Processing of emotional facial expressions is of great importance in interpersonal relationships. Aberrant engagement with facial expressions, particularly an engagement with sad faces, loss of engagement with happy faces, and enhanced memory of sadness has been found in depression. Since most studies used adult faces, we here examined if such biases also occur in processing of infant faces in those ...

Patient self-management is vital to improved health outcomes for patients with chronic diseases. The objective of this study was to understand the role of wearable sensors in patients’ self-management. A survey encompassing factors related to motivation in mHealth was conducted. Ease of use and sensory accuracy was found most important when choosing a wearable. Manual registration of most health-related ...

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an ...

A cognitive bias often reported for schizophrenia is the tendency to make decisions based on little evidence, namely the jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias. The beads task (Huq et al., 1988) is the most commonly used task to investigate the JTC and different attempts were made to explain the JTC. One proposition is that patients might miscomprehend the task and assume volatility, i.e. a change of ...

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to p ≤ .005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

How has the concept of metacognition been used within basic and applied psychological research? We begin our answer by presenting a broad definition of metacognition, a historical overview of its development and its presence in research databases. To assess which function and facets are most frequently addressed within each of the sub-disciplines, we present results from separate literature searches. ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and ...

<i>Background</i> - Families can experience the postpartum period as overwhelming and many report a special need for support. The Newborn Behavioral Observation (NBO) aims to promote a positive parent-infant relationship by sensitising parents to the infant’s signals. This article evaluates the NBO as a universal preventive intervention within the regular well-baby clinic service on measures of ...

Procrastination is a common problem, but defining and measuring it has been subject to some debate. This paper summarizes results from students and employees (N = 2893) in Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Sweden using the Pure Procrastination Scale (PPS) and the Irrational Procrastination Scale (IPS; Steel, 2010), both assumed to measure unidimensional and closely related constructs. ...

<i>Background and objectives</i> - A plethora of studies has investigated and compared social cognition in autism and schizophrenia ever since both conditions were first described in conjunction more than a century ago. Recent computational theories have proposed similar mechanistic explanations for various symptoms beyond social cognition. They are grounded in the idea of a general misestimation ...