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New Perspective on Digital Well-Being by Distinguishing Digital Competency From Dependency: Network Approach
Background In the digital age, there is an emerging area of research focusing on digital well-being (DWB), yet conceptual frameworks of this novel construct are lacking. The current conceptualization either approaches the concept as the absence of digital ill-being, running the risk of pathologizing individual digital use, or follows the general subjective well-being framework, failing to highlight the complex digital nature at play. Objective This preregistered study aimed to address this gap by using a network analysis, which examined the strength of the relationships among affective (digital stress and web-based hedonic well-being), cognitive (online intrinsic needs satisfaction), and social (online social connectedness and state empathy) dimensions of DWB and their associations with some major DWB protective and risk factors (ie, emotional regulation, nomophobia, digital literacy, self-control, problematic internet use, coping styles, and online risk exposure). Methods The participants were 578 adults (mean age 38.7, SD 13.14 y; 277/578, 47.9% women) recruited from the United Kingdom and the United States who completed an online survey. Two network models were estimated. The first one assessed the relationships among multiple dimensions of DWB, and the second examined the relationships between DWB dimensions and related protective and risk factors. Results The 2 resulting network structures demonstrated high stability, with the correlation stability coefficients being 0.67 for the first and 0.75 for the second regularized Gaussian graphical network models. The first network indicated that all DWB variables were positively related, except for digital stress, which was negatively correlated with the most central node—online intrinsic needs satisfaction. The second network revealed 2 distinct communities: digital competency and digital dependency. Emotional regulation emerged as the most central node with the highest bridge expected influence, positively associated with emotion-focused coping in the digital competency cluster and negatively associated with avoidant coping in the digital dependency cluster. In addition, some demographic differences were observed. Women scored higher on nomophobia (χ24=10.7; P=.03) and emotion-focused coping (χ24=14.9; P=.01), while men scored higher on digital literacy (χ24=15.2; P=.01). Compared with their older counterparts, younger individuals scored lower on both emotional regulation (Spearman ρ=0.27; P<.001) and digital self-control (Spearman ρ=0.35; P<.001) and higher on both digital stress (Spearman ρ=−0.14; P<.001) and problematic internet use (Spearman ρ=−0.25; P<.001). Conclusions The network analysis revealed how different aspects of DWB were interconnected, with the cognitive component being the most influential. Emotional regulation and adaptive coping strategies were pivotal in distinguishing digital competency from dependency.
Sleep and circadian difficulties in schizophrenia: presentations, understanding, and treatment.
It is common in mental health care to ask about people's days but comparatively rare to ask about their nights. Most patients diagnosed with schizophrenia struggle at nighttime. The next-day effects can include a worsening of psychotic experiences, affective disturbances, and inactivity, which in turn affect the next night's sleep. Objective and subjective cognitive abilities may be affected too. Patients commonly experience a mix of sleep difficulties in a night and across a week. These difficulties include trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping at all; nightmares and other awakenings; poor-quality sleep; oversleeping; tiredness; sleeping at the wrong times; and problems establishing a regular sleep pattern. The patient group is also more vulnerable to obstructive sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome. We describe in this article how the complex presentation of non-respiratory sleep difficulties arises from variation across five factors: timing, mental state, need for sleep, self-care, and environment. We set out 10 illustrative patterns of such difficulties experienced by patients with non-affective psychosis. These sleep problems are eminently treatable with intensive psychological therapy delivered over approximately eight sessions. We describe key techniques and their typical order of implementation by presentation. Sleep problems are an important issue for patients. Giving them the therapeutic attention patients often desire brings both real clinical benefits and improves views of services. Treatment is also very likely to lessen psychotic experiences and mood disturbances while improving daytime functioning and quality of life. Tackling sleep difficulties can be a route toward the successful treatment of psychosis.
Under pressure: UK preclinical neuroscience at a crossroads.
Graphical Abstract.
Relationships between depression, anxiety, and motivation in the real-world: Effects of physical activity and screentime.
BACKGROUND: Mood and anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and comorbid worldwide, with variability in symptom severity that fluctuates over time. Digital phenotyping, a growing field that aims to characterize clinical, cognitive and behavioral features via personal digital devices, enables continuous quantification of symptom severity in the real world, and in real-time. METHODS: In this study, N=114 individuals with a mood or anxiety disorder (MA) or healthy controls (HC) were enrolled and completed 30-days of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of symptom severity. Novel real-world measures of anxiety, distress and depression were developed based on the established Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (MASQ). The full MASQ was also completed in the laboratory (in-lab). Additional EMA measures related to extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and passive activity data were also collected over the same 30-days. Mixed-effects models adjusting for time and individual tested the association between real-world symptom severity EMA and the corresponding full MASQ sub-scores. A graph theory neural network model (DEPNA) was applied to all data to estimate symptom interactions. RESULTS: There was overall good adherence over 30-days (MA=69.5%, HC=71.2% completion), with no group difference (t(58)=0.874, p=0.386). Real-world measures of anxiety/distress/depression were associated with their corresponding MASQ measure within the MA group (t's > 2.33, p's < 0.024). Physical activity (steps) was negatively associated with real-world distress and depression (IRRs > 0.93, p's ≤ 0.05). Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were negatively associated with real-world distress/depression (IRR's > 0.82, p's < 0.001). DEPNA revealed that both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation significantly influenced other symptom severity measures to a greater extent in the MA group compared to the HC group (extrinsic/intrinsic motivation: t(46) = 2.62, p < 0.02, q FDR < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.76; t(46) = 2.69, p < 0.01, q FDR < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.78 respectively), and that intrinsic motivation significantly influenced steps (t(46) = 3.24, p < 0.003, q FDR < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.94). CONCLUSIONS: Novel real-world measures of anxiety, distress and depression significantly related to their corresponding established in-lab measures of these symptom domains in individuals with mood and anxiety disorders. Novel, exploratory measures of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation also significantly related to real-world mood and anxiety symptoms and had the greatest influencing degree on patients' overall symptom profile. This suggests that measures of cognitive constructs related to drive and activity may be useful in characterizing phenotypes in the real-world.
Feasibility and acceptability of a parent-toddler programme to support the development of executive functions in children at elevated likelihood of autism or ADHD: Pilot findings
This study reports feasibility, fidelity and acceptability of a pilot of START; a 12-week parent-toddler, group-based, neurodiversity-affirming programme aiming to support executive function development in toddlers at elevated likelihood of autism or ADHD. After 4 days' training, community early years practitioner pairs delivered START to 13 UK families with a toddler showing elevated autistic traits, or with a parent or sibling with autism or ADHD, in groups of 6 and 7. Sessions were audio-recorded and rated by practitioners and researchers regarding the extent to which programme and session aims were met. Practitioners' reflections on strengths and challenges in session delivery, adaptations to the session plan and researchers' observations from the audio recordings were probed in weekly debrief calls, and one-to-one interviews at programme end-point. Recruitment and retention were monitored. Parent participants were asked to complete a feedback questionnaire after each session. Results show recruitment to the programme is feasible, but a large minority of parents experience barriers to regular attendance, which is a challenge for achieving exposure targets. Practitioners delivered the programme to a high quality and at least partially met programme and session-specific aims in every session. The most significant barrier to fully meeting session aims was families' late arrival. Parents reported regularly engaging with the suggested activities at home and found the sessions useful, although not all parents responded each week. Overall, the results of this small-scale pilot indicate START is feasible and acceptable as a parent-mediated programme to support toddlers at elevated likelihood of autism or ADHD to thrive.
Moral enhancement and cheapened achievement: Psychedelics, virtual reality and AI.
A prominent critique of cognitive or athletic enhancement claims that certain performance-improving drugs or technologies may 'cheapen' resulting achievements. Considerably less attention has been paid to the impact of enhancement on the value of moral achievements. Would the use of moral enhancement (bio)technologies, rather than (solely) 'traditional' means of moral development like schooling and socialization, cheapen the 'achievement' of morally improving oneself? We argue that, to the extent that the 'cheapened achievement' objection succeeds in the domains of cognitive or athletic enhancement, it could plausibly also succeed in the domain of moral enhancement-but only regarding certain forms. Specifically, although the value of moral self-improvement may be diminished by some of the more speculative and impractical forms of moral enhancement proposed in the literature, this worry has less force when applied to more plausibly viable forms of moral enhancement: forms in which drugs or technologies play an adjunctive or facilitative, rather than a determinative, role in moral improvement. We illustrate this idea with three examples from recent literature: the possible use of psychedelic drugs in certain moral-learning contexts, 'Socratic Al' (a proposed Al-driven moral enhancer) and empathy enhancement through virtual reality (VR). We argue that if one assumes that these technologies work roughly as advertised, the 'cheapened achievement' objection loses much of its bite. The takeaway lesson is that moral enhancement in its most promising and practical forms ultimately evades a leading critique of cognitive and athletic enhancement. We end by reflecting on the potential upshot of our analysis for enhancement debates more widely.
Understanding and harnessing intergroup contact in educational contexts.
Prejudice is a pervasive problem that affects each and every one of us. Understanding how to reduce prejudice and promote better outcomes for both individuals and societies at large is an ambitious but essential task. For decades, social psychologists have theorized about and evaluated approaches to achieve just that, and there is one that stands out from the rest: facilitating intergroup contact, that is, (positive) interactions between members of different groups. Questions remain, however, about how and where good quality (meaningful and cooperative) interactions can be promoted in the face of societal division, and whether such interactions can foster social equality. In this paper, we argue for the importance of educational contexts as sites where future generations encounter the opportunity to interact with, or at the very least learn about, people who are different from them. We first outline social psychological research on the nature and effects of having frequent and good quality contact with people who are different from us, demonstrating evidence from education settings globally. We then provide a series of recommendations for schools and teachers on how to reduce prejudice in the classroom in both the presence and absence of difference.
Beliefs about perception shape perceptual inference: An ideal observer model of detection.
According to Bayesian, "inverse optics" accounts of vision, perceiving is inferring the most likely state of the world given noisy sensory data. This inference depends not only on prior beliefs about the world but also on an internal model specifying how world states translate to visual sensations. Alternative accounts explain perceptual decisions as a rule-based process, with no role for such beliefs about perception. Here, we contrast the two alternatives, focusing on decisions about perceptual absence as a critical test case. We present data from three preregistered experiments where participants performed a near-threshold detection task under different levels of partial stimulus occlusion, thereby visibly manipulating the measurement function going from external world states to internal perceptual states. We find that decisions about presence and absence are differentially sensitive to sensory evidence and occlusion. Furthermore, we observe reliably opposite individual-level effects of occlusion on decisions about absence. Our model accounts for these findings by postulating robust individual differences in the incorporation of beliefs about visibility into perceptual inferences, independent of population variability in visibility itself. We discuss implications for the varied and inferential nature of visual perception more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.
Humans, like all monkeys and apes, have an intense desire to be social. The human social world, however, is extraordinarily complex, depends on sophisticated cognitive and neural processing, and is easily destabilized, with dramatic consequences for our mental and physical health. To show why, I first summarize descriptive aspects of human friendships and what they do for us, then discuss the cognitive and neurobiological processes that underpin them. I then summarize the growing body of evidence suggesting that our mental as well as our physical health and wellbeing are best predicted by the number and quality of close friend/family relationships we have, with five being the optimal number. Finally, I review neurobiological evidence that both number of friends and loneliness itself are correlated with the volume of certain key brain regions associated with the default mode neural network and its associated gray-matter processing units.
Family history of ADHD associates with stronger problem‐solving skills amongst 2‐ to 3‐year‐olds
AbstractBackgroundAttention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is linked to strengths in creative problem‐solving amongst school‐aged children and adults. In contrast, autism (which frequently co‐occurs with ADHD) is associated with lower generativity, and perseverative responses during problem‐solving. Little is known about how ADHD and autism traits—or broader heritable autism and ADHD phenotypes—associate with problem‐solving skills in early childhood.Methods129 UK 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds (exploratory dataset) and 74 Swedish 3‐year‐olds (confirmatory dataset) with and without a family history (FH) of ADHD and autism, completed a problem‐solving task. Parents reported on their 3‐year‐olds’ ADHD and autism traits using the Child Behaviour Checklist and Social Responsiveness Scale‐2. FH group differences in problem‐solving performance were tested using ANOVA (exploratory dataset, FH‐autism and FH‐ADHD as fixed factors) and t‐test (confirmatory and combined datasets split by FH‐ADHD). Linear regressions of problem‐solving success on autism/ADHD traits were run in both samples.ResultsCompared with peers with no FH‐ADHD, children with FH‐ADHD showed higher problem‐solving success at 2 (partial ω2 = 0.106) and 3 years (partial ω2 = 0.045) in the exploratory dataset. In the confirmatory dataset, a FH‐ADHD‐and‐autism group trended towards higher success scores compared with a no‐FH‐ADHD group (comprising FH‐autism‐only and no‐FH ADHD‐or‐autism sub‐groups) but scores were only significantly higher for children with FH‐ADHD‐and‐autism when compared with children with no FH‐ADHD‐or‐autism (gs = 0.977). ADHD (but not autism) traits were positively associated with problem‐solving performance in the exploratory (β = 0.212, p = 0.031) and combined samples (β = 0.173, p = 0.024). Effects were a consistent direction and magnitude, but not significant, in the confirmatory sample alone (β = 0.201, p = 0.103).ConclusionsConsidering a child's family history alongside their neurodivergent traits may help to identify their likely strengths, and how to access them: Children with ADHD traits and/or a family history of ADHD are likely to have an aptitude for generative problem‐solving when presented with highly motivating, ecologically valid challenges.
Simple Executive Function as an endophenotype of autism-ADHD, and differing associations between simple versus complex Executive Functions and autism/ADHD traits.
Autism and ADHD are associated with difficulties with Executive Functions (EFs), but the prevalence and nature of these difficulties in early development is not well understood. In this longitudinal study, 107 children with a family history of autism and/or ADHD (FH-autism/ADHD), and 24 children with No-FH-autism/ADHD completed multiple EF tasks (5 at age 2 years, 7 at age 3 years). Parents reported on their child's autism- (Q-CHAT at age 2, SRS-2 at age 3), and ADHD-related traits (CBCL DSM-ADHD scale, both ages). Compared to the No-FH-autism/ADHD group, the FH-autism/ADHD group showed lower scores on simple EFs (involving response inhibition, and holding in mind) at ages 2 and 3. Exploratory analysis linked FH-autism specifically with lower Executive Attention (top-down attentional control) at age 2, and the combination of FH-autism and FH-ADHD with lower Complex EF (involving selectively deploying responses, or updating information) at age 3. Three-year-olds' Simple EF scores were negatively associated with ADHD-related traits. Complex EF scores were negatively associated with autism traits (before correcting for multiple comparisons). Toddlers with a family history of autism and/or ADHD may benefit from interventions to support simple EF development, whilst those already showing autistic traits may benefit from support with more-complex EF skills.
Computational Frameworks for Human Care
Abstract Some of the earliest science-fiction literature to imagine humans' long-term relationship with machines portrayed technology as a kind of caregiver for humans. The retrofuturist vision of machine care is poised to become reality, as the world of the 2020s is experiencing both incredible advances in AI technology as well as demographic changes that, together, make such systems seem at once possible and necessary. Tracing the key themes from our literary and cultural imagination and framing them against the technical progress in the field of AI alignment reveals insights and lessons for us as we approach the prospect of bringing certain forms of computational care to life. In so doing, they provide not only practical guidance but also give us an opportunity to sharpen our intuitions about the nature of human care itself.
How do Humans Overcome Individual Computational Limitations by Working Together?
Since the cognitive revolution, psychologists have developed formal theories of cognition by thinking about the mind as a computer. However, this metaphor is typically applied to individual minds. Humans rarely think alone; compared to other animals, humans are curiously dependent on stores of culturally transmitted skills and knowledge, and we are particularly good at collaborating with others. Rather than picturing the human mind as an isolated computer, we can imagine each mind as a node in a vast distributed system. Viewing human cognition through the lens of distributed systems motivates new questions about how humans share computation, when it makes sense to do so, and how we can build institutions to facilitate collaboration.