval (ITI) impact performance on an Attentional Blink (AB) task? The AB phenomenon is often used as a test of transient attention (Dux & Marois, 2009); however, it is unclear whether incorporating aspects of sustained attention, by implementing a randomized ITI, would impact task performance. The current research sought to investigate this, by contrasting a standard version of the AB task with a random ITI version to determine whether performance changed, reflecting a change in difficulty, engagement, or motivation.

Method: Thirty university students (21 female; age range 18-57, = 21.

tACS Stimulation at Alpha Frequency Selectively Induces Inattentional Blindness.

Contemporary neurocognitive models implicate alpha oscillations as a top-down mechanism of cortical inhibition, instrumental in the suppression of information that fails to reach conscious visual awareness. This suggests that alpha-band activity may play a key role in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, however this has not yet been empirically examined. The current study employed transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over occipital cortex at alpha, theta, and sham frequencies within an inattentional blindness task to delineate whether an exogenous manipulation of alpha oscillations has a modulatory effect on visual awareness of the unexpected stimulus.

Getting shredded: Development and validation of a measure of muscularity-oriented disordered eating.

This study describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of the Eating for Muscularity Scale (EMS), a measure of muscularity-oriented disordered eating (MDE) attitudes and behaviors. We conducted a literature review to define the construct of MDE and relevant subdomains. This review informed a large pool of items addressing these subdomains, which were then reduced based on feedback from subject-matter experts.

PANAS Models of Positive and Negative Affectivity for Adolescent Boys.

The measurement of affect is often of central interest in adolescent research. Very few studies have investigated the factor structure underlying adolescent responses to the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, with mixed results. Only two studies reported on the trait version: one in Florida, the other in Chile.

Membership in Sport or Exercise Groups Predicts Sustained Physical Activity and Longevity in Older Adults Compared to Physically Active Matched Controls.

Background: Physical activity tends to decline in older age, despite being key to health and longevity. Previous investigations have focused on demographic and individual factors that predict sustained physical activity.

Purpose: To examine whether engaging in physical activity in the context of sport or exercise group membership can protect against age-related physical activity decline.

Searching for emotion: A top-down set governs attentional orienting to facial expressions.

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history.

Interactive Effects of Quality of Life and Related Factors on Alcohol Use Outcomes.

This investigation derives its impetus from public health concerns around detecting, mitigating, and preventing the deleterious effects that alcohol use can cause particularly in advanced age. We aim to complement gerontological research by exploring the interactive effects of quality of life and related factors on alcohol use outcomes assessed by the Drinking Problem Index. The study is based on cross-sectional data collected from questionnaires mailed to a randomly drawn sample of 6,000 Norwegian adults aged 62 and older (participation rate: 32%).

Human hippocampal CA3 damage disrupts both recent and remote episodic memories.

Neocortical-hippocampal interactions support new episodic (event) memories, but there is conflicting evidence about the dependence of remote episodic memories on the hippocampus. In line with systems consolidation and computational theories of episodic memory, evidence from model organisms suggests that the cornu ammonis 3 (CA3) hippocampal subfield supports recent, but not remote, episodic retrieval. In this study, we demonstrated that recent and remote memories were susceptible to a loss of episodic detail in human participants with focal bilateral damage to CA3.

The impact of scaling rather than shaping attention: Changes in the scale of attention using global motion inducers influence both spatial and temporal acuity.

Originally, the zoom lens model of attention scaling proposed that narrowing attention to a small area of the visual field improves visual perception (Eriksen & St. James, 1986). A large body of empirical evidence supports this model, showing that narrow attention enhances performance in spatial acuity tasks.

The effectiveness of touchscreen-based attentional bias modification to thin body stimuli on state rumination.

Ruminative thinking is considered a vulnerability factor for eating disorder symptomatology. Research suggests that attentional bias to body shape stimuli may serve to underpin this maladaptive form of emotion regulation. The current study aimed to determine the direct effect of attentional bias to thin-ideal bodies on state depressive rumination.

A pilot investigation of universal school-based prevention programs for anxiety and depression symptomology in children: A randomized controlled trial.

Objective: The current study aimed to provide a preliminary evaluation of two universal school-based prevention programs, Emotion Regulation (ER) and Behavioral Activation (BA), by increasing resilience to manage excessive worry, a transdiagnostic feature across anxiety and depression.

Method: Primary school children (N = 295; 52.5% female; 8-13 years) from five Australian schools were cluster randomized to an ER, BA or usual class control condition.