Linguistic, affective, parental, and educational contributions to the bicultural identity development of Balkan minority adolescents.

This study investigated linguistic, affective, parental, and educational contributions to bicultural identity, in two samples of younger (13- to 14-year-old; N = 95) and older (16- to 17-year-old; N = 67) bilingual adolescents, who were immigrants or belonged to ethnic minority communities in the Balkans. While bicultural identity level was not differentiated as a function of age group, there was an age-related shift in its predictors. Bicultural identity level was significantly predicted by perceived educators' attitudes toward linguistic/cultural diversity in the younger adolescent group, but by personal affective states (motivation and attitudes) toward the mainstream language in the older adolescent group. Implications of the findings are discussed regarding educational and family practices that would facilitate biculturalism in minority adolescents.

Higher Trait Levels of Guilt may Protect Against Gambling, Whereas Higher State Levels Lead to Riskier Behaviour.

Research on the role of affect in problem gambling remains scarce to date, although it has been proposed that trait-levels of negative self-conscious emotions (SCEs) could be potential risk factors. We report two studies investigating the relationship between negative SCEs, gambling, and risky behavior. In the first study, we investigated shame, guilt and self-disgust in a group of problem-gamblers and control non-gamblers. In the second study, we investigated if experimentally manipulating state levels of guilt, using a narration-induction paradigm, in students with different levels of gambling behavior, would influence their behavior in the Balloon Analog Risk Task. We found that problem gamblers had significantly lower trait-levels of guilt when we adjusted for the influence of depression and anxiety symptoms (p = .008). Problem gamblers also exhibited lower levels of shame, but this difference seemed to be driven by guilt. Lower levels of guilt were significantly associated with higher levels of trait impulsivity (p = .004). In the second study, gamblers had higher state levels of guilt than non-gamblers at the outset, and the narration paradigm successfully induced guilt (p = .001). After the guilt induction, the group of gamblers had significantly less risky behaviour (lower number of pumps) than the group of non-gamblers (p = .021). However, this was primarily driven by an increase in risky behaviour in the non-gamblers (p = .006). Thus, overall our findings suggest that higher trait levels of guilt may act as a protective factor for gambling, whereas high state levels of guilt lead to riskier behaviour but only in people who are not gamblers.

Attentional processes in low-socioeconomic status bilingual children: are they modulated by the amount of bilingual experience?

Recent research indicates that bilingual children are more proficient in resolving cognitive conflict than monolinguals. However, the replicability of such findings has been questioned, with poor control of participants' socioeconomic status (SES) as a possible confounding factor. Two experiments are reported here, in which the main attentional functions and pragmatic ability of 54 bilingual and 56 monolingual low-SES children were assessed (Experiment 1: 6- to 12-year-olds; Experiment 2: 6- to 8-year-olds). A language-switching task was also employed, to measure bilingual proficiency. Overall, the monolingual and bilingual groups did not differ significantly in any of the tasks employed, although the ability to resolve conflict was related to children's level of bilingual experience.

The effects of a computer-based cognitive and physical training program in a healthy and mildly cognitive impaired aging sample.

OBJECTIVES: The Long Lasting Memories (LLM) program concerns a newly integrated platform which combines cognitive exercises with physical activity within the context of advanced technologies. The main objective of this study was to present the preliminary results that determine the possible effectiveness of the LLM program in the improvement of cognitive functions and symptoms of depression in healthy elderly and subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). METHOD: Fifty healthy and MCI subjects participated in the study. All of them received one hour's physical training and 35 minutes' cognitive training, 3 times a week, during the 12 weeks of the program. Before and after the intervention all participants were assessed using a battery of neuropsychological tests. RESULTS: The results showed a significant improvement after the LLM training in global cognitive function, in verbal memory, in attention, in episodic memory and symptoms of depression. CONCLUSION: This study indicates that LLM is a promising solution for older adults with and without cognitive impairment, maintaining their wellbeing with few professional and technical requirements.

Frontal lobe-related cognition in the context of self-disgust.

Self- disgust is an adverse self-conscious emotion that plays an important role in psychopathology and well-being. However, self-disgust has received little attention in the emotion literature, therefore our understanding of the processes underlying the experience of self-disgust is relatively scarce, although neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies support the idea that this emotion may heavily rely on frontal lobe-related cognition. To test this hypothesis, in two studies we investigated the relationship between state and trait levels of self-disgust, cognition and emotion regulation in healthy adults. Specifically, in Study 1 we tested the hypothesis that emotion regulation strategies (avoidance, suppression, and cognitive reappraisal) mediate the relationship between inhibition ability and state and trait levels of self-disgust. In Study 2, we followed a more comprehensive approach to test the hypothesis that frontal lobe-related cognitive processes (updating, Theory of Mind-ToM-, and self-attention) are closely related to the experience of self-disgust in healthy adults. Overall, across these studies, we found evidence to support the idea that inhibition ability and ToM may play a role in the experience of state and trait self-disgust, respectively. However, we did not find consistent evidence across the two studies to support the notion held in the literature that the experience of self- conscious emotions, in this case self-disgust, is heavily dependent on frontal lobe-related cognition.

The relationship between musical training and the processing of audiovisual correspondences: Evidence from a reaction time task.

Numerous studies have reported both cortical and functional changes for visual, tactile, and auditory brain areas in musicians, which have been attributed to long-term training induced neuroplasticity. Previous investigations have reported advantages for musicians in multisensory processing at the behavioural level, however, multisensory integration with tasks requiring higher level cognitive processing has not yet been extensively studied. Here, we investigated the association between musical expertise and the processing of audiovisual crossmodal correspondences in a decision reaction-time task. The visual display varied in three dimensions (elevation, symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude), while the auditory stimulus varied in pitch. Congruency was based on a set of newly learned abstract rules: "The higher the spatial elevation, the higher the tone", "the more dots presented, the higher the tone", and "the higher the number presented, the higher the tone", and accuracy and reaction times were recorded. Musicians were significantly more accurate in their responses than non-musicians, suggesting an association between long-term musical training and audiovisual integration. Contrary to what was hypothesized, no differences in reaction times were found. The musicians' advantage on accuracy was also observed for rule-based congruency in seemingly unrelated stimuli (pitch-magnitude). These results suggest an interaction between implicit and explicit processing-as reflected on reaction times and accuracy, respectively. This advantage was generalised on congruency in otherwise unrelated stimuli (pitch-magnitude pairs), suggesting an advantage on processes requiring higher order cognitive functions. The results support the notion that accuracy and latency measures may reflect different processes.

Schizophrenia decreases guilt and increases self-disgust: Potential role of altered executive function.

Our knowledge of how the more complex self-conscious emotions (SCEs) are affected in schizophrenia is sparse. SCEs, unlike basic emotions, involve sophisticated frontal-lobe-related cognition, impairment of which characterizes the neurocognitive profile of schizophrenia. We investigated, in a cross-sectional study, whether SCEs (shame, guilt and self-disgust) are affected in schizophrenia, and the relationship between changes in SCEs and executive (dys)function. Twenty-nine Greek and thirty Arabic patients with schizophrenia were recruited alongside twenty-two Greek and thirty Arabic matched controls. Participants were administered the Self-Disgust Scale (TOSCA for shame and guilt was also administered to the Greek sample), and the Trail Making and Verbal Fluency Tests to measure executive function (EF). Trait levels of self-disgust and guilt were found to be higher and lower, respectively, in patients with schizophrenia relative to control participants; and poorer EF was related with higher trait levels of SD, but lower trait levels of guilt. The pattern of findings was largely unaffected when controlling for anxiety and depression. Given that altered levels of SCEs are closely related to poorer EF, we suggest that the link between EF and emotion regulation, widely established in basic emotions but under-studied in SCEs, may explain the current findings.

Use of cannabis enhances attentional inhibition.

OBJECTIVE: Orienting attention to an irrelevant location hampers the response to subsequent targets presented at that location in relation to novel, not previously attended, locations. This inhibitory effect has been named inhibition of return. We conducted an experiment to study the temporal course of inhibition of return in users of cannabis. METHOD: Twenty-five cannabis users who self-reported a regular frequency of cannabis use in joints per month, and 26 drug-free controls participated in the study. We employed a typical inhibition of return task with a single cue and manipulated the time interval between the onset of the cue and the target (150, 350, 550, 1500, and 2550 ms). Participants were asked to detect the onset of the target regardless of its location. RESULTS: The group of cannabis users showed a significantly greater overall inhibition relative to the group of nonusers. Furthermore, inhibition of return appeared earlier (at the 350 ms cue-target interval) in the user group. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study to show that attentional inhibition is enhanced in cannabis users. More research is needed to determine whether greater inhibition represents an advantage or disadvantage for visual search performance of cannabis users.

The role of the parietal cortex in inhibitory processing in the vertical meridian: Evidence from elderly brain damaged patients.

We explored the effects of parietal damage on inhibitory effects of visuospatial attention, inhibition of return (IOR) and inhibitory tagging (IT), in the vertical meridian. We combined a vertical spatial cue paradigm with a Stroop task employing three different temporal intervals between the spatial cue and the target (700, 1200 and 2000 ms) in two groups of patients, one with damage to the parietal cortex and underlying white matter (the parietal patients group) and the other with damage in other brain areas not including the parietal lobe (the control patient group), and a healthy control group. Healthy controls showed the expected inhibitory effects, IOR at the 700 and 1200 intervals and IT at the 1200 interval (as evidenced in a reduction in the magnitude of Stroop interference at the cued location). On the other hand, only the group of parietal patients showed delayed onset of inhibitory effects, IOR and IT appeared at the 1200 ms and 2000 ms intervals, respectively. These findings provide evidence for a role of the parietal cortex, and the underlying fibre tracts, in inhibitory processing in the vertical meridian, with damage to the parietal cortex altering the time course of attention-dependent inhibition.

Autonomic factors do not underlie the elevated self-disgust levels in Parkinson's disease.

INTRODUCTION: Parkinson's disease (PD) is manifested along with non-motor symptoms such as impairments in basic emotion regulation, recognition and expression. Yet, self-conscious emotion (SCEs) such as self-disgust, guilt and shame are under-investigated. Our previous research indicated that Parkinson patients have elevated levels of self-reported and induced self-disgust. However, the cause of that elevation-whether lower level biophysiological factors, or higher level cognitive factors, is unknown. METHODS: To explore the former, we analysed Skin Conductance Response (SCR, measuring sympathetic activity) amplitude and high frequency Heart Rate Variability (HRV, measuring parasympathetic activity) across two emotion induction paradigms, one involving narrations of personal experiences of self-disgust, shame and guilt, and one targeting self-disgust selectively via images of the self. Both paradigms had a neutral condition. RESULTS: Photo paradigm elicited significant changes in physiological responses in patients relative to controls-higher percentages of HRV in the high frequency range but lower SCR amplitudes, with patients to present lower responses compared to controls. In the narration paradigm, only guilt condition elicited significant SCR differences between groups. CONCLUSIONS: Consequently, lower level biophysiological factors are unlikely to cause elevated self-disgust levels in Parkinson's disease, which by implication suggests that higher level cognitive factors may be responsible.

Emotional devaluation in ignoring and forgetting as a function of adolescent development.

We know that emotion and cognition interact to guide goal-directed behavior. Accordingly, it has recently been shown that distracting stimuli (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) and instructed to-be-forgotten items (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016) are emotionally devaluated. The devaluation by inhibition hypothesis (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) is the main theoretical explanation of these effects. However, we know little about how the cognition-emotion interplay is further modulated by development, and particularly, by changes in inhibitory control and affective processing within the adolescence period. In the present study we combined a selective attention task with faces, and a selective memory (directed forgetting paradigm) task with words, with a pleasantness evaluation task to address this question in three age groups; younger adolescents, older adolescents and young adults. Younger adolescents exhibited worse accuracy in the attention task, lower overall recognition of words in the memory task, and a smaller in magnitude directed forgetting effect in the latter, relative to the two older groups. That is, they showed less efficient inhibitory control in attention and memory selection. Despite this, all groups showed similar devaluation effects of the distractor faces and the to-be-forgotten words. Our findings do not fully support an inhibition account of such effects. Yet, they support the robustness of the forgetting devaluation effect, replicating the findings of Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, and Bajo (2016) with a Greek version of the task and in a bigger sample of participants.

Biculturalism, linguistic distance, and bilingual profile effects on the bilingual influence on cognition: A comprehensive multipopulation approach.

The idea that being bilingual benefits one's cognitive development and performance has been greatly challenged over the last years. If such an effect exists, as some studies continue to show, it might actually be restricted to particular contexts and bilingual profiles; not unlikely, considering the enormous diversity in the latter across the world. In this study, we assessed 4 different bilingual populations (N = 201) and 2 monolingual populations (N = 105), in the Balkan region. We formed bilingual groups based on (a) acculturation strategy (bicultural vs. monocultural), (b) linguistic distance, as well as (c) bilingual profile (balanced vs. unbalanced), based on linguistic, affective, and acculturation measures and cluster analysis. Beyond prior work, this allowed us to explore the specific conditions under which any cognitive advantage may be observed in bilinguals. We did not find systematic evidence for positive effects of bilingualism, biculturalism, or a balanced bilingual profile on inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, monitoring, and proactive-reactive control management. The only evidence pointing to an advantage was restricted to Bosnian-Albanian bilinguals (linguistic distance analyses) and their general monitoring capacity. Acculturation strategy though, played an important role in shaping the bilinguals' language profile, and appeared to have independent effects on cognition from bilingualism. On this basis, acculturation should be considered in future explorations of bilingual cognitive development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Cultural Adaptation of the Everyday Problems Test-Greek Version: An Instrument to Examine Everyday Functioning.

Assessing cognitive decline and everyday functioning (EvF) in older age is valuable in detecting age-related neurological disorders. In Greece, there is a lack of sensitive instruments that capture fluctuations in EvF among older persons who are cognitively healthy or have subtle cognitive impairments. The EPT 28-items test, a widely used paper-and-pencil EvF measure, was translated in Greek and adapted to the Greek culture in this study. A multi-step methodology using a sample of 139 older Greek persons was employed. The results indicate that the Greek version of the EPT 28-items (i.e., the EPT-G) was well adapted, representing everyday tasks in Greece within a good range of task difficulty. The psychometric properties of the EPT-G replicate those of the original instrument, capturing EvF fluctuations among older persons with mild cognitive impairments. It was concluded that the EPT-G is a useful measure of EvF among Greek older persons.

Computerized Music-Reading Intervention Improves Resistance to Unisensory Distraction Within a Multisensory Task, in Young and Older Adults.

Incoming information from multiple sensory channels compete for attention. Processing the relevant ones and ignoring distractors, while at the same time monitoring the environment for potential threats, is crucial for survival, throughout the lifespan. However, sensory and cognitive mechanisms often decline in aging populations, making them more susceptible to distraction. Previous interventions in older adults have successfully improved resistance to distraction, but the inclusion of multisensory integration, with its unique properties in attentional capture, in the training protocol is underexplored. Here, we studied whether, and how, a 4-week intervention, which targets audiovisual integration, affects the ability to deal with task-irrelevant unisensory deviants within a multisensory task. Musically naïve participants engaged in a computerized music reading game and were asked to detect audiovisual incongruences between the pitch of a song's melody and the position of a disk on the screen, similar to a simplistic music staff. The effects of the intervention were evaluated via behavioral and EEG measurements in young and older adults. Behavioral findings include the absence of age-related differences in distraction and the indirect improvement of performance due to the intervention, seen as an amelioration of response bias. An asymmetry between the effects of auditory and visual deviants was identified and attributed to modality dominance. The electroencephalographic results showed that both groups shared an increase in activation strength after training, when processing auditory deviants, located in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A functional connectivity analysis revealed that only young adults improved flow of information, in a network comprised of a fronto-parietal subnetwork and a multisensory temporal area. Overall, both behavioral measures and neurophysiological findings suggest that the intervention was indirectly successful, driving a shift in response strategy in the cognitive domain and higher-level or multisensory brain areas, and leaving lower level unisensory processing unaffected.

Are females more responsive to emotional stimuli? A neurophysiological study across arousal and valence dimensions.

Men and women seem to process emotions and react to them differently. Yet, few neurophysiological studies have systematically investigated gender differences in emotional processing. Here, we studied gender differences using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and Skin Conductance Responses (SCR) recorded from participants who passively viewed emotional pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The arousal and valence dimension of the stimuli were manipulated orthogonally. The peak amplitude and peak latency of ERP components and SCR were analyzed separately, and the scalp topographies of significant ERP differences were documented. Females responded with enhanced negative components (N100 and N200), in comparison to males, especially to the unpleasant visual stimuli, whereas both genders responded faster to high arousing or unpleasant stimuli. Scalp topographies revealed more pronounced gender differences on central and left hemisphere areas. Our results suggest a difference in the way emotional stimuli are processed by genders: unpleasant and high arousing stimuli evoke greater ERP amplitudes in women relatively to men. It also seems that unpleasant or high arousing stimuli are temporally prioritized during visual processing by both genders.

Re-examining the contribution of visuospatial working memory to inhibition of return.

Castel and colleagues (Percept Psychophys 65(6):970-981, 2003) proposed that visuospatial working memory is needed to retain and update the irrelevant but attended location in an inhibition of return (IOR) procedure. In a series of three experiments, we re-examined this hypothesis by loading visuospatial working memory and manipulating the timing of encoding. When the visuospatial memory items were presented right after the cue, as in Castel et al. (Percept Psychophys 65(6):970-981, 2003), we replicated the lack of IOR in the dual-task condition (Experiment 1). However, when we presented the visuospatial memory items before the spatial cue, to control for retroactive interference in encoding, we found robust IOR effects (Experiment 2); the effect remained strong even when participants were prevented from using verbal labels to rehearse the memory material (Experiment 3). We conclude that IOR does not seem to depend on retaining the position of the irrelevant cue in visuospatial working memory.

Self-reported and experimentally induced self-disgust is heightened in Parkinson's disease: Contribution of behavioural symptoms.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with deficits in the recognition and expression of basic emotions, although self-reported levels of the self-conscious emotions shame and embarrassment are higher. However, one self-conscious emotion-self-disgust-which has been shown to have a negative impact on psychological wellbeing, has not been investigated in PD before. Here we employed self-report measures of self-conscious emotions, and an emotion induction paradigm involving images of the self, and narrated personal vignettes of instances when patients with PD (and controls) found themselves disgusting. We found that self-reported and induced levels of self-disgust were higher in PD patients than in matched controls, and that trait self-disgust was specifically related to disorders of impulse control in PD patients. Given the link between self-disgust and impaired psychological wellbeing, and the prevalence of anxiety and depression in PD, self-disgust might make a useful therapeutic target for psychological interventions in the condition.

Neurophysiological Activations of Predictive and Non-predictive Exogenous Cues: A Cue-Elicited EEG Study on the Generation of Inhibition of Return.

In cueing tasks, predictive and non-predictive exogenous spatial cues produce distinct patterns of behavioral effects. Although both cues initially attract attention, only non-predictive cues lead to inhibitory effects (worse performance at the cued location as compared to the uncued location) if the time elapsed between the cue and the target is long enough. However, the process/processes leading to the later inhibitory effect, named inhibition of return (IOR), are still under debate. In the present study, we used cue-elicited EEG activations from predictive and non-predictive exogenous spatial cues to further investigate the neural processes involved in IOR. Unlike previous similar studies, we intermixed both types of cues in a block of trials, in an attempt to identify the unique neurophysiological activations associated with the generation of IOR. We found that predictive and non-predictive cues significantly differed in activation just at 400-470 ms post-cue window. Activation was greater for non-predictive cues in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and this activation correlated significantly with IOR effects. These findings support the hypothesis that the posterior parietal cortex plays a crucial role in the generation of IOR.

Time course of the inhibitory tagging effect in ongoing emotional processing. A HD-tDCS study.

When a cueing procedure that usually triggers inhibition of return (IOR) effects is combined with tasks that tap semantic processing, or involve response-based conflict, an inhibitory tagging (IT) emerges that disrupts responses to stimuli at inhibited locations. IT seems to involve the executive prefrontal cortex, mainly the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), in cognitive conflict tasks. Contrary to other inhibitory effects, IT has been observed with rather short intervals, concretely when the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime presented at the cued location, and the subsequent target is 250 ms. Here we asked whether IT is also applied to ongoing emotional processing, and whether the left DLPFC plays a causal role in IT using HD-tDCS. In two experiments with an emotional conflict task, we observed reduced conflict effects, the signature of IT, when the prime word was presented at the cued location, and once again when the prime-target SOA was just 250 ms. Also, the IT effect was eliminated when cathodal stimulation was applied to the left DLPFC. These findings suggest that the IT effect involves areas of the executive attention network and cooperates with IOR to favor attentional allocation to novel unexplored objects/locations, irrespective of their emotional content.

Object-based inhibition of return in patients with posterior parietal damage.

Recent evidence has shown that inhibition of return, IOR, is impaired in patients with parietal damage with or without clinical signs of neglect (Bartolomeo, Sieroff, Decaix, & Chokron, 2001; Vivas, Humphreys, & Fuentes, 2003, respectively). In addition to environment-based IOR, Tipper et al. (1991) showed that IOR could be also associated with dynamic, object-based representations. In our study, we examined four patients with unilateral lesions to the parietal lobe, and a group of healthy controls, in an IOR procedure with moving objects where a pre-cued object could move, clockwise or counterclockwise, 90 degrees in polar coordinates. The group of control participants showed a small but significant object-based IOR effect. In contrast, the patients showed an object-based IOR effect when the objects moved from the contralesional field toward the ipsilesional field, whereas there was no IOR effect when they moved from the ipsilesional to the contralesional field. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of the parietal cortex in implementing attentional biases in both environment-based (Vivas et al., 2003) and object-based frames of reference.