Social determinants of health (SDOH) are fundamental drivers of behavioral outcomes; however, their impact on adolescents’ brain age gap (BAG)—an integrated neural marker reflecting deviations from normative brain maturation and potential brain plasticity—remain poorly understood. Moreover, the biological mechanisms underlying the effects are unknown. We conducted a prospective cohort analysis using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (T1: n = 7330, 46.9

Filial piety has been shown to have a strong effect on the well-being of parents, but the findings have been inconsistent. This study aimed to clarify the mixed results by considering the role of parent-child discrepancies in filial piety. Specifically, we examined how congruence and incongruence in filial piety between parents and children are related to parental depressive symptoms. Data were obtained from 3922 eleven-year-old students and their fathers and mothers. Polynomial regression with response surface analysis was used to analyze the effects of parent-child discrepancies on depressive symptoms separately for reciprocal and authoritarian filial piety and separately for the four parent-child gender dyads. Approximately one-third of parents had congruent filial piety with their children, one-third had higher filial piety than their children did, and one-third had lower filial piety. When parent-child filial piety was congruent, greater reciprocal filial piety was associated with fewer parental depressive symptoms, while higher authoritarian filial piety was associated with more parental depressive symptoms. Moreover, parents with higher authoritarian filial piety than their children had more depressive symptoms than those with lower authoritarian filial piety. In addition, greater incongruence in authoritarian filial piety was associated with more parental depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that the type of filial piety, the level of congruent filial piety, and the direction and degree of incongruent filial piety between parents and children all influence parental depressive symptoms. The findings suggest focusing on the psychological needs of parents and reducing conflicts in filial relationships.

Modern large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning abilities, yet it remains unclear whether gains in reasoning ability are accompanied by corresponding improvements in metacognitive sensitivity, which refers to the ability to discriminate, on an item-by-item basis, between correct and incorrect inferences. Here we systematically evaluate this relationship in five experiments across 17 models spanning five LLM series. Although reasoning ability reliably scales with model size, metacognitive sensitivity does not; in some series, the smallest models even exhibit higher metacognitive sensitivity than their larger counterparts. This deviation from scaling law arises from the intermediate reasoning steps produced by large models: long and deterministic reasoning traces boost performance but hinder accurate self-evaluation. Furthermore, distilling the reasoning traces of large models into small models transfers the impairment in metacognitive sensitivity. These findings demonstrate that metacognitive sensitivity is not an automatic by-product of improved reasoning.

Background Despite demonstrating comparable early aptitude, girls often demonstrate lower long-term motivation in mathematics, manifesting an enduring gender paradox in STEM pathways. While prior research frequently attributes this gender divergence to differences in perceived competence, the role of domain-specific metacognitive bias—how accurately students monitor their own performance—remains largely unexplored. Integrating a metacognitive perspective with Expectancy-Value Theory, this study investigated whether early metacognitive bias initiate or/and sustain divergent motivational trajectories. We tracked 4,073 students in China from primary through early middle school, utilizing longitudinal growth modeling to examine the longitudinal interplay between metacognitive bias and a critical math motivation --math intrinsic value (interest) across genders. Results Analyses revealed a general downward trend in math interest for all students, but girls experienced a significantly steeper decline compared to boys. Crucially, the structural pathways initiating this decline were moderated by gender. For girls, early overconfidence provided a temporary boost to initial interest but ultimately predicted a significantly steeper subsequent motivational decline. Conversely, boys’ math interest remained largely independent of early metacognitive bias. Furthermore, the downstream pathway linking the math interest trajectory to later metacognitive bias was positively significant and gender-invariant, leading to sustainment of gender gap in motivational and metacognitive profile. Conclusions These findings suggest that gender disparities in STEM motivation may be better explained by domain-specific metacognitive biases than by global competence beliefs. For girls, early overconfidence presents a developmental trade-off that initiates a steeper motivational decline, whereas boys’ math interest remains anchored in actual achievement. Educational interventions should therefore move beyond merely enhancing self-evaluation accuracy and focus on decoupling intrinsic motivation from competence-related calibration to build long-term motivational resilience.

Testing studied information not only facilitates long-term consolidation of tested content but also enhances subsequent acquisition of new knowledge. These dual aspects of test-enhanced learning have predominantly been examined using verbal materials. In the present study, we extended this investigation to low-level visual features, in particular visual salience (luminance and color saturation), to determine whether interim testing can retrospectively consolidate and prospectively boost learning of continuous visual information. Across two experiments, participants studied five lists of scene images with varying levels of visual salience. Participants in the interim test group were tested on each list, while those in the interim restudy group restudied the prior list after studying Lists 1-4 and were tested only on List 5. A cumulative final test was administered after either a brief delay of 30 s (Experiment 1) or an extended delay of 2 days (preregistered Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that interim testing prospectively enhanced the precision, absolute accuracy, and relative accuracy of visual memory in the List 5 interim test without altering memory bias. Similar retrospective effects of interim testing were observed on the cumulative test. These findings demonstrate the generalizability of test-enhanced learning to the precision and accuracy of continuous visual memory for subtle features and provide support for reset-of-encoding and motivation-based accounts of test-enhanced learning while challenging semantic explanations. In addition, design-related insights into the replicability of memory fading are provided, and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Does overconfidence really confer adaptive benefits to children's learning? Through a tripartite investigation involving a preregistered replication (Study 1; N = 30, children aged 6-8 years), computational simulation (Study 2), and an experimental intervention (Study 3; N = 64, children aged 6-8 years), we first replicated previous findings that highly overconfident (HO) children exhibited less negative performance change across a memory task than their low-overconfidence (LO) counterparts. However, this pattern was driven by participant-selection bias and regression-to-the-mean effects rather than by adaptive benefits of childhood overconfidence. When experimentally manipulating children's overconfidence levels to eliminate these methodological drawbacks, the difference in performance changes between HO and LO children disappeared. These findings challenge an influential hypothesis about the adaptive nature of childhood overconfidence, underscore the risks of median-split designs with difference scores, highlight the necessity of causal experimental approaches in developmental research, and raise concerns about educational practices promoting positive illusions in children.

Previous studies on judgments of learning (JOLs) have primarily focused on how individuals integrate multiple cues to predict subsequent memory performance through experience-based and belief-based processes. However, few studies have examined the relative contributions of global prior beliefs about one's overall memory ability versus item-level processing experiences during JOL formation, possibly due to the absence of formal computational models that can characterize how these two sources of information are integrated. To address this issue, the Bayesian inference model for metamemory (BIM) introduced the parameter Pexp to quantify the reliance on item-level processing experience relative to global prior beliefs in forming JOLs. This study aimed to investigate whether the contribution of item-level processing experience versus global prior beliefs to JOLs (Pexp) is related to JOL resolution, defined as the accuracy in distinguishing between correctly and incorrectly remembered items. Experiments 1 and 2 employed longitudinal designs in which participants completed memory tasks twice, separated by either a one-month or a one-week interval. The results demonstrated individual consistency in Pexp over time, as well as a bidirectional relationship between Pexp and JOL resolution. Experiment 3 and a re-analysis of a previous meta-analytic dataset further revealed that the association between Pexp and JOL resolution persisted even in the presence of metamemory illusion, and was observed across datasets involving different material types and task formats. These findings highlight the complex interplay between JOL resolution and the process underlying JOL formation, and providing new insights into the cognitive mechanisms of metamemory.

Metacognitive monitoring, students’ evaluations of their own performance, is central to self-regulated learning but often misaligns with actual performance. While situational factors have been studied extensively, less is known about how learning-related beliefs and motivational dispositions—hereafter termed learning-related attributes—relate to individual differences in metacognitive monitoring. This study examined how these learning attributes, alongside cognitive and demographic variables, were associated with students’ general confidence and resolution. Data were drawn from 3946 Chinese sixth-grade students who completed academic assessments in the verbal and mathematical domains, provided post-test performance estimates, and completed questionnaires measuring their learning attributes and demographic characteristics. We conducted multilevel analyses with a random-intercept–random-slope specification and identified several learning attributes as significant predictors of metacognitive monitoring, primarily in terms of general confidence. Adding learning-related attributes after the cognitive and demographic blocks increased marginal R2, primarily for general confidence; this order-dependent increment was not interpreted as evidence that the block is inherently more important. The findings extend existing accounts of metacognitive monitoring by suggesting that students’ general confidence is associated with non-cognitive learning attributes—and may thus be partly separable from cognitive ability—whereas their resolution is comparatively less strongly associated with these attributes. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.

Repeatedly asking individuals to answer the same question can increase their confidence in response accuracy, even when it does not improve accuracy per se. Fiechter and Kornell (2021) proposed two theoretical explanations to account for this repeated questioning effect on confidence, namely a fluency hypothesis and a response-repetition hypothesis. Their results supported the response-repetition hypothesis by showing a mediation effect of response repetition in the relationship between repeated questioning and confidence. Meanwhile, their results did not support the fluency hypothesis by showing no mediation effect of trial-completion times. However, fluency can be defined in multiple ways. To further test the fluency hypothesis, the current study used the same experimental procedure as in Fiechter and Kornell (2021), but employed first-key latency as a measure of retrieval fluency. The results showed a reliable mediation effect of first-key latency. Consistent with Fiechter and Kornell (2021), there was also a reliable mediation effect of response repetition. The documented findings support the fluency and response-repetition hypotheses to jointly account for the repeated questioning effect.

Epistemic curiosity, defined as the desire for knowledge, is commonly viewed as an intrinsic, non-instrumental (i.e., not directed toward immediate tangible benefits) drive to seek information. Prior research has shown that epistemic curiosity is influenced by subjective confidence – the perceived certainty individuals hold regarding their knowledge or decisions. Recent evidence suggests that environmental structure determines whether curiosity is driven by low- or medium-confidence stimuli. However, the role of external incentives in shaping the curiosity-confidence relationship remains poorly understood. To address this gap, the present study directly compared curiosity and subsequent information-seeking behaviors across conditions with and without performance-based extrinsic incentives. In Experiment 1 (no incentives), participants shifted from randomly selecting questions to focusing on medium-confidence questions as learning opportunities increased. In contrast, in Experiment 2 (with incentives), participants consistently prioritized low-confidence questions to maximize their knowledge and test scores. These findings demonstrate that extrinsic incentives significantly alter individuals’ information-seeking strategies, underscoring the importance of integrating both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to optimize learning. Our results suggest that a full understanding of the curiosity-confidence link requires explicit separation between studies conducted with and without extrinsic rewards, a distinction often overlooked in prior research.

Parental educational anxiety, which may negatively affect parenting and child development, has become increasingly prevalent. However, its heterogeneity and stability remain unclear. This study explored distinct patterns of parental educational anxiety and their changes during children's transition from middle to high school, a period of heightened academic pressure. Based on two-wave data from 1333 fathers and 1590 mothers, four profiles—Low, Moderate-low, Moderate-high, and High Educational Anxiety—were identified for both fathers and mothers at each time point, with substantial transitions across profiles during this period. Moreover, compared to fathers, mothers reported significantly higher educational anxiety at both time points, had higher frequency in profiles with higher educational anxiety, and showed lower stability in profile transitions. Additionally, during this period, parents with constant-low or decreasing educational anxiety reported less psychological control, and parents with constant-low educational anxiety reported more autonomy support than those with other transition patterns. Notably, fathers with low or decreasing educational anxiety reported higher behavioral control, whereas mothers in these groups reported lower behavioral control. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of parental educational anxiety, highlighting its relevance for parenting practices and offering implications for targeted interventions.

Students’ expectancy-value beliefs often decline as they move into adolescence, yet less is known about whether different motivational components develop in tandem across academic domains and whether students follow distinct cross-domain trajectories during the transition to middle school. Grounded in situated expectancy-value theory, this longitudinal study examined mean-level change and heterogeneity in Chinese adolescents’ competence self-concept, intrinsic value, and utility value in mathematics and reading from Grade 4 to Grade 8 (N = 1,134). We estimated parallel-process growth models and growth mixture models to capture domain-specific developmental trends and person-oriented trajectory patterns. At the mean level, all motivational beliefs declined over time except mathematics utility value, with the magnitude and shape of change varying by domain and component. Person-oriented analyses identified two trajectory classes: a high-initial/high-change/weakly differentiated class (84.39%) and a low-initial/moderate-change/strongly differentiated class (15.61%). Gender differences emerged in initial levels and rates of change within specific domains, but gender did not significantly predict class membership. These findings suggest that motivational development during the transition to middle school is not a uniform decline, but a differentiated process shaped by academic domain, motivational component, and students’ initial motivational profiles. By situating expectancy-value development within the Chinese school transition context, this study extends situated expectancy-value theory by illustrating how sociocultural-educational conditions and developmental transitions jointly shape the co-development of competence beliefs and task values across academic domains.

Taking photos is a ubiquitous everyday activity, woven into social life from classrooms and meetings to travel and social gatherings. Photography is known to impair memory for photographed experiences, a phenomenon termed the photo-taking impairment effect (PTIE), but prior work has focused solely on the photographer. The present research introduces and tests a social extension of this phenomenon: One person's photo-taking activity can impair a nearby companion's memory for the same event, which we term the companion-PTIE. Across four experiments spanning controlled laboratory tasks and a simulated art exhibition, we show that photo-taking reduces a nonphotographing companion's subsequent memory to a degree comparable to taking photos oneself. Mechanistically, we dissociate cognitive offloading from attentional disengagement. Instructing photographers to delete each photo immediately, thereby removing any expectation of later access, left both the self- and companion-PTIE unchanged, arguing against cognitive offloading as a primary driver. By contrast, preventing a nonphotographing companion from seeing the act of photo-taking with an opaque barrier abolished the companion-PTIE, implicating attentional disengagement as the causal pathway. Robust Bayesian meta-analyses estimated a reliable companion-PTIE with no meaningful difference in magnitude from the self-PTIE. These findings reframe the PTIE as a social phenomenon: The memory costs of ubiquitous photography extend beyond photographers to copresent others, revealing how everyday technologies reshape collective memory for shared experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research has extensively examined how various factors (e.g., font size, relatedness) influence Judgments of Learning (JOLs), yet comparatively little is known about whether phonological factors, such as rhyme, similarly influence metacognitive judgments. Across four experiments, the present study investigated how rhyme affects memory performance, JOLs, and metacognitive accuracy, and explored the underlying mechanisms involved. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that rhyme yielded reliable mnemonic benefits only when study involved reading aloud, emphasizing the role of auditory encoding in enhancing memory. Moreover, participants consistently expected higher recall for rhyming than non-rhyming pairs. Experiment 3 confirmed that participants explicitly believed rhyme enhances memorability. Experiment 4 further showed that these beliefs partially mediated rhyme effects on JOLs and that learners updated these beliefs based on study experience. Importantly, despite context-dependent mnemonic benefits, rhyme reduced relative metacognitive accuracy, diminishing item-level discrimination between remembered and forgotten materials. Together, these findings suggest that phonological cues such as rhyme robustly shape metacognitive judgments while sometimes compromising relative accuracy. Practically, instructors and learners should use rhyme judiciously and combine it with more diagnostic cues to support both learning and monitoring accuracy.

Although reciprocal relationships among the educational expectations of fathers, mothers, and adolescents have been theoretically proposed, the dynamic, gender differential, and asymmetric nature of these reciprocal relationships within family systems across adolescence remains unclear. In the current study, a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) was used to examine the reciprocal relationships among the educational expectations of fathers, mothers, and adolescents from 4th grade to 9th grade and the moderating effect of adolescents’ gender was considered. A total of 3403 Chinese students (1628 girls; initial Mage = 9.85 years, SDage = 0.37) and their fathers and mothers were followed from 4th to 9th grade across six waves at one-year intervals. The results indicated significant longitudinal reciprocal relationships among the educational expectations of fathers, mothers, and adolescents. The results of dynamic analysis indicated that father-to-adolescent and mother-to-father effects increased over time. In terms of asymmetries in parent-adolescent reciprocal effects, the results revealed that during the transition from 4th grade to 5th grade, adolescents’ predictive effect on their fathers’ educational expectations was significantly stronger than fathers’ predictive effect on adolescents’ educational expectations. The results of differences in parental-gender revealed that the predictive effect of mothers on adolescents’ educational expectations was significantly stronger than the predictive effect of fathers during the transition from 4th grade to 5th grade. In addition, an adolescent-gender difference was observed in the adolescent-to-parent effects from 4th grade to 9th grade, with daughters having a stronger predictive effect on their parents’ expectations than sons. This study reveals that within family systems, the educational expectations of fathers, mothers, and adolescents represent a dynamic process of mutual interaction, adaptation, and adjustment across different academic stages.

The transition to adolescence is a critical period for the onset of depressive symptoms, making it crucial to examine the risk factors and consequences related to their development and maintenance. Although previous studies have suggested a negative relationship between self-efficacy and depressive symptoms, it is unclear how these two variables evolve together over time during the transition to adolescence and how these relationships vary dynamically within-person and between-person. This study used a latent curve model with structured residuals to examine whether a bidirectional relationship involving academic, social, and emotional self-efficacy and depressive symptoms exists during the transition to adolescence. A sample of 3748 Chinese early adolescents (48.2

Background: Urban green space exposure (GSE) benefits mental health and cognition; however, the underlying neural mechanisms in children, a population especially sensitive to environmental influences, remain unclear. Methods: This cross-sectional study analyzed baseline data from the ABCD study, involving 9-10-year-old children across 21 U.S. sites. GSE included nine indicators, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and tree canopy. Brain structure (BS) and white matter microstructure (WMM) were assessed using MRI. Group Factor Analysis (GFA) was conducted to identify patterns linking GSE with brain metrics. Mental health was evaluated via internalizing and externalizing T-scores, while cognition was assessed using fluid and crystallized intelligence scores. Results: The study included 8430 participants with BS data and 8161 with WMM data. BSGFA 1, associated with higher GSE, positively correlated with surface area, cortical volume, subcortical volume, and most cortical thickness indicators. It predicted lower internalizing (beta = -0.08, p < 0.001, 95 % CI, -0.13 to -0.04) and externalizing problems (beta = -0.10, p < 0.001, 95 % CI, -0.15 to -0.06), and greater crystallized intelligence (beta = 0.12, p < 0.001, 95 % CI, 0.08 to 0.17). WGFA 1, linked to greater GSE, was positively correlated with fractional anisotropy and negatively with mean diffusivity. It predicted lower externalizing problems (beta = -0.04, p = 0.01, 95 % CI, -0.06 to -0.01) and improved fluid (beta = 0.14, p < 0.001, 95 % CI, 0.11 to 0.17) and crystallized intelligence (beta = 0.04, p = 0.01, 95 % CI, 0.01 to 0.06). Forest-related WGFA 2 was negatively associated with fractional anisotropy and fluid intelligence (beta = -0.10, p < 0.001, 95 % CI, -0.15 to -0.06). Conclusions: This study highlights the benefits of urban GSE on children's brain development, mental health, and cognitive function. Notably, forest-related GSE exhibited distinct effects compared to urban green spaces, suggesting that the type and characteristics of green spaces matter significantly. Future research should investigate the long-term impacts of different types of GSE to inform urban designs supporting mental health and cognition.

An emerging body of studies has observed that soliciting judgments of learning (JOLs) reactively changes recall or recognition of specific study items, a phenomenon known as the reactivity effect of JOLs on memory. The current studies explored whether soliciting JOLs reactively affects continuous color memory and whether it affects memory accessibility or memory precision (or a combination of both). Experiment 1 employed a classical continuous color memory task in which participants studied animal images in different colors and then reconstructed the colors on a continuous matching wheel, and found that making JOLs reactively enhanced accessibility but impaired precision of memory. Experiment 2 replicated these dissociated reactivity effects and further found that articulatory suppression successfully eliminated these effects, suggesting that making JOLs reactively alters color memory through prompting individuals to favor the verbal-labeling strategy for encoding and retrieving visual information. The findings support the strategy-change theory to account for the JOL reactivity effect.

As one of the core values of Chinese culture, filial piety is an important value norm for maintaining parent-child relationships and supporting family functioning, which has an important impact on the well-being of children. The value of filial piety may be conflictive between the parents and children in a family, and its psychological influences on children are unknown. Given that depression is a prominent and frequent emotional problem in adolescents and that family pressure stemming from the parent-child relationship is a major risk factor for adolescent depression, this study aimed at exploring the relationship between parent-child value conflict in filial piety and adolescent depression. Given that adolescents tend to take their same-sex parents as role models, parent and child gender differences were also considered. Longitudinal data from 3321 adolescents (1692 boys, 1629 girls ; average age = 10.87 +/- 0.36 years) and their fathers and mothers were collected when the adolescents were in 5th and 7th grades. In the first wave, after providing informed consent, both the adolescents and their fathers and mothers reported their concept of filial piety. In the second wave, both adolescents and their fathers and mothers reported their levels of depression. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to explore the relationship between parent-child value conflict in filial piety and adolescent depression . SPSS 22.0, Mplus 7.1, and MATLAB 2022b were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that (1) when parents' and adolescents' filial piety were not conflictive, the levels of fathers' and sons' reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety, mothers' and sons' reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety, fathers' and daughters' reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety and mothers' and daughters' reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety did not significantly predict adolescents' depression. (2) When parents' and adolescents' filial piety were conflictive, the direction of value conflict between fathers' and sons' reciprocal filial piety predicted the sons' depression. The direction of value conflict between fathers' and daughters' reciprocal filial piety, fathers' and daughters' authoritarian filial piety, mothers' and daughters' reciprocal filial piety and mothers' and daughters' authoritarian filial piety predicted the daughters ' depression. Moreover, the degree of value conflict between fathers' and sons' authoritarian filial piety predicted sons' depression. The degree of value conflict between fathers' and daughters' authoritarian filial piety, mothers' and daughters' reciprocal filial piety and mothers' and daughters' authoritarian filial piety predicted the daughters' depression. The results indicate that when parents and children reach a consensus on filial piety, the type and level of filial piety are not related to adolescents' depression, but the value conflict between fathers' and sons' filial piety and parents' and daughters' filial piety may induce adolescents' depression.

Parents’ anxiety about their children’s education has been common in recent years and has a negative effect on children. This study aimed to clarify this construct and develop the Parental Anxiety about Children’s Education Scale (PACES) to lay a foundation for future research. In Study 1, we developed a scale based on 465 parents that included 20 items and four dimensions of anxiety in relation to children’s academic performance, family educational resources, the quality of school education, and the educational macroenvironment. In Study 2, we used data from 4566 parents to test the reliability and validity of the final scale via item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, consistency reliability, measurement invariance, and validity evidence on the basis of relations. We concluded that the scale is a promising new measure for assessing parental anxiety about children’s education for parents of both primary and secondary school students.