Subsequent Behavioral Adjustment Research Articles

Psychological Coping and Behavioral Adjustment Among Older Adults in Times of COVID-19: Exploring the Protective Role of Working Memory and Habit Propensity

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, well-being, and behavior is likely influenced by individual characteristics that determine one’s capacity for resilience. In this exploratory study, we examined whether individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and habit propensity (HP), measured before the outbreak, could predict variation in subsequent psychological coping efficacy (as operationalized by measures of depression, mental well-being, perceived stress, and loneliness) and behavioral adjustment (by evaluating compliance and self-reported automaticity of four COVID-19 guidelines) among Dutch older adults (n = 36) during the pandemic (measured April 25 to May 6, 2020). While we found elevated levels of depression and emotional loneliness, overall mental well-being, and perceived stress were not affected by the pandemic. Contrary to our expectations, we found no robust evidence for a protective role of WM in predicting these outcomes, although our findings hint at a positive relationship with perceived change in mental well-being. Interestingly, WM and HP were found to affect the self-reported automaticity levels of adherence to behavioral COVID-19 guidelines (i.e., washing hands, physical distancing), where a strong HP appeared beneficial when deliberate resources were less available (e.g., low WM capacity). These novel and preliminary findings offer new potential avenues for investigating individual differences in resilience in times of major life events or challenges.

Interactions between frontal and posterior oscillatory dynamics support adjustment of stimulus processing during reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) in humans is subserved by a network of striatal and frontal brain areas. The electrophysiological signatures of feedback evaluation are increasingly well understood, but how those signatures relate to the use of feedback to guide subsequent behavioral adjustment remains unclear. One mechanism for post-feedback behavioral optimization is the modulation of sensory processing. We used source-reconstructed MEG to test whether feedback affects the interactions between sources of oscillatory activity in the learning network and task-relevant stimulus-processing areas. Participants performed a probabilistic RL task in which they learned associations between colored faces and response buttons using trial-and-error feedback. Delta-band (2–4 Hz) and theta-band (4–8 Hz) power in multiple frontal regions were sensitive to feedback valence. Low and high beta-band power (12–20 and 20–30 Hz) in occipital, parietal, and temporal regions differentiated between color and face information. Consistent with our hypothesis, single-trial power-power correlations between frontal and posterior-sensory areas were modulated by the interaction between feedback valence and the relevant stimulus characteristic (color versus identity). These results suggest that long-range oscillatory coupling supports post-feedback updating of stimulus processing.

Ready for change: Oscillatory mechanisms of proactive motor control.

Proactive motor control is a preparatory mechanism facilitating upcoming action inhibition or adaptation. Previous studies investigating proactive motor control mostly focused on response inhibition, as in the classical go-nogo or stop-signal tasks. However, everyday life rarely calls for the complete suppression of actions without subsequent behavioral adjustment. Therefore, we conducted a modified cued go-nogo-change task, in which cues indicated whether participants might have to change to an alternative action or inhibit the response to an upcoming target. Based on the dual-mechanisms of control framework and using electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated the role of the sensorimotor cortex and of prefrontal regions in preparing to change and cancel motor responses. We focused on mu and beta power over sensorimotor cortex ipsi- and contralateral to an automatic motor response and on prefrontal beta power. Over ipsilateral sensorimotor cortex, mu and beta power was relatively decreased when anticipating to change or inhibit the automatic motor behavior. Moreover, alpha phase coupling between ipsilateral motor cortex and prefrontal areas decreased when preparing to change, suggesting a decoupling of sensorimotor regions from prefrontal control. When the standard motor action actually had to be changed, prefrontal beta power increased, reflecting enhanced cognitive control. Our data highlight the role of the ipsilateral motor cortex in preparing to inhibit and change upcoming motor actions. Here, especially mu power and phase coupling seem to be critical to guide upcoming behavior.

Evaluative priming reveals dissociable effects of cognitive versus physiological anxiety on action monitoring.

Performance monitoring enables the rapid detection of mismatches between goals or intentions and actions, as well as subsequent behavioral adjustment by means of enhanced attention control. These processes are not encapsulated, but they are readily influenced by affective or motivational variables, including negative affect. Here we tested the prediction that worry, the cognitive component of anxiety, and arousal, its physiological counterpart, can each influence specific processes during performance monitoring. In 2 experiments, participants were asked to discriminate the valence of emotional words that were preceded by either correct (good) or incorrect (bad) actions, serving as primes in a standard evaluative priming procedure. In Experiment 1 (n = 36) we examined the influence of trait worry and arousal. Additionally, we included a face priming task to examine the specificity of this effect. Stepwise linear regression analyses showed that increased worry, but not arousal, weakened the evaluative priming effect and therefore the rapid and automatic processing of actions as good or bad. By contrast, arousal, but not worry, increased posterror slowing. In Experiment 2 (n = 30) state worry was induced using an anagram task. Effects of worry on action monitoring were trait but not state dependent, and only evidenced when actions were directly used as primes. These results suggest a double dissociation between worry and arousal during performance monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record

Roles of the Lateral Habenula and Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Negative Outcome Monitoring and Behavioral Adjustment in Nonhuman Primates

Animals monitor the outcome of their choice and adjust subsequent choice behavior using the outcome information. Together with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the lateral habenula (LHb) has recently attracted attention for its crucial role in monitoring negative outcome. To investigate their contributions to subsequent behavioral adjustment, we recorded single-unit activity from the LHb and ACC in monkeys performing a reversal learning task. The monkey was required to shift a previous choice to the alternative if the choice had been repeatedly unrewarded in past trials. We found that ACC neurons stored outcome information from several past trials, whereas LHb neurons detected the ongoing negative outcome with shorter latencies. ACC neurons, but not LHb neurons, signaled a behavioral shift in the next trial. Our findings suggest that, although both the LHb and the ACC represent signals associated with negative outcome, these structures contribute to subsequent behavioral adjustment in different ways.

Lasting impact of regret and gratification on resting brain activity and its relation to depressive traits.

Obtaining lower gains than rejected alternatives during decision making evokes feelings of regret, whereas higher gains elicit gratification. Although decision-related emotions produce lingering effects on mental state, neuroscience research has generally focused on transient brain responses to positive or negative events, but ignored more sustained consequences of emotional episodes on subsequent brain states. We investigated how spontaneous brain activity and functional connectivity at rest are modulated by postdecision regret and gratification in 18 healthy human subjects using a gambling task in fMRI. Differences between obtained and unobtained outcomes were manipulated parametrically to evoke different levels of regret or gratification. We investigated how individual personality traits related to depression and rumination affected these responses. Medial and ventral prefrontal areas differentially responded to favorable and unfavorable outcomes during the gambling period. More critically, during subsequent rest, rostral anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, ventral striatum, and insula showed parametric response to the gratification level of preceding outcomes. Functional coupling of posterior cingulate with striatum and amygdala was also enhanced during rest after high gratification. Regret produced distinct changes in connectivity of subgenual cingulate with orbitofrontal cortex and thalamus. Interestingly, individual differences in depressive traits and ruminations correlated with activity of the striatum after gratification and orbitofrontal cortex after regret, respectively. By revealing lingering effects of decision-related emotions on key nodes of resting state networks, our findings illuminate how such emotions may influence self-reflective processing and subsequent behavioral adjustment, but also highlight the malleability of resting networks in emotional contexts.

Conflict adaptation in prefrontal cortex: Now you see it, now you don't

Daily life requires people to monitor and resolve conflict arising from distracting information irrelevant to current goals. The highly influential conflict monitoring theory (CMT) holds that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) detects conflict and subsequently triggers the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to regulate that conflict. Multiple lines of evidence have provided support for CMT. For example, performance is faster on incongruent trials that follow other incongruent trials (iI), and is accompanied by reduced ACC and increased DLPFC activation (the conflict adaptation effect). In this fMRI study, we explored whether ACC–DLPFC conflict signaling can result in behavioral adjustments beyond on-line contexts. Participants completed a modified version of the Stroop conflict adaptation paradigm which tested for conflict adaptation effects on the current (N) trial associated with not only the immediately preceding (N − 1) trial, but also 2-back (N − 2) trials. Results demonstrated evidence for direct relationships between ACC activity on N − 2 trials and both N trial DLPFC activity and behavioral adjustment when intervening trials were congruent (i.e., icI). In contrast, when N − 1 trials were incongruent (i.e., iiI), ACC–DLPFC signaling failed and conflict adaptation was absent. These results provide new evidence demonstrating that the conflict monitor-controller maintains previously experienced conflict in the service of subsequent behavioral adjustment. However, the processing of multiple, temporally proximal conflict signals takes a toll on the working memory (WM) system, which appears to require resetting in order to adapt our behavior to frequently changing environmental demands.

Maternal Sensitivity and Children's Behavior Problems: Examining the Moderating Role of Infant Sleep Duration

The current study aimed to examine infant sleep duration as a moderator of the relations between maternal sensitivity and child externalizing and internalizing symptoms, in a prospective longitudinal design. Fifty-five Caucasian infants (33 girls) took part in 2 assessments, at 1 and 4 years. Maternal sensitivity was rated at 1 year, based on observations performed throughout a home visit. Infant sleep duration (i.e., nighttime sleep duration and 24-hr sleep duration) was assessed at 1 year as well, using a sleep diary completed by mothers. At 4 years, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist to assess children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Results indicated that maternal sensitivity interacted with infant nighttime sleep duration, such that there were negative relations between sensitivity and subsequent internalizing and externalizing symptoms only for children who slept more at night. Interactions using 24-hr sleep duration as the moderator were not significant. These findings add to an emerging literature on the importance of sleep for children's daytime functioning by suggesting that inadequate or insufficient sleep in infancy can interfere with the normal developmental process linking early maternal sensitivity to child subsequent emotional and behavioral adjustment.

Variability in post-error behavioral adjustment is associated with functional abnormalities in the temporal cortex in children with ADHD

Error processing is reflected, behaviorally, by slower reaction times (RT) on trials immediately following an error (post-error). Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) fail to show RT slowing and demonstrate increased intra-subject variability (ISV) on post-error trials. The neural correlates of these behavioral deficits remain unclear. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) are key regions implicated in error processing and subsequent behavioral adjustment. We hypothesized that children with ADHD, compared to typically developing (TD) controls, would exhibit reduced PFC activation during post-error (versus post-correct inhibition) trials and reduced dACC activation during error (versus correct inhibition) trials. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and a Go/No-Go task, we analyzed the neural correlates of error processing in 13 children with ADHD and 17 TD children. Behaviorally, children with ADHD showed similar RT slowing but increased ISV compared to controls. The post-error contrast revealed a relative increase in blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal in the middle/inferior temporal cortex (TempC), the ACC/supplementary motor area (SMA) and the somatosensory/auditory cortex (AudC) in children with ADHD compared to controls. Importantly, in the ADHD group, increased post-error temporal cortex activity was associated with lower ISV. During error (versus correct inhibition) trials, no between-group differences were detected. However, in children with ADHD lower ISV was associated with decreased insula and increased precentral gyrus activity. In children with ADHD, post-error neural activity suggests, first, a shift of attention towards task-irrelevant stimuli (AudC), and second, a recruitment of compensatory regions that resolve stimulus conflict (TempC) and improve response selection/execution (ACC/SMA). ADHD children with higher temporal cortex activation showed lower ISV, suggesting that functional abnormalities in the compensatory temporal regions contribute to increased variability. Moreover, increased ISV may be related to an over-sensitivity to negative outcomes during error trials in ADHD (insula correlation).

Dissociable processes of cognitive control during error and non-error conflicts: a study of the stop signal task.

BackgroundConflict detection and subsequent behavioral adjustment are critical to daily life, and how this process is controlled has been increasingly of interest. A medial cortical region which includes the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been theorized to act as a conflict detector that can direct prefrontal activity for behavioral adjustments. This conflict monitoring hypothesis was supported by many imaging studies of the Stroop task, with a focus on non-error processes. Here we sought to examine whether this circuit could be generalized to the stop signal task (SST), another behavioral paradigm widely used to study cognitive control. In particular, with a procedure to elicit errors in the SST, we examined whether error and non-error control were mediated by the same pathways.Methodology/Principal FindingsIn functional magnetic resonance imaging of 60 healthy adults, we demonstrated that the medial cortical activity during stop success (SS) as compared to go success (G) trials is correlated with increased prefrontal activity in post-stop SS as compared to post-go SS trials, though this correlation was not specific to the medial cortical region. Furthermore, thalamic and insular rather than medial cortical activation during stop error (SE) as compared to G trials correlated with increased prefrontal activity in post-stop SS as compared to post-go SS trials.Conclusions/SignificanceTaken together, these new findings challenge a specific role of the ACC and support distinct pathways for error and non-error conflict processing in cognitive control.

The consequences of anxious temperament for disease detection, self-management behavior, and quality of life in Type 2 diabetes mellitus

Objective The purpose of this study is to examine the consequences of anxious temperament for disease detection, self-management behavior, and quality of life in Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Method A sample of 204 individuals newly diagnosed with T2DM completed measures of anxious temperament, self-management behavior, and quality of life; participants also supplied a blood sample for glycated hemoglobin (A1C) analysis at initial diagnosis (baseline) and at 6-month follow-up (as indicators of disease progression at diagnosis and achieved glycemic control, respectively). Results Anxious temperament was inversely associated with A1C at both baseline and at 6-month follow-up. However, the association between anxious temperament and A1C at follow-up was mostly accounted for by the association between anxious temperament and baseline A1C and not by the uptake of self-management behaviors after diagnosis. Higher levels of anxious temperament were also associated with an increased likelihood of having been diagnosed with a prediabetic condition but were associated with poorer quality of life at both time points. Conclusion Anxious temperament appears to be a double-edged sword that may facilitate early detection but not subsequent behavioral or emotional adjustment to T2DM.

Family Conflict and Children's Behavior Problems: The Moderating Role of Child Temperament

Child temperament was examined as a moderator of the link between family conflict and child behavior problems. Temperament assessed in early childhood was used to predict the relation between family conflict and externalizing behavior problems measured during the early elementary school years. For children with difficult temperament, a strong association between subsequent family conflict and behavioral adjustment was predicted; for children with easy or intermediate temperaments, low to moderate associations were predicted. These hypotheses were tested across 3 temperament groups (easy, intermediate, and difficult). Data were collected from 108 children and families participating in the Fullerton Longitudinal Study at ages 3 through 10 years. Consistent with the hypotheses, the data provided support for the moderating role of temperament in predicting the association between family conflict and child externalizing behavior problems. These findings suggest that temperamental difficultness operates as a vulnerability factor with respect to the development of children's behavior problems in families with high conflict.

Is there a dark side of positive illusions? Overestimation of social competence and subsequent adjustment in aggressive and nonaggressive children.

This study examined (a) the links between children's overly positive perceptions about the relations with the peer group and with their best friend to subsequent behavioral, emotional, and social adjustment, and (b) whether these links are moderated by children's aggression. Using a short-term longitudinal design, the study was based on a sample of 819 4th- to 6th-graders (427 girls) from low to average SES families. Results showed that positive illusions about their social relations with classmates and with friends were related to an increase in children's peer-rated social preference and fostered the stability of children's dyadic friendships, regardless of children's level of aggression. In addition, overestimation of social competence with the peer group and overestimation of friendship quality were both related to a decrease in children's depressive feelings. Extreme overestimation as well as extreme underestimation of social competence with the peer group was also related to an increase in children's aggression. This latter result, however, was only true for children who were highly aggressive to begin with. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

The Relationship of Early Family Variables to Children's Subsequent Behavioral Adjustment

Examined the relative strength of the relation between early family functioning variables and subsequent (41/2 years later) child adjustment. Five clusters of family variables were examined: child's gender, life-stress events, child characteristics, maternal characteristics, and spousal support. The criterion variables were mother, father, and teacher ratings of the target child's adjustment. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to identify the best models for the prediction of child adjustment. No significant models were found when the independent criteria of father- or teacher-rated behavior were used. The models for the prediction of children's total adjustment, conduct disorders, social aggression, attention problems, and anxiety-withdrawal, as rated by the mother, indicated that the early family variables of life stress, child characteristics, and maternal characteristics are key in subsequent child functioning, with spousal support playing an apparently minor role.