Validation of the FEEL-KJ: an instrument to measure emotion regulation strategies in children and adolescents

Although the field of emotion regulation in children and adolescents is growing, there is need for age-adjusted measures that assess a large variety of strategies. An interesting instrument in this respect is the FEEL-KJ because it measures 7 adaptive and 5 maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in response to three different emotions. However, the FEEL-KJ has not yet been validated extensively. Therefore, the current study aims to test the internal structure and validity of the FEEL-KJ in a large sample of Dutch-speaking Belgian children and adolescents (N = 1102, 8–18 years old). The investigation of the internal structure confirms earlier reports of a two-factor structure with Adaptive and Maladaptive Emotion Regulation as overarching categories. However, it also suggests that the two-factor model is more complex than what was previously assumed. The evaluation of the FEEL-KJ validity furthermore provides evidence for its construct and external validity. In sum, the current study confirms that the FEEL-KJ is a valuable and reliable measure of emotion regulation strategies in children and adolescents

Beyond asking : exploring the use of automatic price evaluations to implicitly estimate consumers’ willingness-to-pay

Explicit consumers responses are often adverse for the validity of procedures used to estimate consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP). This paper investigates if price evaluations occur automatically and to what extent these automatic processes can be used to implicitly estimate consumers' WTP. An adapted version of the task-rule congruency (TRC) paradigm was used in two studies. Results of the first study provided evidence for the notion that prices are automatically evaluated. However, the used procedure had limitations that restricted its utility as an implicit WTP estimate. The procedure was adjusted, and an additional study was conducted. The results of the second study also indicated that prices were evaluated automatically. Additionally, the procedure used during the second study allowed to explore to what extent the observed TRC effects could be used to implicitly estimate consumers' WTP. Taken together, these studies provided evidence for the notion that prices are evaluated automatically. Furthermore, the procedure has the potential to be further developed into an implicit estimate of consumers' WTP

The effect of money priming on self-focus in the imitation-inhibition task : a registered report

The self-sufficiency hypothesis suggests that priming individuals with money makes them focus more strongly on themselves than on others. However, recently, research supporting this claim has been heavily criticized and some attempts to replicate have failed. A reason for the inconsistent findings in the field may lay in the common use of explicit measures, because they tend to rely on one or just a few items and are thus prone to demand effects and low reliability. In the present research, we administered, in two experiments, the imitation-inhibition task – a robust, unobtrusive, and reliable paradigm that is sensitive to self-other focus on a trial-by-trial basis. A pilot study found an increased focus on the self as compared to others when primed with money. Building on this finding, a preregistered high-powered experiment replicated this effect, suggesting that money primes may indeed increase a focus on the self. An additionally carried out meta-analysis indicates that automatic imitation is modulated by self-other focus and that money primes lead to a smaller focus on the self than conventional methods. Overall, the found effects are rather small and several limitations, such as order effects, call for a cautious interpretation of the findings

When your error becomes my error : anterior insula activation in response to observed errors is modulated by agency

Research on error observation has focused predominantly on situations in which individuals are passive observers of errors. In daily life, however, we are often jointly responsible for the mistakes of others. In the current study, we examined how information on agency is integrated in the error observation network. It was found that activation in the anterior insula but not in the posterior medial frontal cortex or lateral prefrontal cortex differentiates between observed errors for which we are partly responsible or not. Interestingly, the activation pattern of the AI was mirrored by feelings of guilt and shame. These results suggest that the anterior insula is crucially involved in evaluating the consequences of our actions for other persons. Consequently, this region may be thought of as critical in guiding social behavior

Early interpersonal trauma reduces temporoparietal junction activity during spontaneous mentalising

Experience of interpersonal trauma and violence alters self-other distinction and mentalising abilities (also known as theory of mind, or ToM), yet little is known about their neural correlates. This fMRI study assessed temporoparietal junction (TPJ) activation, an area strongly implicated in interpersonal processing, during spontaneous mentalising in 35 adult women with histories of childhood physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse (childhood abuse; CA) and 31 women without such experiences (unaffected comparisons; UC). Participants watched movies during which an agent formed true or false beliefs about the location of a ball, while participants always knew the true location of the ball. As hypothesised, right TPJ activation was greater for UCs compared to CAs for false vs true belief conditions. In addition, CAs showed increased functional connectivity relative to UCs between the rTPJ and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Finally, the agent’s belief about the presence of the ball influenced participants’ responses (ToM index), but without group differences. These findings highlight that experiencing early interpersonal trauma can alter brain areas involved in the neural processing of ToM and perspective-taking during adulthood

Mimicry and automatic imitation are not correlated

It is widely known that individuals have a tendency to imitate each other. However, different psychological disciplines assess imitation in different manners. While social psychologists assess mimicry by means of action observation, cognitive psychologists assess automatic imitation with reaction time based measures on a trial-by-trial basis. Although these methods differ in crucial methodological aspects, both phenomena are assumed to rely on similar underlying mechanisms. This raises the fundamental question whether mimicry and automatic imitation are actually correlated. In the present research we assessed both phenomena and did not find a meaningful correlation. Moreover, personality traits such as empathy, autism traits, and traits related to self- versus other-focus did not correlate with mimicry or automatic imitation either. Theoretical implications are discussed

Does anxiety induced by social interaction influence the perception of bistable biological motion?

When observing point light walkers orthographically projected onto a frontoparallel plane, the direction in which they are walking is ambiguous. Nevertheless, observers more often perceive them as facing towards than as facing away from them. This phenomenon is known as the "facing-the-viewer bias" (FTV). Two interpretations of the facing-the-viewer bias exist in the literature: a top-down and a bottom-up interpretation. Support for the top-down interpretation comes from evidence that social anxiety correlates with the FTV bias. However, the direction of the relationship between the FTV bias and social anxiety is inconsistent across studies and evidence for a correlation has mostly been obtained with relatively small samples. Therefore, the first aim of the current study was to provide a strong test of the hypothesized relationship between social anxiety and the facing-the-viewer bias in a large sample of 200 participants recruited online. In addition, a second aim was to further extend top-down accounts by investigating if the FTV bias is also related to autistic traits. Our results replicate the FTV bias, showing that people indeed tend to perceive orthographically projected point light walkers as facing towards them. However, no correlation between the FTV bias and social interaction anxiety (tau = -0.01, p = .86, BF = 0.18) or autistic traits (tau = -0.0039, p = .45, BF = 0.18) was found. As such, our data cannot confirm the top-down interpretation of the facing-the-viewer bias

Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, 'Do you think free will exists?'), but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes (FWA, 'Do you like/value will?'). Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large (N = 1100), open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset

Somatosensory attending to the lower back is associated with response speed of movements signaling back pain

The present study investigated if preparing a movement that is expected to evoke pain results in hesitation to initiate the movement (i.e., avoidance) and, especially, if the allocation of attention to the threatened body part mediates such effect. To this end, healthy volunteers (N = 33) performed a postural perturbation task recruiting lower back muscles. In 'threat trials', the movement was sometimes followed by an experimental pain stimulus on the back, whereas in 'no-threat trials', a non-painful control stimulus was applied. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to assess attending to the lower back. Specifically, somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) to task-irrelevant tactile stimuli administered to the lower back were recorded during movement preparation. Reaction times (RTs) were recorded to assess movement initiation. The results revealed faster responses and enhanced somatosensory attending to the lower back on threat trials than on no-threat trials. Importantly, the amplitude of the N95 SEP component predicted RTs and was found to partially mediate the effect of pain anticipation on movement initiation. These findings suggest that somatosensory attending might be a potential mechanism by which pain anticipation can modulate motor execution