The Social Correlates to Callous-Unemotional Traits in a Sample of High School Students.

Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits are strongly related to early-onset and severe levels of conduct problems. However, much less research has focused on their association with potential problems in adolescents' social relationships. Further, it is important to determine if CU traits explain variance in important social variables, independent of conduct problems or general personality dimensions related to sociability, like agreeableness. In the current study, we examined the association of CU traits with a range of social variables in a community sample of Italian adolescents (N = 563; 460 girls; mean age = 15.80, SD = 1.50). Measures for the social variables included assessment of peer rejection, adolescents' prosocial behaviors, satisfaction in peer relationships, and feelings of connection with school and classmates. We also obtained self-report ratings of CU traits, conduct problems (CP) and agreeableness. Analyses showed that CU traits were significantly associated with all the social variables. After controlling for CP and agreeableness, CU traits were still positively associated with ratings of peer rejection and negatively associated with prosocial behavior and satisfaction in relationships with peers. However, the negative associations with feelings of connection to school and peers were no longer significant. These findings provide further support for the clinical usefulness of CU traits and further evidence for potential targets of intervention, particularly focused on the adolescent's relational skills.

Pathways to resilience: The parallel change in children's emotional difficulties and family context during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy.

OBJECTIVE: The study analyses which pathways to adjustment emerged at the family level during the COVID-19 containment period in Italy, during which children were locked down with their families for 56 days from March 11 to May 6. Using a longitudinal design, with data pre- and postevent, a bivariate latent change score model analyzed the covariance of the change in family well-being (FW) and in emotional difficulties (ED), testing if the longitudinal change in ED is a function of the starting level of FW, and vice-versa. Children's stress reactions to the pandemic and other related experiences were included as additional predictors. METHOD: A total of 166 middle school students (86 females) with a mean age of 11.14 (SD = .47) completed two online questionnaires, in January 2020 (T0) and in June 2020 (T1). RESULTS: Results showed that children's ED decreased significantly, on average, during the lockdown period, and FW remained constant. ED and FW change scores had a significant and negative covariation (ß = - .46; p = .01). When family well-being increased emotional difficulties decreased, and vice versa. FW at T0 predicted no change in FW, nor did T0 scores of ED predict any change in FW. CONCLUSIONS: The strong intercorrelated change between children's ED and FW during the lockdown does not seem influenced by preexisting levels of individual and family functioning. Findings supported the view that for some families, the COVID-19 lockdown was also an opportunity to experience deeper emotional connections, contributing to a decrease in ED. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The longitudinal association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in the elderly: a systematic review.

OBJECTIVE: Loneliness and the onset of depression in old age are growing problems related to the greater life expectancy nowadays. This review investigated the longitudinal association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in the elderly. DESIGN: A comprehensive search was conducted using three databases (Scopus, PsycInfo, and PubMed) combing for empirical studies published up until July 2020. A total of 4.549 abstracts and 221 full-text articles were assessed. Three authors independently reviewed titles and abstracts; disagreements were resolved by consensus. RESULTS: Ten studies were included in the final review. We identified two categories of studies based on the outcome considered in each article: 1) the longitudinal effect of loneliness on depressive symptoms and 2) the clinical course of depression and its association with loneliness. All the articles reported a significant and positive association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in their longitudinal design research, ranging from an odds ratio of 0.41 to 17.76. The heterogeneity regarding the effect size in the analyses can be explained by the multifactorial design implemented by most of the studies included. CONCLUSIONS: Future research should investigate the moderators' role and how it may influence the longitudinal association between loneliness and depression over the years.

Quantifying fairness to overcome selfishness: A behavioural model to describe the evolution and stabilization of inter-group bias using the Ultimatum Game.

The ability to form groups to overcome problems has been crucial for the evolution of human beings. To favour the formation of cooperating groups, one of the mechanisms developed is the inter-group bias, namely the tendency of individuals to favour members of their group and hinder the external ones. It is the cognitive equivalent of the "green beard effect" in evolutionary biology, introduced by Hamilton and popularized by Dawkins, for which a group can profit of the altruistic be-haviour of its members. Here, we use a behavioural model based on the Ultimatum Game, to shed ligh on how this behaviour cloud has been stabilized in the human population, estimating the magnitude of favouritism needed to overcome selfish individuals. Through both numerical simulations and analytic approaches, we study how a community of collectivist and individualist agents evolves. The key factor is the mechanism for the evolution of the population, i.e., the replacement of the poor-performing in-dividuals. In the case of replacement by the reproduction of existing individuals, we observe a smooth phase transition and no coexistence. If the replacement is random, the transition smooths, and coex-istence is possible. We developed analytical approaches for these two cases and performed numerical simulations. Although analytical calculations support the behaviour emerging from simulations, some differences ask for more refined treatments.

Humans best judge how much to cooperate when facing hard problems in large groups.

We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players to use rational calculation for making the cooperative decisions. This environment is directly translated into a computer simulation, from which we extract the collaboration strategy that leads to the maximal attainable score. Based on this, we measure the error that players make when estimating the benefits of collaboration, and find that humans massively underestimate these benefits when facing easy problems or working alone or in small groups. In contrast, when confronting hard problems or collaborating in large groups, humans accurately judge the best level of collaboration and easily achieve the maximal score. Our findings are independent on groups' composition and players' personal traits. We interpret them as varying degrees of usefulness of social heuristics, which seems to depend on the size of the involved group and the complexity of the situation.

Validation of a low-cost EEG device in detecting neural correlates of social conformity.

The study of conformity from a neurobiological point of view has interested many authors: among them, Shestakova and colleagues (2013) have showed how conformity can be assessed through the analysis of event related potentials (ERPs). More specifically, the P300 component of the ERP was shown to be sensitive to the behavioral adjustment that an individual makes when not agreeing with the majority of a group. Starting from these contributions, in the present study, the famous experiment of Solomon Asch [1] was replicated online. The experiment was conducted on a sample of university students, using an innovative and low-cost tool capable of recording the brain signal (a wireless headset equipped with fourteen electrodes, called Emotiv EPOC). The present research aims to demonstrate how cheap and little sensitive tools enable the detection of ERP components that characterize social conformity in an ecological context.