This study examines sexting patterns, moving beyond traditional unidimensional approaches. Using a person-centered framework, a Two-Step Cluster Analysis was conducted on a sample of 460 Italian university students (age range: 18–45 years-old, M = 23.32, SD = 4.27, 76.3% women). Sexting experiences were operationalized through five indicators distinguishing between consensual or coerced, partner or third-party-mediated exchanges, while anxiety, depression, and stress were assessed as dependent variables. The analysis identified four distinct clusters: Low-Engagement Sexting (60.4%), Sexting with Third Parties (14.4%), Sexting with Partner(s) (13.8%), and High-Engagement and Exposure in Sexting (11.3%). Results from ANCOVAs, controlling for gender and sexual orientation, revealed that the high-engagement and exposure in sexting cluster, characterized by pervasive engagement across all indicators, reported significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression compared to other groups. Furthermore, individuals experiencing unsolicited and third-part-mediated exposure exhibited elevated stress levels. While gender-diverse and sexual minority participants reported overall higher psychological distress, no significant interaction effects were found between cluster membership and sociodemographic factors. These findings highlight that psychological outcomes are contingent upon the configuration of consent, agency, and relational context rather than the frequency of sexting alone. The study underscores the need for targeted interventions and comprehensive digital sexuality education that addresses the nuances of online consensual and non-consensual interactions.
Although prior research has clearly demonstrated the general impact of episodic future thinking (EFT) on behavioral decision-making, there has been a scarcity of studies investigating how different features of EFT might variably affect health-related intertemporal choices in adolescents. This lack of research hinders our comprehension of the functional specificity of EFT. The present research aimed to examine how three specific characteristics of EFT (i.e., temporal distance, health relevance, and simulation perspective) influence health-related intertemporal decision-making in adolescent populations. Three experiments were designed and conducted with 248 adolescents aged 15 to 17 years. The decision-making was measured by health-related intertemporal decision-making task. Study 1 experimentally manipulated temporal distance through an episodic thinking imagination task, comparing intertemporal choice between a near-term EFT condition and a long-term EFT condition. Study 2 manipulated the content of EFT (specifically for long-term EFT), comparing intertemporal choice between a health-relevant EFT condition and a health-irrelevant EFT condition. Study 3 manipulated the perspective adopted during EFT simulation (specifically for long-term EFT within health-relevant content), comparing intertemporal choice between a first-person perspective EFT condition and a third-person perspective EFT condition. Study 1 found that long-term EFT was more conducive to health decisions than near-term EFT. Study 2 found that health-relevant EFT was more effective than health-irrelevant EFT. Study 3 found that third-person perspective simulation promoted better health decisions compared to first-person perspective simulation. These findings highlight the functional specificity of EFT and suggest that its impact on intertemporal decision-making can be optimized by manipulating temporal distance, content relevance, and simulation perspective.
Background and aims Questionnaire-based tools such as the Exercise Dependence Scale (EDS) are widely used to identify athletes exhibiting dependence-like features, but it remains unclear how these classifications relate to clinically relevant addictive exercise behaviour. This study combined quantitative screening with semi-structured, study-specific clinical interviews to (1) examine the proportion of athletes showing high EDS scores who meet ICD-11 criteria for a disorder due to addictive behaviour (6C5Y), (2) characterize psychological and motivational differences between athletes meeting versus not meeting ICD-11-based criteria for clinically relevant addictive exercise behaviour, and (3) identify the most discriminative candidate features of this classification. Methods A total of 342 endurance athletes (159 female, 183 male) completed an online survey including the EDS, life satisfaction, and motivational factors. Athletes exceeding the EDS cut-off (>77; n = 63) and consenting to re-contact were invited to semi-structured, study-specific clinical interviews based on ICD-11 criteria for disorders due to addictive behaviors and additionally completed the SCL-90-R; 34 athletes participated in the interview phase (attrition rate: 46.0%). Results Among the 34 EDS-positive athletes who completed the clinical interview, 24 (70.6 %, 95 % CI: 52.5–84.9 %) met ICD-11-based criteria for clinically relevant addictive exercise behaviour. Compared to athletes not meeting these criteria, those meeting ICD-11-based criteria reported greater withdrawal-related symptoms, more comorbidities, lower life satisfaction, and higher weight-related exercise motivation, while training volume did not differ. In an exploratory LASSO model, withdrawal symptoms and past comorbidities emerged as preliminary candidate discriminative features of ICD-11-based classification status. Conclusions High EDS scores may reflect elevated exercise dependence features in endurance athletes, whereas not all meet ICD-11 criteria for clinically relevant addictive exercise behaviour. These findings highlight the importance of withdrawal-related symptoms and comorbidities for differential assessment and support a multi-method approach to distinguish high involvement or dependence from clinically relevant addictive exercise behaviour. However, findings from the interview phase should be interpreted cautiously given the small sample size and exploratory nature of the analyses.
Aerobic exercise is associated with reduced depressive symptoms, but the neurobiological processes supporting this effect remain incompletely understood. We investigated whether short-term aerobic exercise reduces depressive symptoms in healthy young adults and whether such reduction is related to cortical structural change and neurotransmitter-receptor organization. Forty-eight participants completed a two-week aerobic running intervention and a two-week control period, with depressive symptoms and structural MRI assessed at baseline, week 2 and week 4. Aerobic exercise significantly reduced depressive symptoms relative to the control period. Across individuals, greater symptom reduction was associated with larger increases in anterior cingulate cortical thickness, an association observed only during the active intervention. The cortical map of this symptom-thickness association showed selective spatial correspondence with normative distributions of serotonergic 5-HT1A, 5-HT1B, 5-HT2A and 5-HT4 receptors, and the glutamatergic mGluR5 receptor, and this correspondence was observed only during the exercise period. These results indicate that short-term aerobic exercise is associated with changes in depressive symptoms and anterior cingulate structure. They also provide a neurobiologically informed context for understanding these exercise-related changes.
Background Capturing multimodal acute stress responses is important for understanding how stress is expressed across psychophysiological systems. Pupil diameter and electroencephalogram (EEG) are important indices for assessing acute stress responses. However, the relationships among behavioral, pupillary, and EEG responses during sustained stress exposure remain less well understood. Methods We collected multimodal data, including self-reported stress, salivary cortisol, electrocardiogram (ECG), pupil diameter, behavioral performance, and EEG from 33 healthy young adults during the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). Differences in responses between the training and testing conditions across difficulty levels were analyzed to characterize changes in the multimodal dynamics of acute stress responses across MIST blocks, and exploratory correlation analyses were conducted to examine associations between pupil diameter changes and relative EEG power changes Results The testing condition successfully elicited an acute stress response profile, reflected by increased self-reported stress, salivary cortisol, heart rate, and pupil diameter, alongside decreased behavioral performance and a shift in relative EEG power from lower to higher frequency bands. During the testing condition, behavioral performance improved and pupil diameter decreased from the medium to the hard difficulty block, accompanied by changes in relative alpha, beta (beta1, beta2, beta3), and gamma power. These findings may reflect adaptive-like changes over the course of the testing condition. Exploratory analyses showed limited associations between pupil diameter changes and relative EEG power changes, restricted to changes from the medium to the hard difficulty block in the testing condition and mainly involving frontal relative beta2 power. Conclusion Our findings suggest that acute stress involves coordinated but partly dissociable multimodal dynamics across MIST blocks and highlight the value of integrating behavioral, pupillary, and EEG measures to characterize acute stress responses.
Late-life depression (LLD) is a heterogeneous neuropsychiatric condition characterized by affective, cognitive, and autonomic disturbances, underscoring the need for objective markers that index dysfunction in specific neural control systems. Microsaccades, small fixational eye movements generated through oculomotor circuitry that includes the superior colliculus, provide a temporally precise behavioral measure sensitive to arousal and cognitive control signals, yet their clinical relevance in LLD remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examined whether task-evoked microsaccade dynamics are altered in LLD during emotional conflict and valence processing using an emotional face-word Stroop task. Microsaccade rate and kinematic metrics were analyzed in 26 individuals with LLD and 27 healthy older adults (CTRL). Across groups, microsaccade rates were higher during emotionally incongruent compared with congruent trials, indicating sensitivity to emotional conflict, with a trend toward lower overall rates in LLD. During valence processing, microsaccade rates were higher for fearful than happy faces and were significantly lower in LLD than in CTRL participants. In contrast, microsaccade kinematics were largely preserved across groups. Exploratory inter-individual analyses identified nominal associations with somatic symptom burden and cognitive status, but none survived correction for multiple comparisons. An exploratory multivariate classification analysis combining microsaccade, pupil, eye-blink, and reaction time indices yielded chance-level differentiation between groups. Together, these findings indicate that microsaccade rate and kinematics are sensitive to emotional conflict and valence processing, with selective alterations in these dynamics in LLD, highlighting microsaccades as a potentially informative behavioral index of affective interference control in clinical aging.
Objective:Memory dysfunction is a major concern in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and is closely associated with changes in prefrontal cortex (PFC) hemodynamics. Tai Chi (TC) combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to improve MCI-related memory deficits, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate which hemodynamic changes are attributable to the individual effects of TC or tDCS, and which alterations arise from their synergistic interaction. Methods:In this randomized clinical trial, 128 patients with MCI were assigned to one of four groups: TC combined with tDCS, TC alone, tDCS alone, or health education. Outcome measures included memory scale scores and prefrontal hemodynamic activity assessed using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), measured at baseline and after 12 weeks. Results:The combined TC and tDCS intervention produced a significant synergistic interaction effect on verbal memory (P = 0.032), as well as on changes in oxyhemoglobin (HbO2) concentrations across multiple prefrontal regions. These included the right orbitofrontal cortex during resting state (P = 0.026); the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during the 0-back (P = 0.012), 1-back (P < 0.001), and 2-back tasks (P = 0.003); the left frontopolar cortex during the 0-back (P = 0.003), 1-back (P = 0.008), and 2-back tasks (P = 0.020); the right frontopolar cortex during the 1-back task (P = 0.017); and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during the 1-back task (P = 0.041). Correlation analysis revealed a positive association between changes in HbO2 concentrations in the left DLPFC during the 1-back task and verbal memory performance. Conclusions:TC combined with tDCS may synergistically enhance verbal memory in patients with MCI through modulation of HbO2 concentrations in the left DLPFC. Trial registration:ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: ChiCTR2200059316.
Problematic pornography use (PPU) has been increasingly recognized as a behavioral addiction involving aberrant reward processing. However, few studies have examined reward imbalance-the co-occurrence of heightened reactivity to pornographic cues and reduced responsiveness to natural rewards-as a putative mechanism underlying PPU. The present study investigated whether the differential P3 component (ΔP3; pornographic minus natural reward P3) could serve as a neural index of individual differences in PPU risk in a sample of young heterosexual men. A total of 139 participants (aged 18-25 years, M = 20.54, SD = 1.53) completed an ERP oddball task and questionnaires assessing both pornography use and PPU symptoms. Results showed that ΔP3 was positively associated with both pornography use and PPU severity and demonstrated moderate discriminative performance in distinguishing high- versus low-risk participants (AUC = 0.71). In contrast, pornographic reward P3 (PR-P3) and natural reward P3 (NR-P3) alone showed weak and non-significant associations with outcome measures. These findings suggest that reward dysregulation indexed by ΔP3 may reflect a neural signature of altered reward processing in PPU, providing preliminary support for reward imbalance models of addictive behaviors. More broadly, the results highlight the potential value of comparative neural indices over single-cue reactivity measures in characterizing individual differences in PPU.
Suicide prevention research increasingly leverages social media data, where individuals often share personal experiences and emotions. While most studies rely on textual analysis to detect suicidal ideation, the structural characteristics of online social networks remain underexplored. In this exploratory pilot-scale study, we investigate whether network centrality metrics derived from Reddit interaction graphs can provide complementary signals for suicide risk detection beyond text-centric approaches. We construct directed user interaction graphs and extract 14 centrality metrics, including degree, betweenness, eigenvector, authority, and Katz centralities, to evaluate their predictive power. Using traditional machine learning classifiers, we assess the performance of these graph-based features in distinguishing suicidal from non-suicidal users. To further explore the interplay between network structure and textual content, we integrate centrality features with Sentence-BERT (SBERT) embeddings within a Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework. Within the constraints of a small-scale dataset, the best-performing GNN with SBERT achieved 67% accuracy and a 67% F1-score, representing a marginal improvement over the Random Forest baseline (64% accuracy; F1 = 66%). Results show that network centralities alone provide meaningful signals of suicidal risk, revealing patterns of isolation, influence, and social connectedness that characterize vulnerable users. Although these findings provide preliminary evidence for the complementary value of structural network analysis, they should be interpreted cautiously due to dataset scale and keyword-based sampling constraints.
Background:Children with overweight or obesity are at elevated risk for later-life mental health challenges, but the role of accelerometer-derived waking movement behaviors remains uncertain. Thus, we examined longitudinal associations of sedentary behavior (SB), light-intensity physical activity (LPA), and moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) at age 7 with later-life internalizing and externalizing problems. Method:We used data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, focusing on children with overweight or obesity at age 7 who had valid accelerometer data and a complete set of predefined analytic variables (N = 858). Exposures were average daily minutes of SB, LPA, and MVPA. Outcomes were parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire-based internalizing and externalizing problems scores at ages 11 and 14. A generalized random forests approach was used to estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) and conditional average treatment effects (CATEs), adjusted for relevant demographic, socioeconomic, body mass index, parental distress, baseline mental health, and co-occurring movement intensities; day-of-week activity-pattern variables were used as exploratory candidate moderators. Results:Estimated ATEs were small. After applying the Benjamini-Hochberg false-discovery-rate (FDR) correction across the 12 primary exposure-outcome tests, only the association between higher SB and lower internalizing problems at age 11 remained statistically significant (ATE = -0.013 SDQ points per additional min/day; 95% CI, -0.019 to -0.007; q < 0.001). No other pathway survived FDR correction, and other nominal or directionally suggestive estimates were interpreted as exploratory. CATE summaries and calibration tests provided limited evidence of reproducible heterogeneity. Conclusions:Accelerometer-derived waking movement behaviors at age 7 were associated with later SDQ problems scores in small and outcome-specific ways among children with overweight or obesity. Since the study is based on observational data and relies on measured-confounder assumptions, the findings should be interpreted cautiously, and as model-based estimates rather than definitive causal evidence.
Background/objective:During childhood and adolescence, functional connectivity undergoes distinct age-related maturational trajectories within and between networks. However, normative connectivity patterns across development remain insufficiently characterized. Methods:This study integrates voxel-wise degree centrality, degree centrality-derived seed-based connectivity, and network-level analyses to examine large-scale functional organization in a large multisite sample of 322 typically developing children (7-10.99 years) and adolescents (11-15 years) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I and II repositories. Results:Across all analytical levels, adolescents exhibited strengthened functional connectivity of subcortical hubs -the thalamus and the basal ganglia- with the Ventral Attention Network and Frontoparietal Network, emerging as the key hubs of network integration in adolescence. Children, by contrast, showed stronger functional connectivity within posterior sensory-perceptual nodes, particularly involving angular and occipital regions. Conclusions:Our findings delineate a developmental reorganization from sensory-anchored functional architectures in childhood toward increasingly integrated subcortical, attentional and frontoparietal systems in adolescence, supporting emerging capacities for cognitive-control and goal-directed behavior. This multilevel characterization offers a normative reference framework for interpreting variability in neurodevelopment and, ultimately, for identifying potential early deviations.
Despite evidence that non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) co-occurs with both emotional and behavioral problems in adolescence, little research has addressed their tripartite comorbidity. This study employed a person-centered approach to identify heterogeneous comorbidity patterns of NSSI with multiple emotional and behavioral problems, assess their stability and transitions, and explore associated risk and protective factors. A total of 3704 adolescents (57.1% males; Mage = 14.0, SD = 0.83) participated in a two-wave, nine months study. Three distinct patterns were identified, including one Low-symptoms and two comorbidity patterns, namely the Emotion-dominant, Low-NSSI Comorbidity and NSSI-dominant, High-symptoms Comorbidity. Across time, adolescents showed three directions of change as stability, symptoms improvement, and symptoms worsening. Moreover, adolescents with higher impulsivity and emotional dysregulation were more likely to be classified into the comorbidity patterns, whereas those with higher core self-evaluation were less likely to belong to the comorbidity patterns. Longitudinally, higher core self-evaluation reduced the likelihood of symptoms worsening. These findings reveal the heterogeneous and fluid nature of the tripartite comorbidity among NSSI, emotional problems, and behavioral problems, and point to the value of integrative interventions that target emotion regulation, impulse control, and core self-evaluation.
The increasing reliance on online platforms for health information establishes the need to understand people's engagement and attitude towards Online Health Information Seeking (OHIS). The current study aims to develop and validate a comprehensive multidimensional Online Health Information Seeking Scale (OHISS). Items were generated using both inductive and deductive approaches, followed by multiple content and face validity screenings that incorporated qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Data were collected in two stages: Study 1 (N=364) for item development and identifying the preliminary factor structure using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Study 2 (N=236) for validating the obtained factor structure using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Following the descriptive analysis, EFA using Promax rotation yielded a 20-item scale comprising three dimensions: Perceived Benefits and Engagement (11 items), Perceived Risks (6 items), and Social Influences on OHIS (3 items), collectively accounting for 51.1% of the total variance. This three-factor structure was subsequently confirmed through CFA with DWLS estimator (χ²(167)=271.55, χ²/df=1.63, CFI=0.986, TLI=0.984, RMSEA=0.052, SRMR=0.071, and GFI=0.978). The scale has good internal consistency as demonstrated by Cronbach's alpha (α=.833), McDonald's omega (⍵=.824), Spearman brown split-half (rxx=.886), Guttman's lambda (λ=.885) and test-retest (ICC2,1=.728) coefficient. Construct validity was supported by significant correlations with the Attitude towards Online Health Information and Information-Seeking subscales, as well as Average Variance explained, Composite Reliability, and the Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio. The scale demonstrated measurement invariance across male and female groups. The results conclude that the OHISS is a psychometrically standardized measure. The OHISS may be used by health practitioners to assess individuals' attitudes toward online health information, identify barriers in accessing digital health content, and support both health-related communication and research.
Objective:Adolescents exposed to war face heightened risk for psychological difficulties, yet outcomes vary widely, underscoring the need to identify neurocognitive mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability. Error monitoring, a core facet of cognitive control, may play a critical role in shaping responses to real-world stressors. This longitudinal study examined whether two error-related neural markers: error-related negativity (ERN) and mediofrontal induced theta oscillations, moderate the impact of war exposure on adolescents' psychological adjustment. Method:Fifty adolescents (ages 12-17) completed a laboratory flanker task with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings prior to the outbreak of war. One year later, during an escalation of armed conflict, 30 participants completed follow-up assessments of anxiety, perceived stress, and avoidant coping. Results:Moderation analyses revealed that induced theta, but not ERN, moderated the associations between objective exposure to war (number of missile alert sirens) and psychological outcomes. Specifically, higher levels of induced theta amplified the link between war exposure and both perceived stress and avoidant coping. No overall increases in mean anxiety levels were observed, highlighting the heterogeneity of adolescents' responses to conflict. By contrast, ERN, although established as a developmental biomarker of anxiety risk, did not predict stress-related outcomes under prolonged war conditions. Conclusions:These findings suggest that mediofrontal induced theta oscillations, reflecting dynamic and context-sensitive cognitive control processes, may serve as a neurobiological marker of vulnerability to maladaptive coping in real-world stress contexts. This study advances understanding of adolescent neurocognitive responses to threat and underscores the value of age-sensitive markers for identifying individuals at risk.
This paper addresses the critical challenge of achieving both accuracy and interpretability in anomaly detection within complex multidimensional time-series physical fitness data. We design and implement an innovative framework based on a Hierarchical Deep Q-Network (HDQN) that effectively processes and learns the inherent multi-scale and multi-granularity characteristics of physical fitness data. The introduction of a hierarchical structure enables the model to capture subtle patterns at different levels of abstraction, from low-level sensor fluctuations to high-level behavioral patterns. The Deep Q-Network component trains an agent that learns an optimal policy for identifying nuanced and complex anomalous data points or sequences, moving beyond traditional threshold-based methods. Evaluated on a real-world dataset comprising 300 participants monitored over 60 days with 8-dimensional physiological metrics, our HDQN framework achieved superior performance with an F1-score of 0.811, outperforming traditional machine learning methods (Isolation Forest: 0.611, One-Class SVM: 0.575), deep learning approaches (LSTM Autoencoder: 0.703), and non-hierarchical Deep Q-Networks (Flat-DQN: 0.743). The hierarchical architecture inherently supports interpretation of detected anomalies by localizing contributory factors within specific data dimensions or temporal segments. Robustness analysis demonstrated that HDQN maintained stable performance with only 3.82% F1-score degradation under 10% Gaussian noise, significantly better than baseline methods. This amalgamation of hierarchical representation learning and deep reinforcement learning significantly enhances the precision of anomaly detection, provides meaningful explanations for identified deviations, and offers a more comprehensive understanding of an individual's dynamic health status, paving the way for proactive and personalized health interventions in physical education and sports science contexts.
The general psychopathology factor (p factor) reflects a common liability underlying a broad range of emotional and behavioural problems in childhood. Although adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and temperament are established vulnerability dimensions, the mechanisms through which contextual and dispositional influences converge on general psychopathology remain unclear. Emotion regulation may represent a key transdiagnostic process linking early vulnerability to broad psychopathological risk. In a community sample of 241 children aged 6-12 years (57.7% girls), a path model examined associations among cumulative ACEs, temperament dimensions (negative affectivity, effortful control, behavioural inhibition, and surgency), emotion regulation processes (emotional lability and adaptive regulation), and the p factor. The model was estimated using WLSMV and adjusted for age and sex. The model explained 45% of the variance in the p factor. Emotion dysregulation was positively associated with general psychopathology (β = 0.510, p < .001), whereas adaptive regulation was not significant. ACEs (β = 0.201, p < .001), behavioural inhibition (β = 0.152, p = .003), and surgency (β = -.100, p = .023) showed direct associations with the p factor. Significant indirect effects through emotional lability were observed for adversity, negative affectivity, effortful control, behavioural inhibition, and surgency. Emotion dysregulation emerged as a key intermediary process linking adversity and temperament with broad psychopathology in middle childhood. These findings highlight emotion dysregulation as a clinically relevant transdiagnostic target that may help identify children vulnerable to broad psychopathology and guide early preventive interventions.
Context:Children with pediatric brain tumors (PBT) follow a unique clinical course as diverse morbidities may emerge during treatment and may even persist into survivorship. Effectively addressing their needs requires joined efforts from various providers in order to provide optimal support. Aims:To investigate the challenges and needs of providers working in pediatric oncology with PBT patients and survivors. Method:Providers with experience working with PBT patients were recruited throughout France to participate in a semi-structured interview. Data were analyzed following a reflexive thematic analysis method. Results:48 providers were interviewed, with a total of 46 participants included in the final study. Main challenges and needs were identified through 6 themes addressing the strained care environment, the triangular relationship with patients and their family, the complex needs of PBT patients, the emotional burden of care, the long journey of the care pathway, and coordination aspects. Main challenges encompassed poor communication among care teams, as well as patient-provider communication. Repeatedly facing poor prognoses and end-of-life situations were also identified as emotional challenges by providers. Participants also mentioned the necessity to decrease administrative task load, to increase the development of multidisciplinary care, and that training regarding specific PBT care needs is essential for providing optimal care. Conclusion:Pediatric neuro-oncology represents a unique and emotionally demanding field. Despite persistent communication and coordination challenges, findings highlight the critical importance of dedicated, well-coordinated multidisciplinary teams and long-term follow-up care to meet the complex needs of PBT patients and their families.
The death of a loved one is a common yet potentially traumatic event that can impact bereaved people's daily lives substantially. However, bereavement experiences have been investigated mostly with cross-sectional surveys, which provide limited information about bereaved people's everyday functioning. Intensive longitudinal methods (ILM) that collect self-reports once (daily diary; DD) or multiple times (ecological momentary assessment; EMA) a day allow researchers to examine momentary variations in bereaved people's everyday experiences. In this preregistered study, we aimed to systematically review studies that investigated the daily life of bereaved people using ILM. We searched for English peer-reviewed journal articles in Scopus, PubMed, and PsycINFO. After title, abstract, and full-text screening of 230 records, 18 articles were included in the final review. Fourteen studies used DD, and four used EMA designs. Studies examined four topics: a) the acceptability, feasibility, and reactivity effects of ILM among bereaved people, b) emotions and emotion regulation strategies, c) sleep quality, and d) romantic relationships. While the acceptability, feasibility, and reactivity effects of ILM were investigated by both DD and EMA studies, the latter three topics were examined only by DD studies. The studies show that DD and EMA are acceptable and feasible methods among bereaved people. DD studies showed that experiences of positive emotions and affectionate touch were related to better psychological outcomes, such as intimacy, while there were inconsistent associations between grief and sleep quality. ILMs appear to offer valuable yet largely untapped potential for capturing dynamic experiences of grief in bereavement research.
Background:The diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) can create stress for patients and their care partners (dyads). This study aimed to understand how dyadic coping (DC; how well couples feel they cope together in the face of a stressor) is related to the psychological health and overall well-being of couples coping with an MCI diagnosis. Additionally, this study attempted to characterize the impact of the HABIT Healthy Action to Benefit Independence & Thinking® program as a novel approach for improving DC. Methods:We analyzed DC in 213 people with MCI (pwMCI) and 205 care partners using the Dyadic Coping Inventory (Bodenmann, 2005). We compared DC scores to outcome measures of psychological health and well-being. We also analyzed DC in a subset of 135 pwMCI and 138 care partners with 3-month post HABIT DC scores to look for evidence of change. Results:pwMCI and care partner DC significantly affected their own perception of emotional functioning on other measures [quality of life (QoL) and mood for pwMCI and QoL, mood, anxiety, and sense of burden for care partners]. pwMCI DC also predicted care partner anxiety. In all cases, better DC predicted better emotional functioning. Care partner DC was also found to significantly relate to how they rated the pwMCI's cognitive and daily functioning as well as the pwMCI's adherence with a cognitive rehabilitation intervention. pwMCI and care partners with low baseline DC showed an increase in DC scores after completing HABIT, as did pwMCI in the medium baseline DC group. Care partners with medium baseline DC did not experience change post HABIT. High copers in both the pwMCI and care partner groups experienced a decline in DC, although scores remained average to above average. Conclusion:These results suggest that DC is an important part of a couple's psychological health and well-being in MCI. Care partner DC may be particularly important in how partners rate their loved one's cognitive and functional status and how they respond to cognitive rehabilitation intervention. The HABIT program may also represent a novel way to improve DC for low and medium coping couples.
The ability to perceive other people's emotions is essential for social interaction and communication. Emotion perception involves complex cognitive processes triggered by visual, auditory, or both stimuli. However, it remains unclear how people use auditory, visual, and combined audiovisual cues to evaluate emotional valence and arousal. To address this, we conducted an emotion perception task using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure frontoparietal brain responses. Seven emotion categories (Angry, Calm, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Sad, and Surprise) portrayed by actors were presented under three modality conditions: audio-only (AO), audiovisual (AV), and video-only (VO). We observed significant differences between AO, AV, and VO in the behavioral evaluation of emotional valence and arousal. In addition, AV showed significant activations for emotion categories in the frontoparietal network, but not for AO or VO. Moreover, brain-behavior relationships showed that higher oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) activities were associated with more positive valence ratings in the VO condition, but with stronger arousal ratings in the AV condition. These findings reveal that sensory modality affects brain activity (HbO) and behavior evaluation (valence and arousal ratings) in the perception of emotional dimensions.
