Introjective Individuals Tend Toward Anhedonia: Self-Report and Experimental Evidence

A broad line of research has conceptualized personality based on the interaction of two aspects: interpersonal relatedness and self-definition. This theoretical corpus understands these functions as two poles according to the patterns of interaction and relevance in personality. Additionally, the exacerbation of one of these poles generates a psychopathological model that identifies three types of depressive experience: anaclitic, introjective, or mixed pattern. Understanding the lack of interest as a key symptom of depression, this experiment evaluates a relation for anhedonia and the polarities model configuration using an empirical and experimental protocol. We tested 177 individuals using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) subscale for anhedonia and a visual discrimination task with a specific reward system, which was implemented to study reinforcement sensitivity. Participants were classified into four groups by the polarities of experience model. The subscale's results showed that individuals with an introjective character exhibited an enhanced anhedonic symptomatology but no co-occurrence of this evidence on the experimental protocol. These results empirically support the two polarities of the depressive personality model and raise new questions regarding how to experimentally test this relation

Why do People Engage with the Suffering of Strangers? Exploring Epistemic, Eudaimonic, Social, and Affective Motives

Reading violent stories or watching a war documentary are examples in which people voluntarily engage with the suffering of others whom they do not know. The central question of this paper is why people make these decisions. Using a mixed-method approach, we investigated people’s motives to engage with the suffering of strangers. In doing so, we also mapped the characteristics of strangers’ suffering to enable a rich understanding. In Study 1, an online qualitative study (N = 247), participants described situations of suffering and their reasons to engage with it. Using thematic analysis, we developed a typology of the stranger (who), the situation (what), the source (how), and the reason(s) for engaging with the situation (why). We categorized the motives into four overarching themes – epistemic, eudaimonic, social, and affective –, which reflect diversity in the perceived functionality of engaging with a stranger’s suffering. Next, we tested the robustness of the identified motives in a quantitative study. In Study 2, participants (N = 250) recalled a situation in which they engaged with the suffering of a stranger and indicated their endorsement with a variety of possible motives. Largely mirroring the motives emerging from Study 1, Study 2 participants engaged with strangers’ suffering to acquire knowledge (e.g., learn something about the world), for personal utility (e.g., to prepare for an emergency), for social utility (e.g., supporting others), and to feel positive (e.g., gratitude) and negative (e.g., outrage) emotions. We discuss implications for understanding the exploration of human suffering as a motivated phenomenon

Hydrocortisone decreases metacognitive efficiency independent of perceived stress

International audienceIt is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one’s own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress. In other words, the single physiological response of stress produces a net effect on metacognition. These results inform our basic understanding of the physiological bases of metacognition. They are also relevant for applied or clinical research about situations involving stress, anxiety, depression, or simply cortisol use