Negative (but not positive) affective episodic future thinking enhances proactive behavior in 5-year-old children.

Envisioning the future and how you may feel (affective episodic future thinking [EFT]) helps adults to act in favor for their future self, according to manifold experiments. The current study tested whether and how affective EFT also helps children to behave more proactively, that is, to self-initially prepare for an upcoming event. Five-year-old (N = 90) children (data collected from 2021 to 2022) were instructed to mentally imagine how they would feel after successfully managing an upcoming test (positive affective EFT), how they would feel after failing to do so (negative affective EFT), or they were reminded of an upcoming test without a prompt to imagine (control condition, random assignment). Proactive behavior was indicated by children's choice to play one of three games before the actual test (one of the games was announced to be the test game). Mechanisms (e.g., motivation to win, psychological distance, current affect) and moderators (ability of episodically thinking about the future in everyday life, behavioral inhibition, and behavioral approach) for the possible effects of affective EFT were explored. Children in the negative affective EFT condition chose the target game significantly above chance level and more often than children in the control group, whereas children in the positive affective EFT condition did not. This effect was independent of the assumed mediators and moderators. Findings are discussed in the context of the theoretical and empirical literature on affective EFT in adults and suggestions for future studies are given. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Direct Imaging of Current-Induced Antiferromagnetic Switching Revealing a Pure Thermomagnetoelastic Switching Mechanism in NiO.

We unravel the origin of current-induced magnetic switching of insulating antiferromagnet/heavy metal systems. We utilize concurrent transport and magneto-optical measurements to image the switching of antiferromagnetic domains in specially engineered devices of NiO/Pt bilayers. Different electrical pulsing and device geometries reveal different final states of the switching with respect to the current direction. We can explain these through simulations of the temperature-induced strain, and we identify the thermomagnetoelastic switching mechanism combined with thermal excitations as the origin, in which the final state is defined by the strain distributions and heat is required to switch the antiferromagnetic domains. We show that such a potentially very versatile noncontact mechanism can explain the previously reported contradicting observations of the switching final state, which were attributed to spin-orbit torque mechanisms.

Hyperscanning: A Valid Method to Study Neural Inter-brain Underpinnings of Social Interaction.

Social interactions are a crucial part of human life. Understanding the neural underpinnings of social interactions is a challenging task that the hyperscanning method has been trying to tackle over the last two decades. Here, we review the existing literature and evaluate the current state of the hyperscanning method. We review the type of methods (fMRI, M/EEG, and fNIRS) that are used to measure brain activity from more than one participant simultaneously and weigh their pros and cons for hyperscanning. Further, we discuss different types of analyses that are used to estimate brain networks and synchronization. Lastly, we present results of hyperscanning studies in the context of different cognitive functions and their relations to social interactions. All in all, we aim to comprehensively present methods, analyses, and results from the last 20 years of hyperscanning research.