Predictors of Change in Vaccination Decisions Among the Vaccine Hesitant: Examining the Roles of Age and Intolerance of Uncertainty.

BACKGROUND: Vaccine hesitancy and resistance pose significant threats to controlling pandemics and preventing infectious diseases. In a group of individuals unvaccinated against the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19), we investigated how age, intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and their interaction affected the likelihood of having changed one's vaccination decision a year later. We hypothesized that higher IU would increase the likelihood of becoming vaccinated, particularly among individuals of younger age. We predicted that this effect would remain significant, even after controlling for delay discounting and trust in science. PURPOSE: The goal of this research was to understand the factors influencing changes in vaccination decisions among the vaccine hesitant. METHODS: In a larger longitudinal study, ~7,500 participants from Prolific.co completed demographic and vaccination status questions, a delay discounting task, and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale in June-August 2021. Approximately 3,200 participants completed a follow-up survey in July-August 2022, answering questions about vaccination status, reasons for vaccination decision, and trust in science. We analyzed data from 251 participants who initially had no intention of getting vaccinated and completed the follow-up survey; 38% reported becoming vaccinated in the intervening year. RESULTS: Data were analyzed using multilevel logistic regression. Over and above other factors related to vaccination decisions (delay discounting, trust in science), younger participants were more likely to change their decision and become vaccinated a year later, especially if they had higher IU, confirming our predictions. Primary reasons for becoming vaccinated were necessity and seeking protection against the virus. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the complex interplay between age, uncertainty, and vaccination decisions, and inform health policies by suggesting the need for tailoring interventions to specific concerns in different age groups.

Vaccine hesitancy and resistance pose significant threats to controlling pandemics and preventing infectious diseases. It is important to understand the factors that influence whether or not unvaccinated individuals change their mind and get vaccinated. We investigated how age and one's intolerance of uncertainty predicted the likelihood of changing one's mind about getting a COVID-19 vaccination in a group of 251 unvaccinated participants. In mid-2021, these individuals indicated they had no intention to get vaccinated; by mid-2022, 38% of them reported that they had been vaccinated. Over and above other factors known to be related to vaccination decisions (delay discounting and trust in science), we found that younger participants were more likely to have changed their minds and become vaccinated a year later, especially if they were less tolerant of uncertainty. Of the reasons provided by participants for having been vaccinated, necessity and seeking protection against the virus were the most common. These findings highlight the complex interplay between age, uncertainty, and vaccination decisions. Importantly, these findings will inform health policies, suggesting the need for tailoring interventions to specific concerns in different age groups.

Assessing the relationship between delay discounting and decisions to engage in various protective behaviors during COVID-19.

Research suggests that discounting of delayed rewards (i.e., tendency to choose smaller immediate rewards over large later rewards) is a promising target of intervention to encourage compliance with public health measures (PHM), such as vaccination compliance. The effects of delay discounting, however, may differ across the types of PHMs, given that the benefits of vaccination, unlike other PHMs (physical distancing, handwashing, and mask-wearing), are more temporally delayed. Here, we examined whether delay discounting predicts engaging in COVID-19 PHMs in approximately 7,000 participants recruited from 13 countries in June-August 2021. After controlling for demographic and distress variables, delay discounting was a negative predictor of vaccination, but a positive predictor of physical distancing (when restrictions are in place) and handwashing. There was no significant association between delay discounting and frequency of mask-wearing. It is possible that increasing vaccination compliance may require greater emphasis on future benefits of vaccination, whereas promotion of physical distancing and hand hygiene may require greater focus on the present moment. Further research is needed to investigate the nature of this relationship and its implications for public health messaging.

Thinking Beyond COVID-19: How Has the Pandemic Impacted Future Time Horizons?

Older age is reportedly protective against the detrimental psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, consistent with the theory that reduced future time extension (FTE) leads to prioritization of socioemotional well-being. We investigated whether depression severity and pandemic-related factors (regional severity, threat, social isolation) reduce FTE beyond chronological age and whether these relationships differ between younger and older adults. In May 2020, we recruited 248 adults (younger: 18-43 years, older: 55-80 years) from 13 industrialized nations. Multigroup path analysis found that depression severity was a better predictor of FTE than the reverse association in both age groups, suggesting an affective foreshortening of future time. In both age groups, older age was protective against depression severity, and younger age was associated with heightened vulnerability to the negative impacts of pandemic-related factors. Future research should consider the complex interrelationships between FTE, age, and depression severity and the potential impacts of the broader psychosocial milieu.

Short-sighted decision-making by those not vaccinated against COVID-19.

Widespread vaccination is necessary to minimize or halt the effects of many infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Stagnating vaccine uptake can prolong pandemics, raising the question of how we might predict, prevent, and correct vaccine hesitancy and unwillingness. In a multinational sample (N = 4,452) recruited from 13 countries that varied in pandemic severity and vaccine uptake (July 2021), we examined whether short-sighted decision-making as exemplified by steep delay discounting-choosing smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards-predicts COVID-19 vaccination status. Delay discounting was steeper in unvaccinated individuals and predicted vaccination status over and above demographics or mental health. The results suggest that delay discounting, a personal characteristic known to be modifiable through cognitive interventions, is a contributing cause of differences in vaccine compliance.

Neural activation during emotional interference corresponds to emotion dysregulation in stressed teachers.

Teacher stress and burnout has been associated with low job satisfaction, reduced emotional wellbeing, and poor student learning outcomes. Prolonged stress is associated with emotion dysregulation and has thus become a focus of stress interventions. This study examines emotional interference effects in a group of teachers suffering from high stress and to explore how individual differences in cognitive control, emotion dysregulation, and emotion recognition related to patterns of neural activation. Forty-nine teachers suffering moderate-high stress participated in an emotional counting Stroop task while their brain activity was imaged using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants viewed general or teacher specific words of either negative or neutral valence and were required to count the number of words on screen. Behavioural and neuroimaging results suggest that teachers are able to control emotional responses to negative stimuli, as no evidence of emotional interference was detected. However, patterns of neural activation revealed early shared engagement of regions involved in cognitive reappraisal during negative task conditions and unique late engagement of the hippocampus only while counting teacher-specific negative words. Further, we identified that greater emotion dysregulation was associated with increased activation of regions involved in cognitive control processes during neutral word trials. Teachers who showed slower emotion recognition performance were also found to have greater activation in regions associated with visual and word processing, specifically during the teacher specific negative word condition of the task. Future research should explore emotion regulation strategy use in teachers and utilise temporally sensitive neuroimaging techniques to further understand these findings.

Teacher stress and burnout in Australia: examining the role of intrapersonal and environmental factors.

Concerns regarding high rates of teacher stress and burnout are present globally. Yet there is limited current data regarding the severity of stress, or the role of intrapersonal and environmental factors in relation to teacher stress and burnout within the Australian context. The present study, conducted over an 18-month period, prior to the COVID pandemic, surveyed 749 Australian teachers to explore their experience of work-related stress and burnout; differences in stress and burnout across different demographic groups within the profession; as well as the contributing role of intrapersonal and environmental factors, particularly, emotion regulation, subjective well-being, and workload. Results showed over half of the sample reported being very or extremely stressed and were considering leaving the profession, with early career teachers, primary teachers, and teachers working in rural and remote areas reporting the highest stress and burnout levels. Conditional process analyses highlighted the importance of emotion regulation, workload and subjective well-being in the development of teacher stress and some forms of burnout. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

Salience and default-mode network connectivity during threat and safety processing in older adults.

The appropriate assessment of threat and safety is important for decision-making but might be altered in old age due to neurobiological changes. The literature on threat and safety processing in older adults is sparse and it is unclear how healthy ageing affects the brain's functional networks associated with affective processing. We measured skin conductance responses as an indicator of sympathetic arousal and used functional magnetic resonance imaging and independent component analysis to compare young and older adults' functional connectivity in the default mode (DMN) and salience networks (SN) during a threat conditioning and extinction task. While our results provided evidence for differential threat processing in both groups, they also showed that functional connectivity within the SN - but not the DMN - was weaker during threat processing in older compared to young adults. This reduction of within-network connectivity was accompanied by an age-related decrease in low frequency spectral power in the SN and a reduction in inter-network connectivity between the SN and DMN during threat and safety processing. Similarly, we found that skin conductance responses were generally lower in older compared to young adults. Our results are the first to demonstrate age-related changes in brain activation during aversive conditioning and suggest that the ability to adaptively filter affective information is reduced in older adults.

Differentiation of functional networks during long-term memory retrieval in children and adolescents.

The processes that characterize the neural development of long-term memory (LTM) are largely unknown. In young adults, the degree of activation of a single large-scale memory network corresponds to the level of contextual detail involved; thus, differentiating between autobiographical, episodic, and semantic retrieval. In contrast to young adults, children and adolescents retrieve fewer contextual details, suggesting that they might not yet engage the entire memory circuitry and that this brain recruitment might lack the characteristic contextual differentiation found in adults. Twenty-one children (10-12 years of age), 20 adolescents (14-16 years of age), and 22 young adults (20-35 years of age) were assessed on a previously validated LTM retrieval task, while their brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results demonstrate that children, adolescents, and adults recruit a left-lateralized subset of the large-scale memory network, comprising semantic and language processing regions, with neither developmental group showing evidence of contextual differentiation within this network. Additionally, children and adolescents recruited occipital and parietal regions during all memory recall conditions, in contrast to adults who engaged the entire large-scale memory network, as described previously. Finally, a significant covariance between age and brain activation indicates that the reliance on occipital and parietal regions during memory retrieval decreases with age. These results suggest that both children and adolescents rely on semantic processing to retrieve long-term memories, which, we argue, may restrict the integration of contextual detail required for complex episodic and autobiographical memory retrieval.

Evidence for a functional specialization of ventral anterior temporal lobe for language.

The controlled semantic cognition framework proposes that the ventral anterior temporal lobes (vATL) in the left and right hemisphere function as an integrated hub region supporting transmodal semantic representations. The clinical evidence for the transmodal function of vATL is largely based on studies of semantic dementia patients with severe anomia, who also show impaired performance on nonverbal tasks that involve the retrieval of knowledge about objects and their prototypical use, such as the production of tool use pantomimes. Yet, evidence from patients with apraxia and functional neuroimaging studies in healthy adults does not implicate vATL in pantomime production. We, therefore, compared semantic retrieval of object-action associations for overt verb and pantomime production from picture and word stimuli. Our results show that, independent of stimulus modality, the retrieval of object-action associations for verb, but not pantomime, production is related to activity in bilateral vATL. Bilateral vATL activation was also observed for meaningless verbal responses that did not require the retrieval of object-action associations. Taken together, our results suggest that bilateral vATL is not engaged in the retrieval of object-action associations per se, but rather supports semantic representations that are functionally specialized for language. These findings have implications for the semantic cognition framework and our understanding of the dependence of conceptual knowledge on language.

The method of educational assessment affects children's neural processing and performance: behavioural and fMRI Evidence.

Standardised educational assessments are now widespread, yet their development has given comparatively more consideration to what to assess than how to optimally assess students' competencies. Existing evidence from behavioural studies with children and neuroscience studies with adults suggest that the method of assessment may affect neural processing and performance, but current evidence remains limited. To investigate the impact of assessment methods on neural processing and performance in young children, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and quantify the neural correlates during performance across a range of current approaches to standardised spelling assessment. Results indicated that children's test performance declined as the cognitive load of assessment method increased. Activation of neural nodes associated with working memory further suggests that this performance decline may be a consequence of a higher cognitive load, rather than the complexity of the content. These findings provide insights into principles of assessment (re)design, to ensure assessment results are an accurate reflection of students' true levels of competency.