Daily Life Events Research Articles

The role of frontal-subcortical connectivity in the relation between coping styles and reactivity and downregulation of negative emotion

Coping styles (CS) reflect individuals' habitual use of strategies for coping with negative events in daily life. Although research into coping has not reached consistent agreement about classifying coping strategies as either inherently adaptive or maladaptive, the influence of maladaptive CS on mental health is noticeable. CS might also be related to emotion regulation and associated brain systems. Participants (N = 165) completed measurements of CS, trait emotions including trait anxiety, depressive symptoms and happiness and then performed an emotion regulation task, in conjunction with functional MRI. Individual differences in maladaptive CS use were associated with higher trait negative emotionality and higher state reactivity of negative emotion. Concurrent bilateral amygdala-right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) connectivity during passive negative stimulus processing mediated the relation between maladaptive CS and negative emotion ratings. Psychophysiological interaction analyses showed that maladaptive and adaptive CS were linked to patterns of frontal-subcortical connectivity during state emotion regulation. These results suggest that maladaptive CS might be related to negative emotion processing and weaker spontaneous regulation and indicate that maladaptive CS is a risk factor in individual mental health.

Effect of pulmonary rehabilitation programs including lower limb endurance training on dyspnea in stable COPD: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is recommended as an effective treatment for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Previous meta-analyses showed that PR improves exercise capacity and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). However, they did not evaluate the effect of PR on the sensation of dyspnea. We searched six databases in May 2019 for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that examined PR, including supervised lower limb endurance training as a minimal essential component that was continued for 4-12 weeks, in patients with stable COPD, with changes from baseline dyspnea as a primary outcome. Secondary outcomes were changes in exercise capacity, HRQOL, activity of daily life (ADL), physical activity (PA), and adverse events. We calculated the pooled weighted mean difference (MD) using a random effects model. We identified 42 studies with 2150 participants. Compared with the control, PR improved dyspnea, as shown using the British Medical Research Council (MRC) questionnaire (MD, -0.64; 95% CI, -0.99 to -0.30; p=0.0003), transitional dyspnea index (MD, 1.95; 95% CI, 1.09 to 2.81; p=0.0001), modified Borg score during exercise (MD, -0.62; 95% CI, -1.10 to -0.14; p=0.01), and Chronic Respiratory Questionnaire (CRQ) dyspnea score (MD, 0.91; 95% CI, 0.39 to 1.44; p=0.0007). PR significantly increased exercise capacity measured by the 6min walking distance time, peak workload, and peak VO2. It improved HRQOL measured by the St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire and CRQ, but not on PA or ADL. These results indicated that PR programs including lower limb endurance training improve dyspnea, HRQOL, and exercise capacity in patients with stable COPD.

Characterizing Lifetime and Daily Experiences of Weight Stigma among Sexual Minority Women with Overweight and Obesity: A Descriptive Study.

Sexual minority women are disproportionately impacted by obesity yet are underrepresented in weight stigma research. This Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study is a secondary analysis that aimed to elucidate the frequency and contextual characteristics of perceived experiences of lifetime and momentary weight stigma among sexual minority women with overweight/obesity. Participants were 55 sexual minority women ages 18–60 with a body mass index ≥25 kg/m2. Perceived lifetime weight stigma events were assessed at baseline. For the subsequent five days, participants used a smartphone to complete five daily, random EMA prompts assessing the frequency/characteristics of perceived weight stigma events in daily life. All participants reported at least one lifetime weight stigma event. During the EMA period, participants reported 44 momentary weight stigma events (M = 0.80), with 24% of participants reporting at least one event. During most instances of weight stigma, women perceived the stigma’s cause to be their weight and another minority identity (e.g., sexual orientation). Findings showing high rates of perceived lifetime weight stigma in this sample and frequent co-occurrence of perceived weight stigma with stigma due to other marginalized identities in daily life underscore the need for future, larger studies investigating weight stigma through an intersectional lens in sexual minority women with overweight/obesity.

Effects of Personal Just World Belief on Professional Growth and Well-Being of Preschool Teachers

A fair and just world is the pursuit of people expecting to be fairly treated. Without such a belief, an individual could hardly devote to pursuing long-term objectives and adapt to irregular social events in daily life. Along with the emphasis of the government and the society on preschool education, preschool teachers, being the practitioners of preschool education, are concerned about the living behavior. The subjective well-being of preschool teachers being the key factor in the working state is gradually focused by researchers. Taking preschool teachers in City A in China as the research objects, total 350 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 342 copies among the 342 retrieved copies are valid, with the valid rate 97.7%. The research results conclude that 1.just world belief would affect professional growth, 2.just world belief would affect well-being, and 3.professional growth shows remarkably positive effects on well-being. According to the results to propose suggestions, it is expect to enhance the quality of domestic preschool education and promote the healthy growth of children.

The impact of age on the temporal compression of daily life events in episodic memory.

While age differences in episodic memory are well documented, the impact of age on the structure of memories for real-world events has not been investigated in detail. Recent research has shown that the continuous flow of information that constitutes daily life events is compressed in episodic memory, such that the time needed to mentally replay an event is shorter than the actual event duration. To examine whether this process of temporal compression of prior experience in episodic memory is affected by aging, we asked young and older adults to engage in a series of events that simulated daily life activities while their experience was automatically recorded using a wearable camera. Subsequently, participants were asked to mentally replay these events in as much detail as possible and then to verbally report recalled contents and to rate the subjective qualities of their memories. Results revealed that the rates of temporal compression of events during mental replay were similar in young and older adults. In both age groups, rates of temporal compression were predicted by the density of recalled moments of prior experience per unit of time of the actual event duration. Interestingly, however, the number of recalled moments predicted the subjective vividness of memories in young but not in older adults. Taken together, these results suggest that the process of temporal compression of events in episodic memory is unaffected by age but that the subjective experience of memory vividness becomes less tied to recalled moments that represent the unfolding of events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Getting Over It: Working Memory Capacity and Affective Responses to Stressful Events in Daily Life

Supplemental Material for Getting Over It: Working Memory Capacity and Affective Responses to Stressful Events in Daily Life

Cognitive Intervention Targeting Autobiographical Memory Impairment in Patients With Schizophrenia Using a Wearable Camera: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in schizophrenia affects the richness of detail in personal memories and is one of the major predictors of patients’ social functioning. Despite the empirical evidence attributing these difficulties to a defective encoding process, cognitive remediation interventions targeting AM in schizophrenia often focus on the remote past, making it difficult to address the consequences of poor encoding. Our study evaluated the efficacy of an innovative approach using a wearable camera (NarrativeClip®) in reinforcing the encoding of recent daily life events in patients with schizophrenia. Seventeen patients with schizophrenia and 15 control participants wore the camera during four consecutive days. Then, memories of events experienced during these days were reinforced using different types of retrospective, i.e. interventions designed to promote a re-encoding of the event. We evaluated two types of retrospective using the camera pictures: a simple visual retrospective and a visual retrospective associated with a specific event-cueing (VisR+EC). These two techniques were compared to a verbal retrospective and to the absence of retrospective. Our results showed that the VisR+EC allowed patients to retrieve as many details as the control group at a two-week interval. However, patients’ memories remained impaired when a simple visual or a verbal retrospective was used. Our study provides encouraging results to foster the use of a wearable camera in individualized cognitive remediation programs for AM impairment in schizophrenia.

Lifelogging: el fenómeno de las “cajas negras” personales

Lifelogging enables people to digitally record aspects of their daily life events in varying amounts of detail, for a variety of purposes. This continuous record can support human memory or can act as a form of surrogate memory. As such, it somehow constitutes a comprehensive «black box» of certain daily activities and therefore can potentially mine knowledge about how we live our lives. Although «total capture» seems unfeasible for the time being, it is possible to generate records that, despite being inevitably partial or fragmented, are very useful in a good number of scenarios in which users can infer knowledge about themselves for their own benefit. However, keeping this personal data on remote hard disks can be risky and should be carefully considered.

Higher well-being is related to reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life.

Within the study of emotions, researchers have increasingly stressed the importance of studying individual differences in emotion dynamics and emotional responding and the way these relate to more stable differences in well-being. However, there is no clear picture regarding affective reactivity to positive events and how different emotional reactions relate to differences in well-being, particularly higher levels of well-being. Theoretical work and empirical findings from different lines of research (e.g., clinical studies, aging literature, positive and personality psychology) support either of 2 predictions: Higher well-being is related to an enhanced or reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life. Testing these opposing predictions, we examined global well-being and affective reactivity to daily positive events in 6 studies using the experience-sampling or daily diary method (Ns = 70, 66, 95, 200, 76, and 101). Global well-being was measured with various indicators and a well-being composite score. Across the majority of studies, we found that higher global well-being was associated with reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life, as shown by smaller decreases in momentary negative affect. In 3 of the 6 studies, higher well-being composite scores were also associated with smaller increases in momentary positive affect. These findings seem to suggest that people with higher global well-being profit less from the joy of a positive event they experience in daily life. Instead, for people with lower well-being, positive events might be a meaningful way to brighten one's momentary mood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Reliability and Validity of the Chinese Version of the Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile.

In Chinese-speaking societies, a reliable and valid measure is needed to enable early identification of young children's challenges in sensory processing. To examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile (ITSP-C) when used with Taiwanese children. Prospective study. Multiple settings. Participants were 367 typically developing (TD) infants ages 0-6 mo (mean [M] age = 3.44 mo, standard deviation [SD] = 1.82) and 677 toddlers ages 7-36 mo (M age = 22.33 mo, SD = 8.15), along with 42 toddlers with developmental disabilities (DD; M age = 28.4 mo, SD = 6.7). The ITSP, a caregiver questionnaire that measures how children respond to sensory events in daily life, was translated and cross-culturally adapted into a Chinese version (ITSP-C). Internal consistency was high for the 0-6 mo subscale (α = .80) and the 7-36 mo subscale (α = .82). Test-retest reliability was excellent for the 7-36 mo subscale (intraclass correlation coefficient = .94). Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that the ITSP-C discriminated between children with DD and TD children. The ITSP was successfully adapted to Chinese with similar reliability and validity to the original ITSP. The 7-36 mo subscale had a higher level of reliability than the 0-6 mo subscale, and quadrant scores were more reliable than section scores. Moreover, the ITSP-C discriminated children with DD from TD children on the basis of their sensory processing patterns. The ITSP-C has sound psychometric properties and support for its use in early identification of sensory processing difficulties in young Chinese-speaking children.

Are random events perceived as rare? On the relationship between perceived randomness and outcome probability.

Many daily life events, from lotteries to coincidental encounters, occur partly or entirely randomly or "by chance." Six experiments, in two different languages, explored how perceptions of randomness are related to the perceived probability of the same events-specifically, whether low-probability events were viewed as more random than similar events that were judged (rightly or wrongly) to be more likely. The experiments suggest that low-probability outcomes of stochastic events are indeed considered as being more random than medium and highly likely outcomes, even when all are produced by a "blind" (hence random) process. Degree of randomness involved in catching a bus was inversely related to the subjective probability estimates of the same event, both for correct and incorrect estimates. Unlikely coincidences were perceived to be more random than the same events presented in a more likely frame. The outcome of a match between two soccer teams was deemed to be more random when the weaker team wins than when the stronger team wins. Only extremely deviant outcomes-for instance, a top student who fails on two successive exams-made some people reject the randomness account, presumably believing that such extreme events must have a causal explanation. We conclude that people generally associate randomness with low-probability events, indicating outcomes that "cannot be predicted."

Supplemental Material for Sleep Duration and Affective Reactivity to Stressors and Positive Events in Daily Life

Supplemental Material for Sleep Duration and Affective Reactivity to Stressors and Positive Events in Daily Life

The Effects of Reward Sensitivity and Positive Daily Life Events on Anhedonic Depression: Moderated Mediating Effects of Responses to Positive Affect

The Effects of Reward Sensitivity and Positive Daily Life Events on Anhedonic Depression: Moderated Mediating Effects of Responses to Positive Affect

Supplemental Material for The Impact of Age on the Temporal Compression of Daily Life Events in Episodic Memory

Supplemental Material for The Impact of Age on the Temporal Compression of Daily Life Events in Episodic Memory

Smartphone-Based Platform for Affect Monitoring through Flexibly Managed Experience Sampling Methods.

The identification of daily life events that trigger significant changes on our affective state has become a fundamental task in emotional research. To achieve it, the affective states must be assessed in real-time, along with situational information that could contextualize the affective data acquired. However, the objective monitoring of the affective states and the context is still in an early stage. Mobile technologies can help to achieve this task providing immediate and objective data of the users’ context and facilitating the assessment of their affective states. Previous works have developed mobile apps for monitoring affective states and context, but they use a fixed methodology which does not allow for making changes based on the progress of the study. This work presents a multimodal platform which leverages the potential of the smartphone sensors and the Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) to provide a continuous monitoring of the affective states and the context in an ubiquitous way. The platform integrates several elements aimed to expedite the real-time management of the ESM questionnaires. In order to show the potential of the platform, and evaluate its usability and its suitability for real-time assessment of affective states, a pilot study has been conducted. The results demonstrate an excellent usability level and a good acceptance from the users and the specialists that conducted the study, and lead to some suggestions for improving the data quality of mobile context-aware ESM-based systems.

Decision making for portfolio selection by fuzzy multi criteria linear programming

In daily life events, there are many complexities arising from lack of information and uncertainty. Fuzzy linear programming model has been developed to reduce or eliminate this complexity. Fuzzy linear programming is the process of choosing the optimum solution from among the decision alternatives to achieve a specific purpose in cases where the information is not certain. One of the fields where the lack of information or uncertainty makes it difficult to decide is financial markets. Investors who have a certain amount of accumulations are aiming to increase in various ways as well as protecting the value of their income. While doing this, encounter the problem of deciding to which investment vehicle they need to invest in what extent. Therefore, investors apply to fuzzy linear programming model to eliminate this uncertainty and to create the optimal portfolio. In the portfolio selection process suggestions in the literature, the determination of criteria weights is based on triangular fuzzy numbers. In this study, as an alternative to the Enea and Piazza's portfolio selection model, which uses the triangular fuzzy numbers for criteria weighting, a new model that uses the trapezoidal fuzzy numbers for the same aim was proposed. With the solution of the linear programming model which is based on the determined weights, an alternative solution has been produced to the problem of which investment instrument will be invested at what proportion. The results obtained from the existing methods and the results obtained from the proposed model were compared.

Retaining event files in working memory requires extra object-based attention than the constituent elements.

Retaining events containing action-related information in working memory (WM) is vital to daily activities such as action planning and social interaction. During processing of such events, action-related information is bound with other visual elements (e.g., colours) as event files. In this study, we explored whether retaining event files in WM consumes more attention than retaining the constituent elements. Considering that object-based attention underlies the rehearsal of static feature bindings in WM, we hypothesised that object-based attention played a key role in retaining event files in WM. As biological motion (BM) is one of the most frequently observed events in daily life, we employed BM-related event files as the tested stimuli. In separate blocks, we required participants to memorise BM, colours (or locations), or the binding between these elements (i.e., event files). Critically, we added an object-feature report task, which consumed object-based attention, during the WM maintenance phase. We predicted that the added secondary task would lead to larger impairment for BM event files than for the constituent elements. In line with this prediction, Experiments 1 and 2 consistently revealed a selective impairment to BM event files, which could not be attributed to an unbalanced number of elements between memory conditions (Experiment 3), or to the visual processing of a secondary task (Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that object-based attention plays a pivotal role in maintaining event files in WM.

Sensory Modulation in Children Exposed to Continuous Traumatic Stress

Preliminary evidence supports a possible association between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sensory modulation disorder (SMD). Nevertheless, the research focusing on this relationship in children is notably limited. This study examined children with and without PTS symptoms, by comparing their mothers' perceptions of their responses to sensory events in daily life. Mothers of 134 non-referred children aged 5-11, exposed to continuous traumatic stress due to political violence, completed the UCLA-RI and the Short Sensory Profile questionnaires. Significant differences emerged between children with different levels of PTS symptoms in various sensory modalities. Furthermore, half of the symptomatic children had suspected clinically significant deficits in sensory processing. In addition, PTSD symptoms were significantly associated with most of the sensory processing scores. Logistic regression indicated that the overall sensory processing score was a significant predictor of group classification. The results indicate that children with PTS symptoms may be at increased risk for sensory processing deficits. Evaluation of sensory processing should be incorporated into the routine evaluation of this population in order to determine whether this is an additional factor contributing to a child's difficulties in participating in daily activities. Subsequent intervention programs should then address the multiple needs of these children.

Character level embedding with deep convolutional neural network for text normalization of unstructured data for Twitter sentiment analysis

On social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people express their views, arguments, and emotions of many events in daily life. Twitter is an international microblogging service featuring short messages called “tweets” from different languages. These texts often consist of noise in the form of incorrect grammar, abbreviations, freestyle, and typographical errors. Sentiment analysis (SA) aims to predict the actual emotions from the raw text expressed by the people through the field of natural language processing (NLP). The main aim of our work is to process the raw sentence from the Twitter dataset and find the actual polarity of the message. This paper proposes a text normalization with deep convolutional character level embedding (Conv-char-Emb) neural network model for SA of unstructured data. This model can tackle the problems: (1) processing the noisy sentence for sentiment detection (2) handling small memory space in word level embedded learning (3) accurate sentiment analysis of the unstructured data. The initial preprocessing stage for performing text normalization includes the following steps: tokenization, out of vocabulary (OOV) detection and its replacement, lemmatization and stemming. A character-based embedding in convolutional neural network (CNN) is an effective and efficient technique for SA that uses less learnable parameters in feature representation. Thus, the proposed method performs both the normalization and classification of sentiments for unstructured sentences. The experimental results are evaluated in the Twitter dataset by a different point polarity (positive, negative and neutral). As a result, our model performs well in normalization and sentiment analysis of the raw Twitter data enriched with hidden information.

‘It might be time to accept’. Exploring the dynamics between affect regulation strategies, anxiety and timing of regulation

Very few studies have explored variations in the implementation of affect regulation strategies over time and the impact of anxiety, even though understanding these putative dynamics would serve both clinical and research purposes. We hypothesized that (i) emotion regulation strategies vary in their evocability (i.e., probability of being used), depending on the timing of affect regulation in response to negative events, and (ii) these dynamics are modulated by trait anxiety in nonclinical individuals. Generalized additive mixed models highlighted three waves of affect regulation: avoidance and expressing and maintaining negative affects as openers; positive reappraisal as a midregulation strategy; and acceptance as a late strategy, depending on trait anxiety level. Problem solving was a mid-to-late strategy. Our data did not support any of the social sharing models. Interestingly, acceptance was the only strategy with a temporal pattern that clearly differed between high- and low-anxiety individuals. Our results (i) emphasise that time and anxiety are only partially predictive of affect regulation dynamics, and (ii) highlight the challenges that will have to be overcome in future research, if we are to wholly unravel the functioning of these dynamics in daily life events.