Psychology

Stress during adolescence has profound effects on psychological, behavioral, and neurobiological outcomes in adulthood. This study investigates the impact of adolescent stress on safety learning, anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors, and associated neurocircuitry using a rat model. Adolescent male Long Evans rats underwent an unpredictable intermittent stress regimen, followed by behavioral testing and immunohistological analyses in adulthood. It was confirmed that stress impaired safety learning and increased fear generalization. Behavioral assays revealed heightened anxiety- and depressive-like phenotypes in stressed rats, evidenced by reduced open-arm exploration in the elevated plus maze and increased immobility in the forced swim test, although limited changes in sucrose preference were noted during habituation. Immunohistological findings showed reductions in hippocampal neurogenesis (DCX+ cells) and disruptions in GABAergic interneuron plasticity (PV+/PNN+ populations) within the medial prefrontal cortex. These alterations suggest that adolescent stress leads to long-term changes in brain regions associated with emotional regulation and stress resilience.

Author Keywords: Adolescencent Stress, Anxiety-like Behaviour, Hippocampus, Medial Prefrontal Cortex, Neuroplasticity, Safety Learning

The crucial role of parents in shaping child development has been widely recognized, with extensive research focusing on various aspects such as parenting styles, attachment relationships, and specific parenting practices. Mind-mindedness, defined as a parent's ability to recognize and understand their child's mental states, is emerging as an important factor in child development. The present study sought to investigate cross-cultural differences in maternal mind-mindedness, parenting practices, and their relationship to child compliance in China and Canada. The participants included 136 Chinese mother-child dyads and 83 Canadian mother-child dyads, with children ranging from ages 4 to 7. Maternal mind-mindedness, parenting practices, and child compliance were coded through observational method. Results suggest that while Canadian mothers were more mind-minded, Chinese mothers were more power assertive. Moreover, maternal parenting practices mediated the relationship between mind-mindedness and child compliance in China. This study cultivated a culturally sensitive understanding of the parent-child relationship.

Author Keywords: Child Compliance, Culture, Maternal Involvement, Mind-Mindedness, Parenting, Power Assertion

Pharmacological cognitive enhancement is the use of prescription drugs to improve cognitive functioning in healthy individuals. Multiple ethical concerns have been raised by such use. The purpose of this project was to develop a reliable and valid measure to assess public attitudes about this issue. Participants were university students in Studies 1 (N = 465), 2 (N = 580) and 3 (N = 156). In Study 1 principal components analysis reduced the 90-item Attitudes Toward Pharmacological Cognitive Enhancement Scale to 42 items that loaded onto four components: Cheating/Unfairness, Motivation, Expected Benefits and Safety. Subscale scores differentiated users and nonusers. In Study 2 confirmatory factor analyses supported the model and statistically significant associations were found with related constructs such as attitudes toward performance-enhancing drugs, and prescription drug expectancies. In Study 3 test-retest reliability over a 3-week interval was above .70 for 3 of 4 subscales. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Author Keywords: attitudes, cognitive enhancement, nonmedical use of prescription drugs, scale development, smart drugs

Damage to the hippocampus (HPC) causes retrograde amnesia for some memories, but spaced learning mitigates this. Contextual fear conditioning (CFC) studies in rats demonstrate that distributing conditioning over multiple sessions makes a memory less vulnerable to HPC damage, and it has been suggested this occurs through incremental strengthening of the memory outside the HPC via separate bouts of cellular consolidation. To explore this, we examined the number of, and temporal intervals between, spaced CFC sessions required to make a memory less vulnerable to HPC damage. Experiment 1 established six sessions spaced over three days as sufficient to create a memory no longer requiring the HPC. Experiments 2 and 3 found that spacing those six sessions in a single day also created a memory no longer requiring the HPC, but only when the sessions were separated by an interval believed to be sufficient for separate bouts of cellular consolidation to occur.

Author Keywords: consolidation, context fear, hippocampus, memory, retrograde amnesia, spaced learning

Social scientists have debated whether religious involvement is associated with differences in deviant behaviours for over a century. Religious practices and beliefs are often associated with less deviant behaviours in young adults, such as less frequent drug use and law-breaking. Empirical results on these associations, though, have been mixed, possibly due to heterogenous measures. Recent literature has begun teasing apart religious practices (e.g., attending church) from spiritual beliefs (e.g., believing in higher powers) and exploring their unique associations with different outcomes. The present study tested the independent and interactive effects of religion and spirituality in predicting deviance. Religion was negatively associated with some types of deviance, the relationship remained significant even after controlling for covariates. Spirituality was not reliably associated with deviance. There was an interaction between religion and spirituality, where the combination of the two was associated with the lowest level of deviance. Further findings and implications are discussed.

Author Keywords: deviance, religion, spirituality, youth

Metaphors are a ubiquitous component of communication, which are either conventional (familiar) or novel phrases. Metaphors are useful for discussing abstract concepts such as emotions that can be difficult to discuss literally, and as such benefit social relationships (Nippold et al., 2017). Research on contributors to novel metaphor production is limited and previous methodologies have been flawed, however some research suggests a role for executive function (EF; e.g., Menashe et al., 2020). Additionally, figurative language comprehension and metaphor production have been demonstrated to rely on overlapping abilities (Benedek et al., 2014). The current study examined figurative language comprehension and EF in novel metaphor production in 112 young adults aged 17-29 years. Neither individual nor groupwise analyses revealed any relations between EF or figurative language comprehension and novel metaphor production. However, an association with nonverbal IQ was found, suggesting that abstract reasoning abilities may play an important role in metaphoric ability.

Author Keywords: Executive function, Figurative language comprehension, Metaphor generation, Novel metaphor

The traditions of spirituality and meditation have been found to connect to psychological health in the form of increased happiness, empathy, and decreased anxiety. The present study aimed to better understand how these practices might connect to such beneficial outcomes. A sample of 363 undergraduate student participants completed a questionnaire that measured their meditation practice, mindfulness, spirituality, happiness, empathy, and anxiety. Contrary to expectations, meditators and non- meditators did not significantly differ in their psychological health outcomes. These findings have implications for how meditators and non-meditator groups should be differentiated in research. Regarding spirituality, the purpose and meaning and innerness dimensions of the construct significantly predicted happiness and decreased anxiety, while the unified interconnectedness dimension significantly predicted empathy. The transcendence dimension of spirituality did not significantly predict psychological health. This pattern of results has implications for spiritual care interventions that intend to augment psychological health.

Author Keywords: Anxiety, Empathy, Happiness, Meditation, Psychological health, Spirituality

Sexual agency is receiving more attention in sexuality research though its contribution to sexual well-being has yet to be determined. Sexual agency has been theorized as an overarching concept comprised of both internal and external components. Both feelings and behaviours in the sexual domain can be impacted by prevalent culturally prescribed sexual scripts. The present study assessed sexual assertiveness, sexual self-concept, and comfort in sexual communication (i.e., together conceptualized as sexual agency) to determine if greater levels of these indices led to more direct consent communication, more intrinsic motivations for engaging in sex, and more positive sexual evaluations. Analyses were run separately on two samples: a student and community participant pool. Results indicate that greater sexual agency predicts being more intrinsically driven to engage in sex, using more direct consent communication, and reporting more positive evaluations of one's most recent sexual encounter. Gendered analyses reveal that cismen and ciswomen have similar levels of sexual agency, and rate their encounters similarly. Having greater sexual agency was a better predictor of experiencing sexual well-being compared to gender. Implications for policy development and sexual education curriculum reform are discussed, and future research directions are suggested.

Author Keywords: Sexual Agency, Sexual Consent, Sexual Motivations, Sexual Regret, Sexual Well-being

Despite the extensive application of Baumrind's parenting style typology, some argue that it may not adequately capture the implicit warmth Chinese parents embrace. This study attempted to examine whether mind-mindedness could be a key indicator for helping children understand the benevolent intentions behind their mothers' authoritarian parenting practices. Specifically, this study investigated the variations in parenting styles, mind-mindedness, and children's behavior problems in Canada and China, the relationship among these variables, and the moderating effect of mind-mindedness on the relationship between authoritarian parenting and children's behavior problems. Participants were 83 Canadian and 136 Chinese mother-child dyads. Data on parenting styles, mind-mindedness, and problem behaviors were collected from maternal reports and lab observations. As expected, while Chinese mothers exhibited more authoritarian tendencies than Canadian mothers, their mind-mindedness buffer against the negative effect of maternal high-power strategies on children's behavior problems after controlling for maternal age and education. These results provide new perspectives on understanding Chinese parenting.

Author Keywords: culture, externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, mind-mindedness, parenting styles, preschoolers

This study investigates associations between self-other differentiation (the ability to distinguish and coordinate the self and other perspective during social problem-solving) and specific ego functions (reality testing, judgement, sense of reality, object relations, and synthetic-integrative function) from a cognitive perspective in two groups of adolescents aged 12 to 18 years. One group was referred for mental health problems (clinic-referred, n = 129) and the other was a typically developing comparison group (control, n = 184). Clinic-referred adolescents scored significantly lower in both self-other differentiation and ego functions compared to nonclinic-referred adolescents, suggesting a potential relation with adolescent mental health. While self-other differentiation was generally associated with ego function, no moderating effect of clinic referral was observed. Findings suggest a link between self-other differentiation and different aspects of judgement (the ability to anticipate consequences, understand reactions, and learn from past mistakes).

Author Keywords: adolescence, ego function, interpersonal negotiation strategies, mental health problems, self-other differentiation, social problem solving