Individual Differences Approach Research Articles

Contextual Influence of School-Level Gender Role Attitudes and Sexual Prejudice on Allyship, Bullying, and Internalized Homonegativity.

Previous studies have primarily used an individual differences approach to identify dispositional factors associated with bullying behavior, which often neglect the broader school context in which bullying occurs. The present study used a multilevel research design to examine the contextual influence of school normative climate on allyship, bullying, and internalized homonegativity. The study included 3020 students (M = 15.83 years, SD = 1.50) from ten secondary schools in China. The results showed that school-level gender role attitudes were positively associated with bullying perpetration among heterosexual students as well as bullying victimization and internalized homonegativity among LGBQA+ students. In addition, there was a negative association between school-level sexual prejudice and allyship among heterosexual students. The findings demonstrate the contextual influence of school normative climate and highlight the need for regular school climate assessments, so that appropriate instructions, policies, and practices can be implemented to address gender biases and homophobia and the resulting bullying behavior.

Curiosity makes your mind wander: Effects of epistemic curiosity and trait anxiety on mind wandering

This study focused on epistemic curiosity and trait anxiety as personality traits promoting the occurrence of mind wandering (MW), and examined how these traits might predict the tendency toward MW based on an individual difference approach. MW tendency was measured using a self-report questionnaire in Study 1, and thought probes during a behavioral task in Study 2, while intentional and unintentional MW were reported separately. Epistemic curiosity was measured using questionnaires that assessed diversive and specific curiosity. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Effortful Control Scale were used to measure trait anxiety and executive control, respectively. Structural equation modeling showed that diversive curiosity positively predicted both intentional and unintentional MW tendency, whereas specific curiosity did not predict either MW type. In contrast, trait anxiety was not directly related to MW tendency, but was indirectly related via executive control. Executive control negatively affected only unintentional but not intentional MW. These findings indicate that MW is based on epistemic curiosity, a socially desirable personality trait. MW can be explained as occurring when the motivation for task-unrelated thoughts is heightened, partly due to a high level of diversive curiosity, while these thoughts are either executed intentionally or not suppressed by executive control processes.

Facial comparison behaviour of forensic facial examiners

AbstractFacial examiners make visual comparisons of face images to establish the identities of persons in police investigations. This study utilised eye‐tracking and an individual differences approach to investigate whether these experts exhibit specialist viewing behaviours during identification, by comparing facial examiners with forensic fingerprint analysts and untrained novices across three tasks. These comprised of face matching under unlimited (Experiment 1) and time‐restricted viewing (Experiment 2), and with a feature‐comparison protocol derived from examiner casework procedures (Experiment 3). Facial examiners exhibited individual differences in facial comparison accuracy and did not consistently outperform fingerprint analysts and novices. Their behaviour was also marked by similarities to the comparison groups in terms of how faces were viewed, as evidenced from eye movements, and how faces were perceived, based on the made feature judgements and identification decisions. These findings further understanding of how facial comparisons are performed and clarify the nature of examiner expertise.

The Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) Framework for Understanding Musicality-Language Links Across the Lifespan.

Using individual differences approaches, a growing body of literature finds positive associations between musicality and language-related abilities, complementing prior findings of links between musical training and language skills. Despite these associations, musicality has been often overlooked in mainstream models of individual differences in language acquisition and development. To better understand the biological basis of these individual differences, we propose the Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) framework. This novel integrative framework posits that musical and language-related abilities likely share some common genetic architecture (i.e., genetic pleiotropy) in addition to some degree of overlapping neural endophenotypes, and genetic influences on musically and linguistically enriched environments. Drawing upon recent advances in genomic methodologies for unraveling pleiotropy, we outline testable predictions for future research on language development and how its underlying neurobiological substrates may be supported by genetic pleiotropy with musicality. In support of the MAPLE framework, we review and discuss findings from over seventy behavioral and neural studies, highlighting that musicality is robustly associated with individual differences in a range of speech-language skills required for communication and development. These include speech perception-in-noise, prosodic perception, morphosyntactic skills, phonological skills, reading skills, and aspects of second/foreign language learning. Overall, the current work provides a clear agenda and framework for studying musicality-language links using individual differences approaches, with an emphasis on leveraging advances in the genomics of complex musicality and language traits.

The bodily fundament of empathy: The role of action, nonaction-oriented, and interoceptive body representations.

Mental representations with bodily contents or in various bodily formats have been suggested to play a pivotal role in social cognition, including empathy. However, there is a lack of systematic studies investigating, in the same sample of participants and using an individual differences approach, whether and to what extent the sensorimotor, perceptual, and interoceptive representations of the body could fulfill an explanatory role in the empathic abilities.To address this goal, we carried out two studies in which healthy adults were given measures of interoceptive sensibility (IS), action (aBR), and nonaction-oriented body representations (NaBR), and affective, cognitive, and motor empathy. A higher tendency to be self-focused on interoceptive signals predicted higher affective, cognitive, and motor empathy levels. A better performance in tasks probing aBR and NaBR predicted, respectively, higher motor and cognitive empathy levels.These findings support the view that the various facets of the empathic response are differently grounded in the body since they diversely involve representations with a different bodily format.Individual differences in the focus on one's internal body state representation can directly modulate all the components of the empathic experience. Instead, a body representation used interpersonally to represent both one's own body and others' bodies, in particular in its spatial specificity, could be necessary to accurately understand other people's minds (cognitive empathy), while a sensorimotor body representation used to represent both one's own body and others' bodies actions, could be fundamental for the self-awareness of feelings expressed in actions (motor empathy).

The role of honour in interpersonal, intrapersonal and intergroup processes.

In this article, we review research in psychology and other related social science fields that has adopted an honor framework to examine intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup processes taking a culture-comparative or individual differences approach. In the sections below, we will first review research on the role of honor in interpersonal processes focusing primarily on interpersonal aggression including in close relationships, non-aggressive ways of responding to threats (e.g., forgiveness), and reciprocity. Next, we move onto reviewing research on the role of honor in intrapersonal processes, specifically in the domains of emotional responses to honor-threatening situations, mental, and physical health. Finally, we review research emerging from social and political psychology and political science that have utilized the honor framework to understand and explain group processes and intergroup relations at different level of analyses (e.g., social groups, nations). Given the limited space, our goal was to emphasize major and emerging areas of research on honor and provide food for thought for future research.

The relationship between ensemble representations of facial information

People accurately evaluate various types of facial information (gaze direction, facial expression, facial identity, and gender) of multiple faces. Considering such varieties, summarizing abilities of facial information might vary depending on its type because it is either changeable (e.g., gaze direction and expression) or invariant (e.g., identity and gender). The current study investigated the relationship between the averaging abilities of facial information using an individual difference approach and a dual-task paradigm to understand the effect of facial information type on the ensemble coding of facial information. We conducted two online experiments on the relationship between the averaging abilities of facial expressions and gaze direction (Experiment 1) and those of facial expressions and gender (Experiment 2). Participants were asked to estimate the average of each piece of facial information in the first and second blocks (single task), respectively, and both sequentially in the third and fourth blocks (dual task). We found that most of the error autocorrelations of facial information were high, indicating high measurement reliability. Participants’ abilities to average facial expressions were correlated with those to average gaze directions, but not with those to average gender information. That is, the ensemble processing of facial expressions is related to gaze directions, but not genders. These results suggest that ensemble representations of facial information regarding changeable properties differ from those of invariant ones.

A Theory of Momentary Distress Tolerance: Toward Understanding Contextually Situated Choices to Engage With or Avoid Distress

As a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor, low distress tolerance predicts a wide variety of psychopathology. The current article extends past research, which has typically adopted an individual-differences approach, by articulating a social-cognitive theory of momentary distress tolerance. This new model intentionally separates actions taken to remain engaged with distress (i.e., tolerance) from avoidance/escape actions associated with intolerance, and highlights willingness to experience distress as central to tolerance. In addition, self-efficacy for tolerating distress is highlighted as a central predictor of the tolerance/intolerance process, influenced by distress intensity and momentary psychological resources (e.g., hunger, tiredness, degree of life stressors, social support). Finally, the model also explains how repeated experiences of distress tolerance and/or intolerance coalesce into a global self-perception indicative of individual differences in distress tolerance. Reasons why the proposed model has the potential to overcome current challenges in distress tolerance research are reviewed, and future directions for both research and clinical practice are highlighted.

Hippocampus and temporal pole functional connectivity is associated with age and individual differences in autobiographical memory

Recollection of one's personal past, or autobiographical memory (AM), varies across individuals and across the life span. This manifests in the amount of episodic content recalled during AM, which may reflect differences in associated functional brain networks. We take an individual differences approach to examine resting-state functional connectivity of temporal lobe regions known to coordinate AM content retrieval with the default network (anterior and posterior hippocampus, temporal pole) and test for associations with AM. Multiecho resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and autobiographical interviews were collected for 158 younger and 105 older healthy adults. Interviews were scored for internal (episodic) and external (semantic) details. Age group differences in connectivity profiles revealed that older adults had lower connectivity within anterior hippocampus, posterior hippocampus, and temporal pole but greater connectivity with regions across the default network compared with younger adults. This pattern was positively related to posterior hippocampal volumes in older adults, which were smaller than younger adult volumes. Connectivity associations with AM showed two significant patterns. The first dissociated connectivity related to internal vs. external AM across participants. Internal AM was related to anterior hippocampus and temporal pole connectivity with orbitofrontal cortex and connectivity within posterior hippocampus. External AM was related to temporal pole connectivity with regions across the lateral temporal cortex. In the second pattern, younger adults displayed temporal pole connectivity with regions throughout the default network associated with more detailed AMs overall. Our findings provide evidence for discrete ensembles of brain regions that scale with systematic variation in recollective styles across the healthy adult life span.

Integrating self-regulated learning and individual differences in the prediction of university academic achievement across a three-year-long degree

The study investigated the joint contribution of the self-regulated learning (SRL) and individual differences approaches to the prediction of university students’ grade point average (GPA) obtained at three separate time points throughout their degree (3 years). We assessed cognitive (i.e., previous academic performance, cognitive ability, and cognitive SRL strategies) and non-cognitive variables (i.e., personality, trait emotional intelligence, motivation, and non-cognitive SRL strategies) in a sample of Spanish undergraduates. Results showed that GPA correlated with previous academic performance (i.e., combination of high school’s GPA and college admission test score), academic self-efficacy, academic engagement, SRL strategies, and conscientiousness. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that non-cognitive factors (i.e., academic engagement, academic self-efficacy, regulation of behavior and context, and conscientiousness) alone explained 17–25% of the variance in GPA across three years, and previous academic performance accounted up to an additional 25% of the variance, jointly reaching an explained variance of up to 50% in GPA. Specifically, academic engagement and regulation of behavior and context demonstrated incremental validity over and above cognitive predictors such as previous academic performance, inductive reasoning and regulation of cognition and metacognition. The role of intelligence, whether cognitive or emotional, was not as obvious as a predictor. Two nested structural equation models explained about 27–29% of the variance in a latent GPA factor exclusively from a proxy of a global variable of non-cognitive factors as a latent predictor, which is a novel and promising proof of its robust criterion validity. Implications and recommendations for future studies are discussed.

What Makes an Environmental Steward? An Individual Differences Approach

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet.

Cognitive Rigidity, Habitual Tendencies, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: Individual Differences and Compensatory Interactions.

Recent theories have posited a range of cognitive risk factors for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), including cognitive inflexibility and a maladaptive reliance on habits. However, empirical and methodological inconsistencies have obscured the understanding of whether inflexibility and habitual tendencies indeed shape OCD symptoms in clinical and sub-clinical populations, and whether there are notable interactions amongst these traits. The present investigation adopted an interactionist individual differences approach to examine the associations between behaviorally-assessed cognitive flexibility and subclinical OCD symptomatology in a healthy population. It also explored the nature of the interactions between cognitive flexibility and habitual tendencies, and the degree to which these cognitive traits predict subclinical OCD symptomatology. Across two studies, including a preregistration, Bayesian and regression analyses revealed that cognitive inflexibility and compulsive habitual tendencies act as unique and independent predictors of subclinical OCD symptomatology in healthy populations. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between cognitive rigidity and habitual compulsivity, which accounted for 49.4% of the variance in subclinical OCD symptomatology in Study 1, and 37.3% in Study 2. In-depth analyses revealed a compensatory effect between cognitive inflexibility and habitual compulsivity such that both are necessary for OCD symptomatology, but neither is sufficient. These results imply that in order to generate reliable and nuanced models of the endophenotype of OCD symptomatology, it is essential to account for interactions between psychological traits. Moreover, the present findings have important implications for theories on the cognitive roots of OCD, and potentially in the development of interventions that target both cognitive inflexibility and habitual compulsivity.

Recognition of pareidolic objects in developmental prosopagnosic and neurotypical individuals

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with difficulties in the perception and recognition of faces. However, the extent to which DP affects non-face object is an ongoing debate. In this study, we asked whether pareidolic objects (which give rise to the perception of a face) are also affected in DP. First, we compared performance in DPs (n = 30) and controls (n = 27) on a recognition task with faces, pareidolic objects and non-pareidolic objects (bottles). The pareidolic objects had either similar or dissimilar image statistics to faces. Consistent with our understanding of DP, we found that the pattern of recognition across items between DPs and controls was lowest for faces. Interestingly, there was also a low correlation between DPs and controls for pareidolic-similar objects that was similar to faces. In contrast, there were higher correlations between DPs and controls for pareidolic-dissimilar objects and bottles, which were both significantly different to faces. These findings suggest that the deficit in DP involves processing image properties that are common to faces. Next, using an individual differences approach across a large group of neurotypical adults (n = 94), we found that face recognition covaried with the recognition of pareidolic-similar objects, but not with pareidolic-dissimilar objects or non-pareidolic objects. Together, these findings support the idea that a representation based on image properties plays an important role in the perception and recognition of objects and faces and that the deficit in the perception of some object categories in DP could be explained by their similarity to the image properties found in faces.

Individual differences and the multidimensional nature of face perception

Face perception is crucial to social interactions, yet people vary in how easily they can recognize their friends, verify an identification document or notice someone’s smile. There are widespread differences in people’s ability to recognize faces, and research has particularly focused on exceptionally good or poor recognition performance. In this Review, we synthesize the literature on individual differences in face processing across various tasks including identification and estimates of emotional state and social attributes. The individual differences approach has considerable untapped potential for theoretical progress in understanding the perceptual and cognitive organization of face processing. This approach also has practical consequences — for example, in determining who is best suited to check passports. We also discuss the underlying structural and anatomical predictors of face perception ability. Furthermore, we highlight problems of measurement that pose challenges for the effective study of individual differences. Finally, we note that research in individual differences rarely addresses perception of familiar faces. Despite people’s everyday experience of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with faces, a theory of how people recognize their friends remains elusive.

Exploring the Common Mechanisms of Motion-Based Visual Prediction

Human vision supports prediction for moving stimuli. Here we take an individual differences approach to investigate whether there could be a common processing rate for motion-based visual prediction across diverse motion phenomena. Motion Induced Spatial Conflict (MISC) refers to an incongruity arising from two edges of a combined stimulus, moving rigidly, but with different apparent speeds. This discrepancy induces an illusory jitter that has been attributed to conflict within a motion prediction mechanism. Its apparent frequency has been shown to correlate with the frequency of alpha oscillations in the brain. We asked what other psychophysical measures might correlate positively with MISC frequency. We measured the correlation between MISC jitter frequency and another three measures that might be linked to motion-based spatial prediction. We demonstrate that the illusory jitter frequency in MISC correlates significantly with the accrual rate of the Motion Induced Position Shift (MIPS) effect - the well-established observation that a carrier movement in a static envelope of a Gabor target leads to an apparent position shift of the envelope in the direction of motion. We did not observe significant correlations with the other two measures – the Adaptation Induced Spatial Shift accrual rate (AISS) and the Smooth Motion Threshold (SMT). These results suggest a shared perceptual rate between MISC and MIPS, implying a common periodic mechanism for motion-based visual prediction.

Selective contributions of executive function ability to the P3

The P3 component (P300, P3b) is considered to be an effective index of attention and categorization processes when elicited in a visual oddball task, specifically reflecting the selection of a rare target item among frequent non-targets. Researchers have proposed that target categorization is guided by representations of target features held in working memory (WM), thus guiding attention and categorization processes to distinguish targets from non-targets. Although WM is theorized to have visuospatial, verbal and executive function components, most studies do not investigate how these WM components contribute to the P3. This study uses an individual differences approach to determine whether correlations between WM capabilities and P3 amplitudes indicate a common underlying cognitive construct. Participants (n = 140) completed an 80/20 visual oddball task to elicit the P3 as well as independent visual working memory (VWM), spatial working memory (SPWM), and executive function (task switching (TS) and digit symbol substitution (DSS)) tests. Results indicated that measures of executive function, DSS and TS, but not VWM or SPWM ability, correlated with and predicted faster task response times and greater P3 amplitudes. RT and WM measures were not correlated with P3 fractional area latencies. These results support context updating theory. Executive function WM availability, whether as a property of the participant's processing system or based on task demands, plays a functional role in the P3 and an important role in efficient visual categorization and goal-directed learning.

The Resting-State Neural Network of Delay Discounting.

Delay discounting is a common phenomenon in daily life, which refers to the subjective value of a future reward decreasing as a function of time. Previous studies have identified several cortical regions involved in delay discounting, but the neural network constructed by the cortical regions of delay discounting is less clear. In this study, we employed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) to measure the spontaneous neural activity in a large sample of healthy young adults and used the Monetary Choice Questionnaire to directly measure participants’ level of delay discounting. To identify the neural network of delay discounting at rest, we used an individual difference approach to explore brain regions whose spontaneous activities were related to delay discounting across the whole brain. Then, these brain regions served as seeds to identify the neural network of delay discounting. We found that the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) of the left insula were positively correlated to delay discounting. More importantly, its connectivity to the anterior cingulate cortex was read out for participants’ behavioral performance in the task of delay discounting. In short, our study provides empirical evidence that insula-anterior cingulate cortex connectivity may serve as a part of the neural network for delay discounting.

Medial prefrontal and occipito-temporal activity at encoding determines enhanced recognition of threatening faces after 1.5years.

Studies demonstrated that faces with threatening emotional expressions are better remembered than non-threatening faces. However, whether this memory advantage persists over years and which neural systems underlie such an effect remains unknown. Here, we employed an individual difference approach to examine whether the neural activity during incidental encoding was associated with differential recognition of faces with emotional expressions (angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral) after a retention interval of > 1.5years (N = 89). Behaviorally, we found a better recognition for threatening (angry, fearful) versus non-threatening (happy and neutral) faces after a delay of > 1.5years, which was driven by forgetting of non-threatening faces compared with immediate recognition after encoding. Multivariate principal component analysis (PCA) on the behavioral responses further confirmed the discriminative recognition performance between threatening and non-threatening faces. A voxel-wise whole-brain analysis on the concomitantly acquired functional magnetic resonanceimaging (fMRI) data during incidental encoding revealed that neural activity in bilateral inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and ventromedial prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/OFC) was associated with the individual differences in the discriminative emotional face recognition performance measured by an innovative behavioral pattern similarity analysis (BPSA). The left fusiform face area (FFA) was additionally determined using a regionally focused analysis. Overall, the present study provides evidence that threatening facial expressions lead to persistent face recognition over periods of > 1.5years, and thatdifferential encoding-related activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and occipito-temporal cortex may underlie this effect.

Invited Session V: GABAergic function and dysfunction in visual perception: Strong evidence against a common center-surround mechanism in visual processing

Events and objects in the world generally do not occur in isolation. This surrounding spatial and temporal information has major effects on visual processing, effects that are typically described as contextual modulations. Given qualitative similarities among various contextual surround effects (e.g., the effects tend to exaggerate differences and suppress uniform stimuli), it might seem intuitive that these processes are related. It is unknown, however, whether contextual modulation processes across visual sub-modalities are independent, or at least in part share a common underlying mechanism. This is especially relevant for clinical work where these contextual effects are often linked to inhibitory function. We addressed this question using an individual differences approach in three different populations (total N = 129): neurotypical adults, older adults and patients with schizophrenia. The context battery included six tasks that assessed surround modulations in luminance, contrast, orientation, motion (2X) and size domains. The results revealed robust contextual effects across all tasks. However, despite large sample sizes, we found no significant correlations among different contextual tasks. Across groups, we did find significant differences: (a) weaker surround contrast effect in both schizophrenia and older adults, (b) stronger repulsive surround tilt and motion effects in older adults and (c) weaker surround suppression for motion in both schizophrenia and older adults. We find that (1) strength of contextual modulation does not correlate across visual sub-modalities and (2) deficits in contextual modulation that go in different directions. Together, this indicates an absence of a common underlying mechanism for contextual modulation in vision.

Predicting patterns of similarity among abstract semantic relations.

Although models of word meanings based on distributional semantics have proved effective in predicting human judgments of similarity among individual concepts, it is less clear whether or how such models might be extended to account for judgments of similarity among relations between concepts. Here we combine an individual-differences approach with computational modeling to predict human judgments of similarity among word pairs instantiating a variety of abstract semantic relations (e.g., contrast, cause-effect, part-whole). A measure of cognitive capacity predicted individual differences in the ability to discriminate among distinct relations. The human pattern of relational similarity judgments, both at the group level and for individual participants, was best predicted by a model that takes representations of word meanings based on distributional semantics as its inputs and uses them to learn an explicit representation of relations. These findings indicate that although the meanings of abstract semantic relations are not directly coded in the meanings of individual words, important aspects of relational similarity can be derived from distributional semantics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).