Social support predicted subsequent subjective well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a prospective study.

BACKGROUND: Subjective well-being (SWB) is associated with social support in cross-sectional studies. However, it remains unclear whether and how social support predicts SWB longitudinally, especially during the COVID-19 contingency. METHODS: By adopting a prospective design, the current work addressed this research question in a sample of 594 participants from the U.K. The data were collected via the online platform, Prolific, at two time points (June, 2020 and August, 2021) with a 14-month interval. Descriptive analysis and a moderated mediation model were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. RESULTS: Baseline social support was a significant predictor of subjective well-being (SWB) 14 months later, even after controlling for baseline SWB and other covariates such as personality traits. Additionally, affect balance (i.e., the affective component of SWB) fully mediated the link between baseline social support and subsequent life satisfaction (i.e., the cognitive component of SWB). Moreover, household income moderated this relationship, indicating a stronger mediation for individuals with lower monthly household income. CONCLUSION: The present work sheds light on the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the association between social support and different components of SWB during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enjoy exercise more: The effects of dual-channel evaluative conditioning on implicit attitudes toward exercise.

Researchers have been looking for effective interventions to promote physical activity due to its great impact on both physical and mental health. In two studies, the current research investigated (1) whether evaluative conditioning could increase implicit attitudes toward exercise; (2) whether dual-channel evaluative conditioning had a greater influence compared to single-channel evaluative conditioning. In Study 1, results from 32 participants (7 males, 25 females; Mage = 19.470, SDage = 1.174) were used to compare the audiovisual dual-channel with the visual single-channel evaluative conditioning. In Study 2, we analyzed data from 100 participants (35 males, 65 females; Mage = 20.990, SDage = 3.141) and compared the visual-kinesthetic dual-channel with the visual single-channel evaluative conditioning. The results showed that individuals' implicit attitudes toward exercise were more positively affected by dual-channel than single-channel evaluative conditioning.

How and when institutional trust helps deal with group crisis like COVID-19 pandemic for Chinese employees? A social perspective of motivation.

Social factors cannot be neglected in predicting individual psychological health during a group crisis. Grounded in Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation, the present research explores how and when institutional trust influences crisis related worries and griefs. Both the survey study (N = 234) and the experimental study (N = 111) were conducted to examine our hypothesized moderated mediation model. Multiple waves of surveys were delivered in Study 1 and participants were requested to rate their experiences and responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 2, participants from both the collectivism manipulation group and the control group were requested to rate their psychological responses in an imagined group crisis. Regression analyses showed that institutional trust reduced worries and griefs by improving personal resilience, which is more significant for individuals with high levels of collectivism. These findings point to the importance of understanding individual psychological health in a social perspective of motivation.

An updated meta-analysis of the ego depletion effect.

The ego depletion effect is one of the most famous phenomena in social psychology. A recent meta-analysis showed that after accounting for small-studies effects by using a newly developed method called PET-PEESE, the ego depletion effect was indistinguishable from zero. However, it is too early to draw such rushing conclusion because of the inappropriate usage of PET-PEESE. The current paper reported a stricter and updated meta-analysis of ego depletion by carefully inspecting problems in the previous meta-analysis, including new studies not covered by it, and testing the effectiveness of each depleting task. The results suggest that attention video should be an ineffective depleting task, whereas emotion video should be the most effective one. Future studies are needed to confirm the effectiveness of each depletion task revealed by the current meta-analysis.

Is there an alternative explanation to the evolutionary account for financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive individuals?

All three critical points of the evolutionary explanation proposed by Maestripieri et al. may not withstand close scrutiny. Instead, there should be an alternative explanation that has nothing to do with genetic continuity, but stresses the rewarding property of attractiveness that results mainly from sociocultural value assignment and sexual experience pursuit.

Self-control depletion impairs goal maintenance: A meta-analysis.

Initial exertion of self-control has been suggested to impair subsequent self-regulatory performance. The specific cognitive processes that underlie this ego depletion effect have rarely been examined. Drawing on the dual-process theory of executive control (Engle & Kane, ; Kane & Engle, ), the current meta-analysis revealed that initial self-control exertion impairs participants' capacities of maintaining the task goal but its effect on capacities of resolving response competition is in need of further investigation. Our results are more consistent with recent theoretical views that consider ego depletion as a switch cost and a result arising from reduced motivation to engage in further self-control.

Testing the role of glucose in self-control: A meta-analysis.

The glucose view of self-control posited glucose as the physiological substrate of self-control "resource", which results in three direct corollaries: 1) engaging in a specific self-control activity would result in reduced glucose level; 2) the remaining glucose level after initial exertion of self-control would be positively correlated with following self-control performance; 3) restoring glucose by ingestion would help to improve the impaired self-control performance. The current research conducted a meta-analysis to test how well each of the three corollaries of the glucose view would be empirically supported. We also tested the restoring effect of glucose rinsing on subsequent self-control performance after initial exertion. The results provided clear and consistent evidence against the glucose view of self-control such that none of the three corollaries was supported. In contrast, the effect of glucose rinsing turned out to be significant, but with alarming signs of publication bias. The implications and future directions are discussed.

When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning.

Recent research has shown that poverty directly impeded cognitive functions because the poor could be easily distracted by monetary concerns. We argue that this effect may be limited to functions relying on working memory. For functions that rely on proceduralized processes however, monetary concerns elicited by reminding of financial demands would be conducive rather than harmful. Our results supported this hypothesis by showing that participants with lower income reached the learning criterion of the information-integration categorization task faster than their more affluent counterparts after reminding of financial demands.

Action orientation overcomes the ego depletion effect.

It has been consistently demonstrated that initial exertion of self-control had negative influence on people's performance on subsequent self-control tasks. This phenomenon is referred to as the ego depletion effect. Based on action control theory, the current research investigated whether the ego depletion effect could be moderated by individuals' action versus state orientation. Our results showed that only state-oriented individuals exhibited ego depletion. For individuals with action orientation, however, their performance was not influenced by initial exertion of self-control. The beneficial effect of action orientation against ego depletion in our experiment results from its facilitation for adapting to the depleting task.

Escalate shamefully, de-escalate angrily or gratefully: the influence of discrete emotions on escalation of commitment.

Decision makers often tend to escalate their commitment when faced with a dilemma of whether to continue a losing course of action. Researchers recently began to investigate the influence of discrete emotions on this decision tendency. However, this work has mainly focused on negative emotions and rarely considered positive emotions, to say nothing of comparing the effects of both of them simultaneously. The current study addresses this need by presenting the results of three experiments that examined the effects of four emotions of both positive and negative valences in escalation situations. Experiment 1 investigated the relationships of three trait emotions (hope, shame, and anger) and escalation of commitment. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the effects of three induced emotions (anger, shame, and gratitude) on escalation of commitment in a student sample and an employee sample, respectively. The results revealed that the effects of discrete emotions in escalation situations are mainly due to their associated differences on the appraisal dimension of responsibility that is related to escalation situations rather than their valence. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Differentiating the relationships between traditional and new media use and sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic: roles of psychological distress and age.

Background: Numerous studies have consistently demonstrated a decline in sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of this study is to explore the impact of engaging with pertinent epidemic information through the media amid the COVID-19 crisis on individuals' sleep quality and the underlying mechanisms through which this influence operates. Methods: An online cross-sectional study design was employed. A total of 1,063 British adults (36.2% males; M age = 38.85, SD age = 13.36, ranging from 18 to 77 years old) participated in the study and completed our questionnaires, which included media usage frequency during the pandemic, the 10-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), and the Ten-item Personality Inventory (TIPI). Results: Pearson's correlation analyses indicated that there was no significant correlation between COVID-19-related traditional media use (television, radio, newspaper) and psychological distress or sleep quality. However, exposure to information related to COVID-19 through new media use (Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter) was correlated with greater psychological distress and poorer sleep quality. A moderated mediation analysis showed that psychological distress fully mediated the relationship between new media use and poor sleep, which was moderated by age, with the association between psychological distress and poor sleep quality being stronger among older adults. Conclusion: Exposure to information of COVID-19 via new (but not traditional) media use deteriorated sleep quality through greater psychological distress, and this relationship was stronger among older adults.

Network analysis of the relationship between non-suicidal self-injury, depression, and childhood trauma in adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Non-suicidal self-injury seriously harm the physical and mental health of adolescents. The aim of the current study was to explore the relationship between non-suicide self-injury, depression, and childhood trauma from the perspective of symptoms in adolescents. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in four junior high middle schools and collected 2640 valid questionnaires. There were 1329 male students and 1311 female students. The age of the participants ranged from 11 to 17 years old, with a mean age of 13.3 (± 0.94) years. Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), depressive symptoms, and childhood trauma were assessed using the Adolescent Self-Harm Scale, the Childhood Depression Scale, and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, respectively. A network analysis was performed. RESULTS: In the network, NSSI, depressive symptoms, and childhood trauma were closely related. Negative self-esteem in the depressive symptoms and emotional abuse in childhood were the most central nodes. Negative self-esteem and negative mood were directly connected to NSSI, other nodes of depressive symptoms appeared to be indirectly connected to NSSI through these two nodes. Emotional abuse was the only node in childhood trauma categories directly connected to NSSI. Nodes of other categories of childhood trauma (physical neglect, physical abuse, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse) were indirectly connected to NSSI through emotional abuse. CONCLUSIONS: NSSI, depression, and childhood trauma of teenagers were closely related. Individuals who have suffered emotional abuse in childhood were more likely to have depressive symptoms and NSSI. Improving negative self-esteem and negative emotions and reducing emotional abuse may be beneficial in alleviating depression and reducing NSSI in adolescents.

Exploring sex differences: insights into gene expression, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, cognition, and pathology.

Increased knowledge about sex differences is important for development of individualized treatments against many diseases as well as understanding behavioral and pathological differences. This review summarizes sex chromosome effects on gene expression, epigenetics, and hormones in relation to the brain. We explore neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, cognition, and brain pathology aiming to explain the current state of the art. While some domains exhibit strong differences, others reveal subtle differences whose overall significance warrants clarification. We hope that the current review increases awareness and serves as a basis for the planning of future studies that consider both sexes equally regarding similarities and differences.

Adapting to an initial self-regulatory task cancels the ego depletion effect.

The resource-based model of self-regulation provides a pessimistic view of self-regulation that people are destined to lose their self-control after having engaged in any act of self-regulation because these acts deplete the limited resource that people need for successful self-regulation. The cognitive control theory, however, offers an alternative explanation and suggests that the depletion effect reflects switch costs between different cognitive control processes recruited to deal with demanding tasks. This account implies that the depletion effect will not occur once people have had the opportunity to adapt to the self-regulatory task initially engaged in. Consistent with this idea, the present study showed that engaging in a demanding task led to performance deficits on a subsequent self-regulatory task (i.e. the depletion effect) only when the initial demanding task was relatively short but not when it was long enough for participants to adapt. Our results were unrelated to self-efficacy, mood, and motivation.

The Longitudinal Relationship Between Parenting and Self-Control Needs Reconsideration: A Commentary on Li et al. (2019).

The relationship between parenting and self-control has received much attention from social and developmental psychologists. In a meta-analytic review, Li et al. (2019) identified a longitudinal association between parenting and subsequent self-control (P → SC) of r = .157, p < .001, and a longitudinal association between adolescent self-control and subsequent parenting (SC → P) of r = .155, p < .001. However, the longitudinal associations may have been substantially biased because Li et al. (2019) utilized the bivariate correlation between the predictor at Time 1 and the outcome at Time 2 to estimate the effect size. To provide a more accurate estimate of the longitudinal association between parenting and adolescent self-control, we reexamined the data on the basis of the cross-lagged association. The results showed weaker longitudinal associations for both P → SC (r = .059, p < .001) and SC → P (r = .062, p < .001). Our results point to the importance of utilizing the cross-lagged association in meta-analyzing the longitudinal relationship between variables.

Relationship between leadership-member exchange (LMX) and flow at work among medical workers during the COVID-19: the mediating role of job crafting.

Based on relational leadership theory and self-determination theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX), job crafting, and flow at work among medical workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants in the study consisted of 424 hospital employees. The results showed that: (1) the LMX positively predicted flow at work; (2) two types of job crafting (increasing structural job resources and challenging job demands) played a mediating role between the LMX and flow at work; and (3) gender did not moderate these mediating effects as suggested by previous studies. These results indicate that the LMX can not only directly predict flow at work, but also indirectly predict work-related flow through job crafting by increasing structural job resources and challenging job demands, thus providing new insights for enhancing flow experiences of medical workers.

A deep learning model for brain age prediction using minimally preprocessed T1w images as input.

Introduction: In the last few years, several models trying to calculate the biological brain age have been proposed based on structural magnetic resonance imaging scans (T1-weighted MRIs, T1w) using multivariate methods and machine learning. We developed and validated a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based biological brain age prediction model that uses one T1w MRI preprocessing step when applying the model to external datasets to simplify implementation and increase accessibility in research settings. Our model only requires rigid image registration to the MNI space, which is an advantage compared to previous methods that require more preprocessing steps, such as feature extraction. Methods: We used a multicohort dataset of cognitively healthy individuals (age range = 32.0-95.7 years) comprising 17,296 MRIs for training and evaluation. We compared our model using hold-out (CNN1) and cross-validation (CNN2-4) approaches. To verify generalisability, we used two external datasets with different populations and MRI scan characteristics to evaluate the model. To demonstrate its usability, we included the external dataset's images in the cross-validation training (CNN3). To ensure that our model used only the brain signal on the image, we also predicted brain age using skull-stripped images (CNN4). Results: The trained models achieved a mean absolute error of 2.99, 2.67, 2.67, and 3.08 years for CNN1-4, respectively. The model's performance in the external dataset was in the typical range of mean absolute error (MAE) found in the literature for testing sets. Adding the external dataset to the training set (CNN3), overall, MAE is unaffected, but individual cohort MAE improves (5.63-2.25 years). Salience maps of predictions reveal that periventricular, temporal, and insular regions are the most important for age prediction. Discussion: We provide indicators for using biological (predicted) brain age as a metric for age correction in neuroimaging studies as an alternative to the traditional chronological age. In conclusion, using different approaches, our CNN-based model showed good performance using one T1w brain MRI preprocessing step. The proposed CNN model is made publicly available for the research community to be easily implemented and used to study ageing and age-related disorders.

Collectivism reduces objective mobility trends to public areas during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In order to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, staying at home and avoiding going outside have been either strongly recommended or stringently enforced by governments all over the globe. Previous studies found that people with more collectivist orientation were more willing to comply with governmental guidelines and engage in preventive behaviors such as social distancing. However, these studies were based on self-report data within a short period. The current study aims to overcome these limitations by using objective mobility data generated by Google users all over the world during the past two years, thus providing a stronger test for the predictive effect of collectivism on preventive measures in response to the pandemic. We found consistent results at both the US state level (n = 50) and the country/territory level (n = 133), such that people in more collectivistic regions reduced their visits to and length of stay at certain public areas such as parks during the past two years. Our findings emphasize the importance of cultural values in face of global crises.

Psychometric Evaluation of the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire in Chinese Parents.

Parental reflective functioning (PRF) is important for parenting and child development. To effectively assess PRF in Chinese parents, this study aimed to revise the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) for the Chinese context. The original Chinese version of the PRFQ (PRFQ-C) was revised by following psychometric validation procedures in a sample of Chinese parents (N = 2,021, 1,034 mothers and 987 fathers). A series of psychometric analyses, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), internal consistency reliability analysis, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity analysis, and analysis for measurement invariance between mothers and fathers, were conducted. The CFA results indicated that the final 12-item, three-factor model had a good fit {χ 2(49) = 472.381; CFI = 0.929; TLI = 0.904; RMSEA = 0.065, 90%CI = [0.060, 0.071]}. The Chinese version of the PRFQ with 12 items (PRFQ-12C) showed satisfactory reliability (omega = 0.68-0.82), discriminant validity [heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) values < 0.85], and criterion-related validity. The PRFQ-12C also had measurement invariance across mothers and fathers. In conclusion, the PRFQ-12C is psychometrically sound and can be applied in China.

To Be Authentic, to Be Eco: Exploring the Link Between Authenticity and Pro-environmental Behavior.

Authentic self is believed to be morally good. The current research proposes that the authentic self is also environmentally good. Across two studies, we tested the link between authenticity and pro-environmental attitude and behavior. In Study 1 (N=2,646), dispositional authenticity was found to be a predictor of pro-environmental behavior (PEB). In Study 2 (N=474), participants in the authentic condition (recalling their experiences of being authentic) were more willing to donate money to protect the environment than those in the inauthentic (recalling their experiences of being inauthentic) or the neutral (recalling their experiences of a typical day) conditions. Participants in the authentic condition also reported higher intention to conduct PEB than their peers in the other conditions. The results of the present research provide initial evidence that people are more likely to endorse pro-environmental attitude and behave pro-environmentally when being authentic.