The case of young people who use e-cigarettes infrequently: Who is this population? What becomes of them?

BACKGROUND: Emerging data indicate that many adolescents and young adults ("youth") engage in infrequent, or occasional, e-cigarette use. However, little is known about this population as they are often subsumed into the broader "any past-30-day use" category used to define youth "current use." This study aimed to focus on infrequent e-cigarette use by youth, examining its correlates and transitional outcomes. METHODS: Participants were from a prospective cohort study of youth (aged 15-24 at baseline). Among youth who had used e-cigarettes, we classified "infrequent use" as using e-cigarettes ≤5 days in the last 30 days (n=273) and "frequent use" as using e-cigarettes ≥6 days in the last 30 days (n=278). Descriptive statistics, Markov modeling, and logistic regression were utilized. RESULTS: By the 12-month follow-up, 76.8% of those using infrequently at baseline remained in the "infrequent use" category, 6.3% reported no recent use, and 16.8% had escalated to the "frequent use" category. Among the youth using infrequently at baseline, those who did (vs. did not) escalate to frequent use by follow-up had higher baseline nicotine dependence and were more likely to have family members who used tobacco. CONCLUSIONS: Infrequent e-cigarette use is extremely common, and often fairly stable, among young people. Prevention efforts must certainly attempt to reduce escalation and attend to both individual and interpersonal factors (e.g., nicotine dependence, family use). Yet prevention efforts must additionally attend to the case of continued infrequent use, given the high prevalence of people in this category and their regular exposure to e-cigarette harms.

Nicotine information disclosed online by e-cigarette brands popular with young people.

INTRODUCTION: E-cigarette use is most prevalent among adolescents and young adults - and there are often misperceptions about product risk. The purpose of this study was to determine what nicotine information is provided on e-cigarette brand websites. METHODS: Based on national and local surveys, we identified 44 e-cigarette brands commonly used in the US by adolescents and young adults. For each of these brands, their associated websites were analyzed for disclosed nicotine information. Specifically, for each brand's website, we coded whether there was information on nicotine concentration (recorded if a numerical value was provided such as '5% nicotine'), nicotine form (free-base, nicotine salts, or not stated), and nicotine type (tobacco-derived, synthetically derived, or not stated). Coding allowed for both lay (e.g. 'nic salts') as well as scientific (e.g. 'isomers') terms. RESULTS: Of the 44 brands examined, all provided basic information on nicotine concentration (e.g. '5% nicotine'). However, 23% of brands did not disclose information on nicotine form (i.e. nicotine salt vs free-base), and 66% of brands did not disclose information on nicotine type (i.e. synthetic vs tobacco-derived). CONCLUSIONS: Overall, these results suggest that the e-cigarette industry is not fully informing its consumers about the nicotine in their products. Given that nicotine form and type have implications for e-cigarette addiction potential, these findings highlight a public health concern. There is a need for more comprehensive national regulations for mandating product constituents and emissions disclosures.

Demographic and Behavioral Differences Between Adolescents and Young Adults Who Use E-Cigarettes at Low and High Frequency.

BACKGROUND: Among adolescents and young adults (AYAs), "current use" of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) is commonly defined as any use in the past 30 days. However, few studies have examined differences among those within this broad category. This study examined characteristics of AYAs who used e-cigarettes at a low frequency (within the last 3 months but <6 days out of the past 30 days) and those who used e-cigarettes at a high frequency (6+ days out of the past 30 days). METHODS: We conducted cross-sectional analyses among 551 Ohio AYAs (15- to 24-year-olds) who reported using an e-cigarette to vape nicotine in the past 3 months. We used descriptive statistics and logistic regression to characterize those using e-cigarettes at a low frequency and a high frequency. RESULTS: Among our sample of AYAs who reported past 3-month e-cigarette use, about half (50.8%) reported using an e-cigarette 6 or more days out of the past 30 days (ie, high frequency). In the multivariable analysis, reported nicotine dependence (Odds Ratio [OR]: 7.0, 95% CI: 4.8, 10.3) and current other tobacco product use (OR: 1.8, 95% CI: 1.1, 2.9) were associated with high-frequency e-cigarette use. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that frequency of use is an important characteristic in understanding AYA e-cigarette use. Any use in the past 30 days may not be sensitive enough to understand dependence and tobacco-use behaviors. Further characterizing "current" e-cigarette use by frequency of use may provide meaningful information for public health professionals to better target intervention and cessation efforts to AYAs.

What do young people know about the nicotine in their e-cigarettes?

INTRODUCTION: In recent years, the nicotine in e-cigarettes has been available in either a 'free-base' (unprotonated) or 'nicotine salt' (protonated) form. Additionally, e-cigarette nicotine can be either 'synthetic' or 'tobacco-derived'. These dimensions of nicotine have implications for nicotine absorption, bioavailability and sensory experiences. However, it is unclear if the young people using e-cigarettes are aware of these nicotine dimensions. METHODS: Data came from a cohort of Ohio youth (aged 15-24) who reported using an e-cigarette in the past 4 months (N=271). Participants were enrolled and provided background information in 2021; their 12-month follow-up survey asked about the presence, form and type of nicotine in their usual e-cigarette. Individuals who reported that they could distinguish between tobacco-derived and synthetic nicotine were additionally asked to describe the difference. RESULTS: Of the 247 youth who reported that there was nicotine in their usual e-cigarette, 71.7% did not know whether it was free-base or nicotine salt and 75.7% did not know whether it was synthetic or tobacco-derived. Awareness was higher among youth who were using e-cigarettes at a greater frequency and quantity. The majority reported that they could not detect a difference between the experience of using synthetic vs tobacco-derived nicotine. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate the generally limited awareness about nicotine among youth who used e-cigarettes. Improvements in health communications and requirements for e-cigarette industry disclosures are necessary to ensure that consumers are better informed about the dimensions-and the risks-of the nicotine they are consuming.

The boundary between real and fictional others in the medial prefrontal cortex is blurred in lonelier individuals.

People spend much of their free time engaging with narrative fiction. Research shows that, like real-life friends, fictional characters can sometimes influence individuals' attitudes, behaviors, and self-beliefs. Moreover, for certain individuals, fictional characters can stand in for real-life friends by providing the experience of belonging. Despite these parallels between how people think of real and fictional others, it is unclear whether, and to what degree, their neural representations are similar. Does the brain treat psychologically close fictional others as it does close real-world friends, or are real others somehow privileged in their neural representation? In the present study, fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones performed a trait-evaluation task for the self, 9 real-life friends/acquaintances, and 9 fictional characters from Game of Thrones while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Using both brain decoding and representational similarity analysis, we found evidence of a categorical boundary between real and fictional others within the medial prefrontal cortex. However, the boundary between these categories was blurred in lonelier individuals. These results suggest that lonelier individuals may turn to fictional characters to meet belongingness needs, and this, in turn, alters the manner in which these categories are encoded within the social brain.

They Saw a Debate: Political Polarization Is Associated with Greater Multivariate Neural Synchrony When Viewing the Opposing Candidate Speak.

With rampant polarization in current U.S. politics, it seems as though political partisans with opposing viewpoints are living in parallel realities. Indeed, prior research shows that people's impressions/attitudes toward political candidates are intertwined with their political affiliation. The current study investigated the relationship between political affiliation and intersubject neural synchrony of multivariate patterns of activity during naturalistic viewing of a presidential debate. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 20 individuals varying in political affiliation underwent functional neuroimaging while watching the first debate between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pairs of participants with more polarized political affiliations were higher in neural synchrony in a system of brain regions involved in self-referential processing when viewing the opposing candidate speak compared with that candidate's supporters regardless of which extreme of the political spectrum they occupied. Moreover, pairs of political partisans matching in the candidate they supported were higher in neural synchrony when watching the candidate they opposed compared with the one they both supported. These findings suggest that political groups' shared understanding may be driven more by perceptions of outgroups than of their own party/candidates.

Dual Use of E-cigarettes and Cannabis among Young People in America: A New Public Health Hurdle?

In this commentary, we discuss the concerning prevalence of cannabis use among young people who use e-cigarettes. National data in the U.S., as well as our own local data, indicate that dual use (i.e., nicotine e-cigarette use and cannabis use) is more common than e-cigarette use alone. Our commentary discusses why this dual use is a major concern for public health. We argue that continuing to examine e-cigarettes in isolation is not only impractical but also problematic, as it misses out on opportunities to understand additive and multiplicative health impacts, to share cross-knowledge, and to inform prevention and treatment. This commentary calls for more attention to dual use and concerted, equity-enhancing efforts from funders and researchers.

Mental Health and Behavior of College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Mobile Smartphone and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study, Part II.

BACKGROUND: Since late 2019, the lives of people across the globe have been disrupted by COVID-19. Millions of people have become infected with the disease, while billions of people have been continually asked or required by local and national governments to change their behavioral patterns. Previous research on the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that it is associated with large-scale behavioral and mental health changes; however, few studies have been able to track these changes with frequent, near real-time sampling or compare these changes to previous years of data for the same individuals. OBJECTIVE: By combining mobile phone sensing and self-reported mental health data in a cohort of college-aged students enrolled in a longitudinal study, we seek to understand the behavioral and mental health impacts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, measured by interest across the United States in the search terms coronavirus and COVID fatigue. METHODS: Behaviors such as the number of locations visited, distance traveled, duration of phone use, number of phone unlocks, sleep duration, and sedentary time were measured using the StudentLife mobile smartphone sensing app. Depression and anxiety were assessed using weekly self-reported ecological momentary assessments, including the Patient Health Questionnaire-4. The participants were 217 undergraduate students. Differences in behaviors and self-reported mental health collected during the Spring 2020 term, as compared to previous terms in the same cohort, were modeled using mixed linear models. RESULTS: Linear mixed models demonstrated differences in phone use, sleep, sedentary time and number of locations visited associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In further models, these behaviors were strongly associated with increased interest in COVID fatigue. When mental health metrics (eg, depression and anxiety) were added to the previous measures (week of term, number of locations visited, phone use, sedentary time), both anxiety and depression (P<.001) were significantly associated with interest in COVID fatigue. Notably, these behavioral and mental health changes are consistent with those observed around the initial implementation of COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020. CONCLUSIONS: In the initial lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, people spent more time on their phones, were more sedentary, visited fewer locations, and exhibited increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. As the pandemic persisted through the spring, people continued to exhibit very similar changes in both mental health and behaviors. Although these large-scale shifts in mental health and behaviors are unsurprising, understanding them is critical in disrupting the negative consequences to mental health during the ongoing pandemic.

Becoming the King in the North: identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self-other neural overlap.

During narrative experiences, identification with a fictional character can alter one's attitudes and self-beliefs to be more similar to those of the character. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is a brain region that shows increased activity when introspecting about the self but also when thinking of close friends. Here, we test whether identification with fictional characters is associated with increased neural overlap between self and fictional others. Nineteen fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones performed trait evaluations for the self, 9 real-world friends and 9 fictional characters during functional neuroimaging. Overall, the participants showed a larger response in the vMPFC for self compared to friends and fictional others. However, among the participants higher in trait identification, we observed a greater neural overlap in the vMPFC between self and fictional characters. Moreover, the magnitude of this association was greater for the character that participants reported feeling closest to/liked the most as compared to those they felt least close to/liked the least. These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of 'becoming' characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self.

The orbitofrontal cortex spontaneously encodes food health and contains more distinct representations for foods highest in tastiness.

The human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been associated with food reward processing and is thought to represent modality-independent signals of value. Food tastiness and health are core attributes of many models of food choice and dietary self-control. Here we used functional neuroimaging to examine the neural representation of tastiness and health for a set of 28 food categories selected to be orthogonal with respect to both dimensions. Using representational similarity analysis, in conjunction with linear mixed-effects modeling, we demonstrate that the OFC spontaneously encodes food health, whereas tastiness was associated with greater neural dissimilarity. Subsequent analyses using model dissimilarity matrices that encode overall tastiness magnitude demonstrated that the neural representation of foods grows more distinct with increasing tastiness but not with increasing health. In a separate study, we use lexical analysis of natural language descriptions of food to show that food tastiness is associated with more elaborate descriptions of food. Together these data show not only that the OFC spontaneously encodes the dimensions of health and tastiness when viewing appetitive food cues, but also that the neural and cognitive representations of food categories that are the highest in tastiness are more refined than those lower in tastiness.

Mental Health and Behavior of College Students During the Early Phases of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Smartphone and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.

BACKGROUND: The vast majority of people worldwide have been impacted by coronavirus disease (COVID-19). In addition to the millions of individuals who have been infected with the disease, billions of individuals have been asked or required by local and national governments to change their behavioral patterns. Previous research on epidemics or traumatic events suggests that this can lead to profound behavioral and mental health changes; however, researchers are rarely able to track these changes with frequent, near-real-time sampling or compare their findings to previous years of data for the same individuals. OBJECTIVE: By combining mobile phone sensing and self-reported mental health data among college students who have been participating in a longitudinal study for the past 2 years, we sought to answer two overarching questions. First, have the behaviors and mental health of the participants changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic compared to previous time periods? Second, are these behavior and mental health changes associated with the relative news coverage of COVID-19 in the US media? METHODS: Behaviors such as the number of locations visited, distance traveled, duration of phone usage, number of phone unlocks, sleep duration, and sedentary time were measured using the StudentLife smartphone sensing app. Depression and anxiety were assessed using weekly self-reported ecological momentary assessments of the Patient Health Questionnaire-4. The participants were 217 undergraduate students, with 178 (82.0%) students providing data during the Winter 2020 term. Differences in behaviors and self-reported mental health collected during the Winter 2020 term compared to previous terms in the same cohort were modeled using mixed linear models. RESULTS: During the first academic term impacted by COVID-19 (Winter 2020), individuals were more sedentary and reported increased anxiety and depression symptoms (P<.001) relative to previous academic terms and subsequent academic breaks. Interactions between the Winter 2020 term and the week of the academic term (linear and quadratic) were significant. In a mixed linear model, phone usage, number of locations visited, and week of the term were strongly associated with increased amount of COVID-19-related news. When mental health metrics (eg, depression and anxiety) were added to the previous measures (week of term, number of locations visited, and phone usage), both anxiety (P<.001) and depression (P=.03) were significantly associated with COVID-19-related news. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with prior academic terms, individuals in the Winter 2020 term were more sedentary, anxious, and depressed. A wide variety of behaviors, including increased phone usage, decreased physical activity, and fewer locations visited, were associated with fluctuations in COVID-19 news reporting. While this large-scale shift in mental health and behavior is unsurprising, its characterization is particularly important to help guide the development of methods to reduce the impact of future catastrophic events on the mental health of the population.

Causal Factors of Anxiety and Depression in College Students: Longitudinal Ecological Momentary Assessment and Causal Analysis Using Peter and Clark Momentary Conditional Independence.

BACKGROUND: Across college campuses, the prevalence of clinically relevant depression or anxiety is affecting more than 27% of the college population at some point between entry to college and graduation. Stress and self-esteem have both been hypothesized to contribute to depression and anxiety levels. Although contemporaneous relationships between these variables have been well-defined, the causal relationship between these mental health factors is not well understood, as frequent sampling can be invasive, and many of the current causal techniques are not well suited to investigate correlated variables. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to characterize the causal and contemporaneous networks between these critical mental health factors in a cohort of first-year college students and then determine if observed results replicate in a second, distinct cohort. METHODS: Ecological momentary assessments of depression, anxiety, stress, and self-esteem were obtained weekly from two cohorts of first-year college students for 40 weeks (1 academic year). We used the Peter and Clark Momentary Conditional Independence algorithm to identify the contemporaneous (t) and causal (t-1) network structures between these mental health metrics. RESULTS: All reported results are significant at P<.001 unless otherwise stated. Depression was causally influenced by self-esteem (t-1 rp, cohort 1 [C1]=-0.082, cohort 2 [C2]=-0.095) and itself (t-1 rp, C1=0.388, C2=0.382) in both cohorts. Anxiety was causally influenced by stress (t-1 rp, C1=0.095, C2=0.104), self-esteem (t-1 rp, C1=-0.067, C2=-0.064, P=.002), and itself (t-1 rp, of C1=0.293, C2=0.339) in both cohorts. A causal link between anxiety and depression was observed in the first cohort (t-1 rp, C1=0.109) and only observed in the second cohort with a more liberal threshold (t-1 rp, C2=0.044, P=.03). Self-esteem was only causally influenced by itself (t-1 rp, C1=0.389, C2=0.393). Stress was only causally influenced by itself (t-1 rp, C1=0.248, C2=0.273). Anxiety had positive contemporaneous links to depression (t rp, C1=0.462, C2=0.444) and stress (t rp, C1=0.354, C2=0.358). Self-esteem had negative contemporaneous links to each of the other three mental health metrics, with the strongest negative relationship being stress (t rp, C1=-0.334, C2=-0.340), followed by depression (t rp, C1=-0.302, C2=-0.274) and anxiety (t rp, C1=-0.256, C2=-0.208). Depression had positive contemporaneous links to anxiety (previously mentioned) and stress (t rp, C1=0.250, C2=0.231). CONCLUSIONS: This paper is an initial attempt to describe the contemporaneous and causal relationships among these four mental health metrics in college students. We replicated previous research identifying concurrent relationships between these variables and extended them by identifying causal links among these metrics. These results provide support for the vulnerability model of depression and anxiety. Understanding how causal factors impact the evolution of these mental states over time may provide key information for targeted treatment or, perhaps more importantly, preventative interventions for individuals at risk for depression and anxiety.

Media multitasking is associated with higher risk for obesity and increased responsiveness to rewarding food stimuli.

Obesity among children and adolescents has dramatically increased over the past two to three decades and is now a major public health issue. During this same period, youth exposure to media devices also became increasingly prevalent. Here, we present the novel hypothesis that media multitasking (MMT)-the simultaneous use of and switching between unrelated forms of digital media-is associated with an imbalance between regulatory processes and reward-related responses to appetitive food stimuli, resulting in a greater sensitivity to external food cues among high media multitaskers. This, in turn, may contribute to overeating and weight gain over time. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two studies examining research participants who grew up during the recent period of escalating multitasking and obesity-and among whom 37% are overweight or obese. In Study 1, participants' propensity to engage in MMT behaviors was associated with a higher risk for obesity (as indicated by higher body mass index and body fat percentage). Next, in Study 2, a subset of participants from Study 1 were exposed to appetitive food cues while undergoing functional neuroimaging and then, using passive mobile sensing, the time participants spent in various food points-of-sale over an academic term was inferred from GPS coordinates of their mobile device. Study 2 revealed that MMT was associated with an altered pattern of brain activity in response to appetizing food cues, specifically an imbalance favoring reward-related activity in ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex-relative to recruitment of the frontoparietal control network. This relationship was further tested in a mediation model, whereby increased MMT, via a brain imbalance favoring reward over control, was associated with greater time spent in campus eateries. Taken together, findings from both studies suggest the possibility that media multitasking may be implicated in the recent obesity epidemic.

The neural representation of self is recapitulated in the brains of friends: A round-robin fMRI study.

Humans continually form and update impressions of each other's identities based on the disclosure of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. At the same time, individuals also have specific beliefs and knowledge about their own self-concept. Over a decade of social neuroscience research has shown that retrieving information about the self and about other persons recruits similar areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), however it remains unclear if an individual's neural representation of self is reflected in the brains of well-known others or if instead the two representations share no common relationship. Here we examined this question in a tight-knit network of friends as they engaged in a round-robin trait evaluation task in which each participant was both perceiver and target for every other participant and in addition also evaluated their self. Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC during a person's self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person. Moreover, the similarity of neural self-other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self-other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session. These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Correction: Calorie information and dieting status modulate reward and control activation during the evaluation of food images.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204744.].

Fusing Mobile Phone Sensing and Brain Imaging to Assess Depression in College Students.

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent in our society, so have rates of depression, particularly among young adults. Individual differences in smartphone usage patterns have been shown to reflect individual differences in underlying affective processes such as depression (Wang et al., 2018). In the current study, a positive relationship was identified between smartphone screen time (e.g., phone unlock duration) and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC), a brain region implicated in depression and antidepressant treatment response, and regions of the ventromedial/orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), such that increased phone usage was related to stronger connectivity between these regions. This cluster was subsequently used to constrain subsequent analyses looking at individual differences in depressive symptoms in the same cohort and observed partial replication in a separate cohort. Similar analyses were subsequently performed on metrics of circadian rhythm consistency showing a negative relationship between connectivity of the sgCC and OFC. The data and analyses presented here provide relatively simplistic preliminary analyses which replicate and provide an initial step in combining functional brain activity and smartphone usage patterns to better understand issues related to mental health. Smartphones are a prevalent part of modern life and the usage of mobile sensing data from smartphones promises to be an important tool for mental health diagnostics and neuroscience research.

Recruitment of cognitive control regions during effortful self-control is associated with altered brain activity in control and reward systems in dieters during subsequent exposure to food commercials.

Engaging in effortful self-control can sometimes impair people's ability to resist subsequent temptations. Existing research has shown that when chronic dieters' self-regulatory capacity is challenged by prior exertion of effort, they demonstrate disinhibited eating and altered patterns of brain activity when exposed to food cues. However, the relationship between brain activity during self-control exertion and subsequent food cue exposure remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated whether individual differences in recruitment of cognitive control regions during a difficult response inhibition task are associated with a failure to regulate neural responses to rewarding food cues in a subsequent task in a cohort of 27 female dieters. During self-control exertion, participants recruited regions commonly associated with inhibitory control, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Those dieters with higher DLPFC activity during the initial self-control task showed an altered balance of food cue elicited activity in regions associated with reward and self-control, namely: greater reward-related activity and less recruitment of the frontoparietal control network. These findings suggest that some dieters may be more susceptible to the effects of self-control exertion than others and, whether due to limited capacity or changes in motivation, these dieters subsequently fail to engage control regions that may otherwise modulate activity associated with craving and reward.

Correlates of Stress in the College Environment Uncovered by the Application of Penalized Generalized Estimating Equations to Mobile Sensing Data.

BACKGROUND: Stress levels among college students have been on the rise for the last few decades. Currently, rates of reported stress among college students are at an all-time high. Traditionally, the dominant way to assess stress levels has been through pen-and-paper surveys. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to use passive sensing data collected via mobile phones to obtain a rich and potentially less-biased source of data that can be used to help better understand stressors in the college experience. METHODS: We used a mobile sensing app, StudentLife, in tandem with a pictorial mobile phone-based measure of stress, the Mobile Photographic Stress Meter, to investigate the situations and contexts that are more likely to precipitate stress. RESULTS: Using recently developed methods for handling high-dimensional longitudinal data, penalized generalized estimating equations, we identified a set of mobile sensing features (absolute values of beta >0.001 and robust z>1.96) across the domains of social activity, movement, location, and ambient noise that were predictive of student stress levels. CONCLUSIONS: By combining recent statistical methods and mobile phone sensing, we have been able to study stressors in the college experience in a way that is more objective, detailed, and less intrusive than past research. Future work can leverage information gained from passive sensing and use that to develop real-time, targeted interventions for students experiencing a stressful time.

Decoding the neural representation of self and person knowledge with multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches.

Multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches to understand how the human brain encodes sensory information and higher level conceptual knowledge have become increasingly dominant in visual and cognitive neuroscience; however, it is only in recent years that these methods have been applied to the domain of social information processing. This review examines recent research in the field of social cognitive neuroscience focusing on how multivariate pattern analysis (e.g., pattern classification, representational similarity analysis) and data-driven methods (e.g., reverse correlation, intersubject correlation) have been used to decode and characterize high-level information about the self, other persons, and social groups. We begin with a review of what is known about how self-referential processing and person perception are represented in the medial prefrontal cortex based on conventional activation-based neuroimaging approaches. This is followed by a nontechnical overview of current multivariate pattern-based and data-driven neuroimaging methods designed to characterize and/or decode neural representations. The remainder of the review focuses on examining how these methods have been applied to the topic of self, person perception, and the perception of social groups. In this review, we highlight recent trends (e.g., analysis of social networks, decoding race and social groups, and the use of naturalistic stimuli) and discuss several theoretical challenges that arise from the application of these new methods to the question of how the brain represents knowledge about the self and others. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.