Context-Dependent Responses to the Spread of COVID-19 Among National and International Students During the First Lockdown:An Online Survey

Background: Restrictions to minimize social contact was necessary to prevent the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus but may have impacted individuals' mental well-being. Emotional responses are modulated by contextual information. Living abroad during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have boosted the feeling of isolation as the context is unfamiliar. Objectives: This study compared the psychological impact of social distancing in national students (living in a familiar context) versus international students (living in an unfamiliar context). Methods: During March/April 2020 (first lockdown in the Netherlands), 850 university students completed an online survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to compare how students' responses to the virus were predicted by health anxiety, emotional distress, and personal traits. Results: Compared with national students, international students showed higher levels in 4 identified factors (COVID-19-related worry, perceived risk of infection, distance from possibly contaminated objects, distance from social situations). The factors were mainly predicted by health anxiety across international students, while emotional distress and individual traits (eg, intolerance of uncertainty) played a role across national students.Conclusions: In the familiar context, individual characteristics (traits) predicted the responses to the virus, while the unfamiliar context drove individuals' health-focused responses. Living in a foreign country is associated with psychological burdens and this should be considered by universities for more pronounced social support and clear references to health-related institutions.</p

Context-dependent responses to the spread of COVID-19 among national and international students during the first lockdown:An online survey

Background: Restrictions to minimize social contact was necessary to prevent the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus but may have impacted individuals' mental well-being. Emotional responses are modulated by contextual information. Living abroad during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have boosted the feeling of isolation as the context is unfamiliar. Objectives: This study compared the psychological impact of social distancing in national students (living in a familiar context) versus international students (living in an unfamiliar context). Methods: During March/April 2020 (first lockdown in the Netherlands), 850 university students completed an online survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to compare how students' responses to the virus were predicted by health anxiety, emotional distress, and personal traits. Results: Compared with national students, international students showed higher levels in 4 identified factors (COVID-19-related worry, perceived risk of infection, distance from possibly contaminated objects, distance from social situations). The factors were mainly predicted by health anxiety across international students, while emotional distress and individual traits (eg, intolerance of uncertainty) played a role across national students. Conclusions:In the familiar context, individual characteristics (traits) predicted the responses to the virus, while the unfamiliar context drove individuals' health-focused responses. Living in a foreign country is associated with psychological burdens and this should be considered by universities for more pronounced social support and clear references to health-related institutions.</p

No influence of threat uncertainty on fear generalization

Fear overgeneralization and perceived uncertainty about future outcomes have been suggested as risk factors for clinical anxiety. However, little is known regarding how they influence each other. In this study, we investigated whether different levels of threat uncertainty influence fear generalization. Three groups of healthy participants underwent a differential fear conditioning protocol followed by a generalization test. All groups learned to associate one female face (conditioned stimulus, CS+) with a female scream (unconditioned stimulus, US), whereas the other face (CS−) was not associated with the scream. In order to manipulate threat uncertainty, one group (low uncertainty, n = 26) received 80%, the second group (moderate uncertainty, n = 32) received 60%, and the third group (high uncertainty, n = 30) 40% CS-US contingency. In the generalization test, all groups saw CS+ and CS− again along with four morphs resembling the CSs in steps of 20%. Subjective (expectancy, valence, and arousal ratings), psychophysiological (skin conductance response, SCR), and visuocortical (steady-state visual evoked potentials, ssVEPs) indices of fear were registered. Participants expected the US according to their reinforcement schedules and the discriminative responses to CS+/CS− increased with more uncertainty in skin conductance. However, acquisition of conditioned fear was not evident in ssVEPs. During the generalization test, we found no effect of threat uncertainty in any of the measured variables, but the strength of generalization for threat expectancy ratings was positively correlated with dispositional intolerance of uncertainty. This study suggests that mere threat uncertainty does not modulate fear generalization.</p

Examining the impact of cue similarity and fear learning on perceptual tuning

Past research on the effects of associative aversive learning on discrimination acuity has shown mixed results, including increases, decreases, and no changes in discrimination ability. An animal study found that the type of learning experience determined the direction and extent of learning-induced changes. The current preregistered web-based study aimed to translate these findings to humans. Experiment 1 (N = 245) compared changes in stimulus discrimination between simple learning (only one oriented grating cue), coarse differential conditioning (physically distinct cues), and fine differential conditioning (physically similar cues) as well as to their three respective control groups. The discrimination task consisted of a two-alternative-forced-choice task with oriented grating stimuli. During learning, a specific orientation was paired with unpleasant pictures. Our analysis using generative modeling demonstrated weak to moderate evidence that aversive learning did not alter discrimination acuity in any of the groups. In a follow-up experiment (N = 121), we replicated these findings despite successful learning trajectories in all three groups and a more detailed assessment of discrimination acuity. Contrary to prior assumptions, our findings indicate that aversive learning does not enhance perceptual discrimination, and the presence of additional safety cues does not appear to moderate this effect.</p

Lying obliquely—a clinical sign of cognitive impairment: cross sectional observational study

Objective To determine if failure to spontaneously orient the body along the longitudinal axis of a hospital bed when asked to lie down is associated with cognitive impairment in older patients

No intolerance of errors:The effect of intolerance of uncertainty on performance monitoring revisited

Errors have been conceptualized as internal forms of threat that can cause harm in unpredictable ways. An index of error processing is the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential reflecting variability in the sensitivity to errors. Prior work has shown the relationship between psychopathology symptoms and the ERN is unclear, and may be moderated by intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a trait that captures how people react to unpredictability. IU includes two subfactors of prospective IU (active seeking of predictability) and inhibitory IU (behavioral paralysis). In the present study, 188 undergraduates performed an Eriksen flanker task designed to elicit the ERN, while brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). Participants completed the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale, Short Form (IUS-12), and other measures of anxiety, depression and worry. Total IU explained 5 % of the variance in correct-response negativity (CRN), but was not associated with the ERN in our sample. In contrast to previous findings, the IU subfactors did not predict the ERN or post-error slowing (PES), nor did total IU and depression interact to predict the ERN. Exploratory analyses also showed that total IU did not moderate the relationship between trait anxiety and the ERN. Small samples may have previously exaggerated the links between self-reported IU and the ERN. As such, further high-powered replications are required to confirm if, and how, they are related

Cognitive reappraisal is not always successful during pain anticipation: Stimulus-focused and goal-based reappraisal effects on self-reports and peripheral psychophysiology

The present study aims at comparing the effects of two subtypes of cognitive reappraisal (i.e., stimulus-focused vs. goal-based reappraisal) to reduce anticipatory anxiety of pain. Affective ratings, startle reflex, and autonomic measures (electrodermal and heart rate changes) were used as a measure of emotion regulation success. A total of 86 undergraduate students completed an anticipatory task in which they had to regulate their negative emotions or react naturally when faced with the possibility of receiving a painful thermal stimulus. Participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups to compare the stimulus-focused and goal-based strategies explored here. Our results revealed enhanced self-reported anxiety, electrodermal activity and eyeblink response when participants tried to voluntarily down-regulate their negative emotions, compared to the control instruction. Differences between both cognitive reappraisal groups were not found. These unexpected findings suggest that brief reappraisal instructions may not necessarily be favorable for regulating emotions during anticipation of aversive events. Moreover, these results are further explained in terms of the pain expectation, the painful stimuli modality, and emotion regulation instructions.Funding for open access charge: CRUE-Universitat Jaume

A Systematic Review of the Inter-individual Differences in Avoidance Learning

Avoidance is typically adaptive given it prevents threat. However, avoidance becomes maladaptive when it is executed out of proportion of threat (i.e., excessive or insufficient avoidance), persists in the absence of threat, or excessively generalizes to other innocuous situations. Although there has been an increase in research in these different processes of maladaptive avoidance, the role of inter-individual differences in these avoidance processes receives less research attention, despite its theoretical and clinical importance. In this systematic review, we summarized the role of inter-individual traits that relate to risk or resilient factors for anxiety-related disorders, trauma-and stressor-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive related disorders, pain related disorders, eating-related disorders, and affective disorders. A majority of the inter-individual differences had an apparent mixed or null effect on the different processes of avoidance. We discussed this lack of evidence of inter-individual differences on avoidance due to a lack of methodological and/or analytical consensus in the field, in addition to a lack of integration of recent findings into existing theories. Recommendations for future research are discussed, with a focus on examining the conditions or experimental parameters for certain inter-individual traits to manifest their effects on avoidance, identifying the nuances of methodological and/or inter-individual differences in avoidance, and a call for integrating recent preliminary findings into existing theories.</p

Attentional bias modification in social anxiety: Effects on the N2pc component

Several meta-analyses to date have confirmed the efficacy of attentional bias modification (ABM) in shifting reaction times away from threatening stimuli, reducing anxiety symptoms, and buffering against stressor vulnerability. The reliability of reaction time differences, however, has been found to show unacceptable psychometric properties. In this study, we tested the impact of an extensive Dot-Probe ABM procedure, consisting of close to 7000 trials, concurrently with behavioral and electrophysiological measures within a large sample of over 100 highly socially anxious participants. Results indicated that the N2pc component demonstrates superior internal consistency and more statistical power in detecting attentional biases and their modification than reaction time (RT) differences. RTs were neither indicative of an attentional bias before ABM nor of a modification over time. In contrast, the N2pc indexed both an initial attentional preference for threatening stimuli and an alteration of this relationship after training. Outcomes were not specific for attentional training away from threat but also occurred in the no-contingency control procedure, casting doubt on the theoretic underpinnings of ABM. Electrophysiological measures are an important complement to the ABM literature and should be further utilized to assess attentional biases with excellent reliability

Brain Activations to Emotional Pictures are Differentially Associated with Valence and Arousal Ratings

Several studies have investigated the neural responses triggered by emotional pictures, but the specificity of the involved structures such as the amygdala or the ventral striatum is still under debate. Furthermore, only few studies examined the association of stimuli's valence and arousal and the underlying brain responses. Therefore, we investigated brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging of 17 healthy participants to pleasant and unpleasant affective pictures and afterwards assessed ratings of valence and arousal. As expected, unpleasant pictures strongly activated the right and left amygdala, the right hippocampus, and the medial occipital lobe, whereas pleasant pictures elicited significant activations in left occipital regions, and in parts of the medial temporal lobe. The direct comparison of unpleasant and pleasant pictures, which were comparable in arousal clearly indicated stronger amygdala activation in response to the unpleasant pictures. Most important, correlational analyses revealed on the one hand that the arousal of unpleasant pictures was significantly associated with activations in the right amygdala and the left caudate body. On the other hand, valence of pleasant pictures was significantly correlated with activations in the right caudate head, extending to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings support the notion that the amygdala is primarily involved in processing of unpleasant stimuli, particularly to more arousing unpleasant stimuli. Reward-related structures like the caudate and NAcc primarily respond to pleasant stimuli, the stronger the more positive the valence of these stimuli is