Going beyond video game consumption when considering Internet Gaming Disorder.

BACKGROUND: Recognizing the crucial importance of understanding the impact of video games on health in today's gaming-dominated world, our study aimed to investigate the relationship between gaming time and Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). Despite the widespread assumption that a connection exists between both, previous studies have revealed highly variable associations, highlighting significant weaknesses in establishing a robust link. METHODS: To unravel this complex relationship, we recruited two independent samples of League of Legends players. We combined the collection of self-reported and actual gameplay data, together with assessments of mental health, personality traits, and cognitive abilities. RESULTS: Surprisingly, none of the gaming variables demonstrated a robust and stable association with IGD, regardless of whether players spent less than or more than 30 hours per week gaming-a threshold suggested by the American Psychiatric Association as a potential indicator of disordered gaming. Notably, mental health factors, such as anxiety, depression and ADHD, emerged as the most influential predictors of IGD. CONCLUSION: These findings, replicated across two independent samples, challenge the prevailing belief that limiting screen time alone effectively combats IGD. Instead, mental health factors play a crucial role in mitigating risks associated with gaming. Policies focusing solely on restricting screen time are insufficient in reducing the prevalence or symptoms of IGD. Rather, a comprehensive approach that considers mental health and key personality traits must be adopted to safeguard the well-being of individuals engaged in gaming.

Eye-tracking evidence of a relationship between attentional bias for emotional faces and depression severity in patients with treatment-resistant depression.

In a retrospective study, 54 patients with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (TRD) completed a free-viewing task in which they had to freely explore pairs of faces (an emotional face (happy or sad) opposite to a neutral face). Attentional bias to emotional faces was calculated for early and sustained attention. We observed a significant negative correlation between depression severity as measured by the 10-item Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and sustained attention to happy faces. In addition, we observed a positive correlation between depression severity and sustained attention to sad faces. No significant correlation between depression severity and early attention was found for either happy or sad faces. Although conclusions from the current study are limited by the lack of comparison with a control group, the eye-tracking free-viewing task appears to be a relevant, accessible and easy-to-use tool for measuring depression severity through emotional attentional biases in TRD.

[Screens and adolescence: what issues for the Z generation?] / Écrans et adolescence : quels enjeux pour la Génération Z ?

Digital media and screens are ubiquitous in the daily lives of adolescents. The screen-addicted portrait of young people has gained public attention, and health professionals are often consulted about the impact of screen use on teenagers' physical and mental health. Scientific evidence suggests that screen use is associated with risks and benefits that need to be weighed up in a nuanced way. This paper takes a critical look at the issue of screen time and at the models for understanding a problematic screen use. These considerations underline the importance of adopting a contextual understanding of screen use in adolescence.

Les médias numériques sont omniprésents dans la vie quotidienne des adolescent-es. La figure de l'adolescent-e « addict-e ¼ aux écrans est devenue un sujet de préoccupation dans l'opinion publique et il est fréquent que les professionnel-les de la santé soient sollicité-es pour répondre aux interrogations sur l'impact de l'utilisation des écrans sur la santé mentale et physique des jeunes. Les données scientifiques indiquent que l'usage des écrans est associé à des risques et des bénéfices qu'il s'agit d'évaluer de manière nuancée. Dans cet article, nous discutons en particulier et de façon critique du temps d'écran et des modèles de compréhension de l'usage problématique de celui-ci. Ces réflexions nous amènent à souligner l'importance d'adopter une compréhension contextualisée de cet usage à l'adolescence.

In search of better practice in executive functions assessment: Methodological issues and potential solutions.

The multicomponent nature of executive functions (EF) has long been recognized, pushing for a better understanding of both the commonalities and the diversity between EF components. Despite the advances made, the operationalization of performance in EF tasks remains rather heterogeneous, and the structure of EF as modeled by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) is still a topic of debate (Karr et al., 2018). The present work demonstrates these two issues are related, showing how different operationalizations in task-based performance indicators impact the resulting models of EF structure with CFA. Using bootstrapped data from 294 children (8-12 years old) and nine EF tasks (tapping inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility), we first show improved model convergence and acceptance when operationalizing EF through single tasks' scores (e.g., incongruent trials, Flanker task) relative to difference scores (e.g., incongruent minus congruent trials, Flanker task). Furthermore, we show that response times exhibit poor model convergence and acceptance compared not only to accuracy but also drift rate. The latter, a well-known indicator in drift-diffusion models, is found to present the best trade-off between convergence and acceptance to model EF with CFA. Finally, we examine how various operationalizations of performance in EF tasks impact CFA model comparison in the assessment of EF structure and discuss the theoretical foundations for these results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Not screens but their context of use impact cognitive development: a commentary on Yang et al. (2023).

There have been extensive debates about the impact of the digital transformation on human development. A recent study by Yang and colleagues highlights the importance of considering context of use, beyond amount of use. In their study, children from parents who reported having TV-on during family meals when they were 2 years old showed poorer cognitive development at age 3.5 as compared to those with TV-off during family meals. This highlights the importance of considering the context of use when studying effect of screen use. While Yang et al. discuss the distracting effects of TV-on sensory processing, we propose an alternative - and not mutually exclusive - interpretation based on TV induced deprivation of family interactions. On a more practical note, this should encourage to preserve screen-free time, especially during structured time such as family meals, in order to maintain family interactions known to be critical to development.

Attentional modulation as a mechanism for enhanced facial emotion discrimination: The case of action video game players.

Action video game players (AVGPs) outperform nonvideo game players (NVGPs) on a wide variety of attentional tasks, mediating benefits to perceptual and cognitive decision processes. A key issue in the literature is the extent to which such benefits transfer beyond cognition. Using steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) as a neural measure of attentional resource allocation, we investigated whether the attentional benefit of AVGPs generalizes to the processing of rapidly presented facial emotions. AVGPs (n = 36) and NVGPs (n = 32) performed a novel, attention-demanding emotion discrimination task, requiring the identification of a target emotion in one of two laterally presented streams of emotional faces. The emotional faces flickered at either 2.0 Hz or 2.5 Hz. AVGPs outperformed NVGPs at detecting the target emotions regardless of the type of emotion. Correspondingly, attentional modulation of the SSVEP at parieto-occipital recording sites was larger in AVGPs compared with NVGPs. This difference appeared to be driven by a larger response to attended information, as opposed to a reduced response to irrelevant distractor information. Exploratory analyses confirmed that this novel paradigm elicited the expected pattern of event-related potentials associated with target detection and error processing. These components did not, however, differ between groups. Overall, the results indicate enhanced discrimination of facial emotions in AVGPs arising from enhanced attentional processing of emotional information. This presents evidence for the attentional advantage of AVGPs to extend beyond perceptual and cognitive processes.

A Single Session of Bifrontal tDCS Can Improve Facial Emotion Recognition in Major Depressive Disorder: An Exploratory Pilot Study.

Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging studies indicate that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in both depressive symptoms and emotional processing. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulations (tDCS) applied over the DLPFCs have held the promise to alleviate the symptoms in patients with MDD, but the effect on emotional processing in the patients is unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of a single session of tDCS over the DLPFCs on the emotional processing in patients with treatment-resistant MDD. In a randomized sham-controlled study, 35 patients received a single 30 min session of either active (2 mA, n = 18) or sham tDCS (n = 17). The anode was placed over the left and the cathode over the right DLPFC. Emotional processing accuracy was measured by a facial emotion recognition (FER) task. We observed an overall improvement in FER performance after the active tDCS, but not the sham tDCS. These exploratory results suggest that a single session of tDCS over the DLPFCs may improve FER in MDD, a crucial function of social cognition. Further studies are needed to investigate whether this acute improvement of FER in response to a single tDCS session could translate into clinical benefits or predict remission following repeated sessions of stimulation.

Ten Sessions of 30 Min tDCS over 5 Days to Achieve Remission in Depression: A Randomized Pilot Study.

Although transcranial Direct Current stimulation (tDCS) shows promise in the treatment of major depressive episodes, the optimal parameters and population to target remain unclear. We investigated the clinical interest of a 10 session tDCS regimen in patients with mild to severe treatment-resistant depression, in a pilot double-blind, randomized sham-controlled trial. tDCS was delivered over 5 consecutive days (two 30 min sessions per day separated by at least 2 h, 2 mA). The anode and cathode were placed over the left and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, respectively. One month after tDCS, we observed significantly fewer patients who achieved remission (MADRS10 < 10) in the sham group (0 out of 18 patients) than in the active group (5 out of 21 patients; p = 0.05). However, no significant difference was observed between the groups regarding the mean scores of severity changes throughout the study period. Bifrontal add-on tDCS delivered twice per day over 5 days, in combination with antidepressant medication, can be a safe and suitable approach to achieve remission in patients with mild to severe treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. However, in regards to the pilot nature and limitations of the present study, further studies are needed before any frank conclusions can be made regarding the use of tDCS with the proposed parameters in clinical settings.

The Indirect Role of Executive Functions on the Relationship between Cardiorespiratory Fitness and School Grades.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to investigate the indirect effects of cardiorespiratory fitness on scholastic performance through executive functions. More precisely, we examined the contribution of the different domains of executive functions, and whether this relationship was specific to certain school topics. METHODS: Children 8-12 yr old completed nine cognitive tests and the multistage fitness test. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the role of different domains of executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and a common factor to all tasks) in the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and school grades in three domains: (i) mathematics; (ii) grammar, spelling, and vocabulary; and (iii) text comprehension and expression. Covariate analyses included age and socioeconomic status. RESULTS: The results of this study showed that an indirect effect of the various domains of executive functions explained, in part, the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and (i) mathematics (ß = 0.12, SE = 0.03, P < 0.001), and between cardiorespiratory fitness and (ii) grammar, spelling, and vocabulary (ß = 0.12, SE = 0.03, P < 0.001). No relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and (iii) text comprehension and expression was observed. Although executive functions correlated with school grades, cognitive flexibility drove the indirect effect when all executive function domains were simultaneously taken into account. CONCLUSIONS: These results show the role that executive functions play in understanding the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and scholastic performance. Importantly, not all executive function domains contributed equally because cognitive flexibility played a leading role in this wide age range. Furthermore, the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and scholastic performance was strongest for mathematics and for low-level language topics but nonsignificant for higher-level language topics, providing a more modulated view of the effect of cardiorespiratory fitness on language.

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Action video game players (AVGPs) display superior performance in various aspects of cognition, especially in perception and top-down attention. The existing literature has examined these performance almost exclusively with stimuli and tasks devoid of any emotional content. Thus, whether the superior performance documented in the cognitive domain extend to the emotional domain remains unknown. We present 2 cross-sectional studies contrasting AVGPs and nonvideo game players (NVGPs) in their ability to perceive facial emotions. Under an enhanced perception account, AVGPs should outperform NVGPs when processing facial emotion. Yet, alternative accounts exist. For instance, under some social accounts, exposure to action video games, which often contain violence, may lower sensitivity for empathy-related expressions such as sadness, happiness, and pain while increasing sensitivity to aggression signals. Finally, under the view that AVGPs excel at learning new tasks (in contrast to the view that they are immediately better at all new tasks), the use of stimuli that participants are already experts at predicts little to no group differences. Study 1 uses drift-diffusion modeling and establishes that AVGPs are comparable to NVGPs in every decision-making stage mediating the discrimination of facial emotions, despite showing group difference in aggressive behavior. Study 2 uses the reverse inference technique to assess the mental representation of facial emotion expressions, and again documents no group differences. These results indicate that the perceptual benefits associated with action video game play do not extend to overlearned stimuli such as facial emotion, and rather indicate equivalent facial emotion skills in AVGPs and NVGPs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Altering perception: the case of action video gaming.

The view that better perceptual skills can open the door to greater cognitive fitness calls for identifying interventions that enhance perception. We review here the impact of action video game play on perception. Cross-sectional studies indicate that action video game players outperform non-players by about ¾ of a standard deviation across all perceptual skills. More specifically, tasks relying on the dorsal system and peripheral vision appear most enhanced in action video game players. Despite their crucial role for establishing a causal role of action video game play on perception, the paucity of intervention studies limits interpretation. Yet, the existing dose-response curve already calls for at least 20 hours of play for significant effects to emerge. When considering the mechanisms at play, we propose that attentional control may mediate the noted perceptual benefits by increasing the quality of the perceptual information gathered, facilitating in turn the development of better perceptual templates.

Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills.

The ubiquity of video games in today's society has led to significant interest in their impact on the brain and behavior and in the possibility of harnessing games for good. The present meta-analyses focus on one specific game genre that has been of particular interest to the scientific community-action video games, and cover the period 2000-2015. To assess the long-lasting impact of action video game play on various domains of cognition, we first consider cross-sectional studies that inform us about the cognitive profile of habitual action video game players, and document a positive average effect of about half a standard deviation (g = 0.55). We then turn to long-term intervention studies that inform us about the possibility of causally inducing changes in cognition via playing action video games, and show a smaller average effect of a third of a standard deviation (g = 0.34). Because only intervention studies using other commercially available video game genres as controls were included, this latter result highlights the fact that not all games equally impact cognition. Moderator analyses indicated that action video game play robustly enhances the domains of top-down attention and spatial cognition, with encouraging signs for perception. Publication bias remains, however, a threat with average effects in the published literature estimated to be 30% larger than in the full literature. As a result, we encourage the field to conduct larger cohort studies and more intervention studies, especially those with more than 30 hours of training. (PsycINFO Database Record

Egocentric fairness perception: emotional reactions and individual differences in overt responses.

Extensive research documents the existence of egocentric biases in the perception and application of justice norms. The origin of these biases remains poorly understood. We investigated both inter- and intra-individual differences in egocentric justice biases. Participants played an ultimatum game presumably with different anonymous players (simulated by a computer) in which they contributed differentially to the joint production of the initial endowment. We examined how contributions (low vs. high) affect proposers' offers and responders' acceptance decisions, as well as their fairness judgments and their emotional reactions to different types of offers (equal, equitable, unfair, and hyperfair). An egocentric bias in proposers' offers (indicating more flexible preferences) was found only in individualists and not in prosocials, suggesting differences in the motivations (or cognitions) underlying their choice of justice norms. Responders also showed egocentric biases in their judgments of fairness and in their emotional reactions to equal and equitable offers, but not in their acceptance decisions. Such dissociation might suggest that some form of emotion regulation occurred. Responders may evaluate offers on valence dimensions (e.g., goal conduciveness/outcome favorability and norm compatibility/justice) that are multiply interacting and potentially conflicting. The individual's acceptance/rejection decision reflects the relative weight attributed to competing appraisals. For this overt behavioral decision, the (personal) appraisal of outcome favorability that drives (analytical) acceptance of goal-conducive outcome seems to be stronger than the (social) appraisal of outcome fairness, which may trigger covert (emotional) rejection of offers that are incompatible with justice norms. Our data show that the emotional reaction patterns provide a more fine-grained readout of the overall evaluation of the proposer's action, the underlying emotional dynamics of which may, in real life, strongly determine future interactions with specific partners. Further research on the relationship between emotion and behavior in economic games is needed to explore potential dissociations and long-term effects.

Human amygdala response to dynamic facial expressions of positive and negative surprise.

Although brain imaging evidence accumulates to suggest that the amygdala plays a key role in the processing of novel stimuli, only little is known about its role in processing expressed novelty conveyed by surprised faces, and even less about possible interactive encoding of novelty and valence. Those investigations that have already probed human amygdala involvement in the processing of surprised facial expressions either used static pictures displaying negative surprise (as contained in fear) or "neutral" surprise, and manipulated valence by contextually priming or subjectively associating static surprise with either negative or positive information. Therefore, it still remains unresolved how the human amygdala differentially processes dynamic surprised facial expressions displaying either positive or negative surprise. Here, we created new artificial dynamic 3-dimensional facial expressions conveying surprise with an intrinsic positive (wonderment) or negative (fear) connotation, but also intrinsic positive (joy) or negative (anxiety) emotions not containing any surprise, in addition to neutral facial displays either containing ("typical surprise" expression) or not containing ("neutral") surprise. Results showed heightened amygdala activity to faces containing positive (vs. negative) surprise, which may either correspond to a specific wonderment effect as such, or to the computation of a negative expected value prediction error. Findings are discussed in the light of data obtained from a closely matched nonsocial lottery task, which revealed overlapping activity within the left amygdala to unexpected positive outcomes.

Disrupting pre-SMA activity impairs facial happiness recognition: an event-related TMS study.

It has been suggested that the left pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) could be implicated in facial emotion expression and recognition, especially for laughter/happiness. To test this hypothesis, in a single-blind, randomized crossover study, we investigated the impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on performances of 18 healthy participants during a facial emotion recognition task. Using a neuronavigation system based on T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging of each participant, TMS (5 pulses, 10 Hz) was delivered over the pre-SMA or the vertex (control condition) in an event-related fashion after the presentation of happy, fear, and angry faces. Compared with performances during vertex stimulation, we observed that TMS applied over the left pre-SMA specifically disrupted facial happiness recognition (FHR). No difference was observed between the 2 conditions neither for fear and anger recognition nor for reaction times (RT). Thus, interfering with pre-SMA activity with event-related TMS after stimulus presentation produced a selective impairment in the recognition of happy faces. These findings provide new insights into the functional implication of the pre-SMA in FHR, which may rely on the mirror properties of pre-SMA neurons.

Effects of social context and predictive relevance on action outcome monitoring.

Outcome monitoring is crucial for subsequent adjustments in behavior and is associated with a specific electrophysiological response, the feedback-related negativity (FRN). Besides feedback generated by one's own action, the performance of others may also be relevant for oneself, and the observation of outcomes for others' actions elicits an observer FRN (oFRN). To test how these components are influenced by social setting and predictive value of feedback information, we compared event-related potentials, as well as their topographies and neural generators, for performance feedback generated by oneself and others in a cooperative versus competitive context. Our results show that (1) the predictive relevance of outcomes is crucial to elicit an FRN in both players and observers, (2) cooperation increases FRN and P300 amplitudes, especially in individuals with high traits of perspective taking, and (3) contrary to previous findings on gambling outcomes, oFRN components are generated for both cooperating and competing observers, but with smaller amplitudes in the latter. Neural source estimation revealed medial prefrontal activity for both FRN and oFRN, but with additional generators for the oFRN in the dorsolateral and ventral prefrontal cortex, as well as the temporoparietal junction. We conclude that the latter set of brain regions could mediate social influences on action monitoring by representing agency and social relevance of outcomes and are, therefore, recruited in addition to shared prediction error signals generated in medial frontal areas during action outcome observation.

A comparison of facial emotion processing in neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Patients suffering from various neurological and psychiatric disorders show different levels of facial emotion recognition (FER) impairment, sometimes from the early phases of the disease. Investigating the relative severity of deficits in FER across different clinical and high-risk populations has potential implications for the diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, and could also allow us to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotion perception itself. To investigate the role of the dopaminergic system and of the frontotemporal network in FER, we reanalyzed and compared data from four of our previous studies investigating FER performance in patients with frontotemporal dysfunctions and/or dopaminergic system abnormalities at different stages. The performance of patients was compared to the performance obtained by a specific group of matched healthy controls using Cohen's d effect size. We thus compared emotion and gender recognition in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD) at the mild dementia stage, major depressive disorder, Parkinson's disease treated by l-DOPA (PD-ON) or not (PD-OFF), remitted schizophrenia (SCZ-rem), first-episode schizophrenia treated by antipsychotic medication (SCZ-ON), and drug-naïve first-episode schizophrenia (SCZ-OFF), as well as in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia (SIB). The analyses revealed a pattern of differential impairment of emotion (but not gender) recognition across pathological conditions. On the one hand, dopaminergic medication seems not to modify the moderate deficits observed in SCZ and PD groups (ON vs. OFF), suggesting that the deficit is independent from the dopaminergic system. On the other hand, the observed increase in effect size of the deficit among the aMCI, AD, and FTD groups (and also among the SIB and SCZ-rem groups) suggests that the deficit is dependent on neurodegeneration of the frontotemporal neural networks. Our transnosographic approach combining clinical and high-risk populations with the impact of medication provides new information on the trajectory of impaired emotion perception in neuropsychiatric conditions, and on the role of the dopaminergic system and the frontotemporal network in emotion perception.

Delayed monitoring of accuracy errors compared to commission errors in ACC.

Error detection is essential for monitoring performance and preparing subsequent behavioral adjustments, and is associated with specific neural responses in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). To investigate whether different brain mechanisms subserve the processing of commission vs. accuracy errors, we recorded EEG in adult participants while they performed a novel speeded GO-NOGO aiming task ("the Shoot-NoShoot paradigm"). Our ERP results show that commission errors (responding during NOGO trials) elicited a classical error-related negativity (ERN) component, followed by an error-related positivity (Pe), as well as a negativity peaking before response onset (pre-ERN). By contrast, spatial accuracy errors elicited a feedback-related negativity (FRN), which correlated with the spatial discrepancy between response and target position across subjects. Fast hits also elicited a pre-ERN but no ERN, suggesting that this pre-response monitoring component might be related to the detection of error likelihood. Although source analysis revealed similar generators in ACC for these different error-related negativities, the respective timing differed, suggesting that commission errors are detected rapidly based on internal motor representations, whereas the detection of accuracy errors in ACC relies on the additional and swift processing of external visual information.

Effects of outcomes and random arbitration on emotions in a competitive gambling task.

Research on self-serving biases in judgments and decision-making suggests that individuals first evaluate the outcomes they get, and then the procedures by which these outcomes were obtained. Evidence also suggests that the appraisal of the former (outcome favorability) can bias the appraisal of the latter (procedural fairness). We investigated the nature of the emotions that are elicited by these appraisals by using a new paradigm in which participants performed a choice task between pairs of competing gambles against a virtual opponent. Conflicts (when the participant selected the same gamble as his virtual opponent) were resolved by a neutral arbitrator who either confirmed the participant's choice ("pro-self") or attributed his gamble to the virtual opponent ("pro-competitor"). Trials in which the participant and his virtual opponent selected different gambles ("no-conflict") served as a control condition. In order to validate this new task, emotional reactions to the outcomes of the gambles were measured using self-reports, skin conductance responses, and facial electromyography (zygomaticus, corrugator, and frontalis). In no-conflict trials, effects of counterfactual thinking and social comparison resulted in (i) increased happiness as well as SCR and zygomaticus activity for wins compared to losses (valence effect) and for high compared to low gains (magnitude effect), and (ii) increased anger, regret, disappointment, and envy for losses compared to wins (valence effect). More importantly, compared to no-conflict trials and to pro-self awards with similar outcomes, pro-competitor awards increased subjective reports of anger for unfavorable outcomes, and increased happiness and guilt for favorable outcomes. Although the outcomes were independent from the arbitrators' decisions, and both the arbitrators' decisions and the outcomes were kept equally likely, individuals tended to attribute their outcomes to unfair arbitrators, reacting emotionally, especially when the modification of their initial choice for a gamble led to a negative outcome.