Prediction of the Effect of Adaptation and Active HB Mechanics on Prestin-Based Amplification Using a Macroscopic Model of the Cochlea

Introduction: Negative social evaluation is associated with psychopathology. Given the frequency of evaluation through increasingly prevalent virtual social networks, increased understanding of the effects of this social evaluation is urgently required. Methods: A new digital social peer evaluation experiment (digi-SPEE) was developed to mimic everyday online social interactions between peers. Participants received mildly negative feedback on their appearance, intelligence, and congeniality. Two hundred and forty-one young people [58.9% female, aged 18.9 years (15 to 34)] from an ongoing novel general population twin study participated in this study. Positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), implicit self-esteem, and cortisol were assessed before and after exposure to the social evaluation experiment. Results: The social evaluation experiment decreased PA (B=-5.25, p Conclusion: The digi-SPEE represents a social evaluation stressor that elicits biological and implicit and explicit mental changes that are relevant to mechanisms of psychopathology

The complex and dynamic interplay between self-esteem, belongingness and physical activity in daily life:An experience sampling study in adolescence and young adulthood

Physical activity has positive effects on self-esteem and sense of belongingness and vice versa. The experience sampling method allows for a level of analysis of the within-subject temporal dynamics of these interactions. We hypothesized that physical activity would predict prospective increases of self-esteem and belongingness in the flow of daily life, and vice versa. Additionally, we hypothesized that belongingness would predict self-esteem at the beep level. The study included 781 individuals (17.4 +/- 3.5 years; 59% female) who responded to 10 beeps daily for 6 days to items on physical activity, self-esteem and belongingness. Univariate and multivariate multilevel models were used to examine within-person prospective bidirectional associations. We found that physical activity predicted higher self-esteem and belongingness at t0+1. Participants who had a stronger increase of self-esteem following an increase in physical activity also had a concurrent stronger increase in belongingness. In contrast, self-esteem had no effect on physical activity at the next beep. Belongingness predicted self-esteem. We conclude that the interactions between physical activity, self-esteem and belongingness are complex and fluctuating in daily life. This has important implications for current theories describing the mental health benefits of physical activity

Lower emotional complexity as a prospective predictor of psychopathology in adolescents from the general population

Emotional complexity (EC) involves the ability to distinguish between distinct emotions (differentiation) and the experience of a large range of emotions (diversity). Lower EC has been related to psychopathology in cross-sectional studies. This study aimed to investigate (a) whether EC prospectively predicts psychopathology and (b) whether this effect is contingent on stressful life events. To further explore EC, we compared the effects of differentiation and diversity. Adolescents from the general population (N = 401) rated 8 negatively valenced emotions 10 times a day for 6 consecutive days. Further, they completed the Symptom Checklist-90 (baseline and 1-year follow-up) and a questionnaire on past year's life events at follow-up. Logistic regression analyses tested whether EC-reflected by emotion differentiation (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC]) and diversity (diversity index [DI])-predicted prognosis (good: remitting or lacking symptoms vs. bad: worsening or persisting symptoms). EC predicted prognoses but only when based on the ICC (OREC.ICC = 1.42, p = .02). An ECICC 1 SD above average increased the probability of good prognosis from .67 to .74. This effect was not related to stressful life events (OREC × Life events = 1.03, p = .86) and disappeared when emotion intensity (mean level) was taken into account (OREC = 1.20, p = .20). Predicting future prognosis does not necessitate complex measures of emotional experience (ICC, DI) but rather might be achieved through simpler indices (mean). The discrepant effects of the ICC and DI on prognosis suggest that impaired emotion representation (ICC) plays a more important role in vulnerability to mental ill health than does low diversity of emotions (DI)

Be(com)ing Social:Daily-Life Social Interactions and Parental Bonding

Parents are known to provide a lasting basis for their children's social development. Understanding parent-driven socialization is particularly relevant in adolescence, as an increasing social independence is developed. However, the relationship between key parenting styles of care and control and the microlevel expression of daily-life social interactions has been insufficiently studied. Adolescent and young adult twins and their nontwin siblings (N = 635; mean age = 16.6; age range = 14.2-21.9; 58.6% female; 79.5% in or having completed higher secondary/tertiary education; 2.8% speaking language other than Dutch at home) completed the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) on parental care and control. Participants also completed a 6-day experience sampling period (10 daily beeps, mean compliance = 68.0%) to assess daily-life social interactions. Higher overall parental bonding quality (of both parents) related to more positive social experiences in daily life (e.g., belonging in company), but not to more social behaviors (e.g., being with others). Factor analysis indicated a three-factor structure of the PBI, with care, denial of psychological autonomy, and encouragement of behavioral freedom. Paternal care was uniquely predictive of better social experiences. These findings demonstrate how parenting styles may be uniquely associated with how adolescents experience their social world, with a potentially important role for fathers in particular. This complements the long-held idea of socialization through parenting by bringing it into the context of daily life and implies how both conceptualizations of social functioning and interventions aimed at alleviating social dysfunction might benefit from a stronger consideration of day-to-day social experiences.</p

Emotion regulation in response to daily negative and positive events in youth:The role of event intensity and psychopathology

Environmental and individual contextual factors profoundly influence how people regulate their emotions. The current article addresses the role of event intensity and psychopathology (an admixture of depression, anxiety, and psychoticism) on emotion regulation in response to naturally occurring events. For six days each evening, a youth sample (aged 15-25, N = 713) recorded the intensity of the most positive and most negative event of the day and their subsequent emotion regulation. The intensity of negative events was positively associated with summed total emotion regulation effort, strategy diversity, engaging in rumination, situation modification, emotion expression, and sharing and negatively associated with reappraisal and acceptance. The intensity of positive events was positively associated with strategy diversity, savoring, emotion expression, and sharing. Higher psychopathology symptoms were only related to ruminating more about negative events. We interpret these findings as support for the role of context in the degree of effort and type of emotion regulation that young people engage in

Early warning signals in psychopathology:what do they tell?

BACKGROUND: Despite the increasing understanding of factors that might underlie psychiatric disorders, prospectively detecting shifts from a healthy towards a symptomatic state has remained unattainable. A complex systems perspective on psychopathology implies that such symptom shifts may be foreseen by generic indicators of instability, or early warning signals (EWS). EWS include, for instance, increasing variability, covariance, and autocorrelation in momentary affective states-of which the latter was studied. The present study investigated if EWS predict (i) future worsening of symptoms as well as (ii) the type of symptoms that will develop, meaning that the association between EWS and future symptom shifts would be most pronounced for congruent affective states and psychopathological domains (e.g., feeling down and depression). METHODS: A registered general population cohort of adolescents (mean age 18 years, 36% male) provided ten daily ratings of their affective states for 6 consecutive days. The resulting time series were used to compute EWS in feeling down, listless, anxious, not relaxed, insecure, suspicious, and unwell. At baseline and 1-year follow-up, symptom severity was assessed by the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90). We selected four subsamples of participants who reported an increase in one of the following SCL-90 domains: depression (N = 180), anxiety (N = 192), interpersonal sensitivity (N = 184), or somatic complaints (N = 166). RESULTS: Multilevel models showed that EWS in feeling suspicious anticipated increases in interpersonal sensitivity, as hypothesized. EWS were absent for other domains. While the association between EWS and symptom increases was restricted to the interpersonal sensitivity domain, post hoc analyses showed that symptom severity at baseline was related to heightened autocorrelations in congruent affective states for interpersonal sensitivity, depression, and anxiety. This pattern replicated in a second, independent dataset. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of EWS prior to symptom shifts may depend on the dynamics of the psychopathological domain under consideration: for depression, EWS may manifest only several weeks prior to a shift, while for interpersonal sensitivity, EWS may already occur 1 year in advance. Intensive longitudinal designs where EWS and symptoms are assessed in real-time are required in order to determine at what timescale and for what type of domain EWS are most informative of future psychopathology

Polygenic liability for schizophrenia and childhood adversity influences daily‐life emotion dysregulation and psychosis proneness

Objective To test whether polygenic risk score for schizophrenia (PRS-S) interacts with childhood adversity and daily-life stressors to influence momentary mental state domains (negative affect, positive affect, and subtle psychosis expression) and stress-sensitivity measures. Methods The data were retrieved from a general population twin cohort including 593 adolescents and young adults. Childhood adversity was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Daily-life stressors and momentary mental state domains were measured using ecological momentary assessment. PRS-S was trained on the latest Psychiatric Genetics Consortium schizophrenia meta-analysis. The analyses were conducted using multilevel mixed-effects tobit regression models. Results Both childhood adversity and daily-life stressors were associated with increased negative affect, decreased positive affect, and increased subtle psychosis expression, while PRS-S was only associated with increased positive affect. No gene-environment correlation was detected. There is novel evidence for interaction effects between PRS-S and childhood adversity to influence momentary mental states [negative affect (b = 0.07, P = 0.013), positive affect (b = -0.05, P = 0.043), and subtle psychosis expression (b = 0.11, P = 0.007)] and stress-sensitivity measures. Conclusion Exposure to childhood adversities, particularly in individuals with high PRS-S, is pleiotropically associated with emotion dysregulation and psychosis proneness

Sensitivity to Peer Evaluation and Its Genetic and Environmental Determinants:Findings from a Population-Based Twin Study

Adolescents and young adults are highly focused on peer evaluation, but little is known about sources of their differential sensitivity. We examined to what extent sensitivity to peer evaluation is influenced by interacting environmental and genetic factors. A sample of 354 healthy adolescent twin pairs (n=708) took part in a structured, laboratory task in which they were exposed to peer evaluation. The proportion of the variance in sensitivity to peer evaluation due to genetic and environmental factors was estimated, as was the association with specific a priori environmental risk factors. Differences in sensitivity to peer evaluation between adolescents were explained mainly by non-shared environmental influences. The results on shared environmental influences were not conclusive. No impact of latent genetic factors or gene-environment interactions was found. Adolescents with lower self-rated positions on the social ladder or who reported to have been bullied more severely showed significantly stronger responses to peer evaluation. Not genes, but subjective social status and past experience of being bullied seem to impact sensitivity to peer evaluation. This suggests that altered response to peer evaluation is the outcome of cumulative sensitization to social interactions