Individual differences in toddlers' social understanding and prosocial behavior: disposition or socialization?

We examined how individual differences in social understanding contribute to variability in early-appearing prosocial behavior. Moreover, potential sources of variability in social understanding were explored and examined as additional possible predictors of prosocial behavior. Using a multi-method approach with both observed and parent-report measures, 325 children aged 18-30 months were administered measures of social understanding (e.g., use of emotion words; self-understanding), prosocial behavior (in separate tasks measuring instrumental helping, empathic helping, and sharing, as well as parent-reported prosociality at home), temperament (fearfulness, shyness, and social fear), and parental socialization of prosocial behavior in the family. Individual differences in social understanding predicted variability in empathic helping and parent-reported prosociality, but not instrumental helping or sharing. Parental socialization of prosocial behavior was positively associated with toddlers' social understanding, prosocial behavior at home, and instrumental helping in the lab, and negatively associated with sharing (possibly reflecting parents' increased efforts to encourage children who were less likely to share). Further, socialization moderated the association between social understanding and prosocial behavior, such that social understanding was less predictive of prosocial behavior among children whose parents took a more active role in socializing their prosociality. None of the dimensions of temperament was associated with either social understanding or prosocial behavior. Parental socialization of prosocial behavior is thus an important source of variability in children's early prosociality, acting in concert with early differences in social understanding, with different patterns of influence for different subtypes of prosocial behavior.

Individual Differences in the Neural Response to Personal Goal Pursuit Success and Failure: A Developmental Analysis

Regulatory focus theory (RFT) proposes two different social-cognitive motivational systems for goal pursuit: a promotion system, which is organized around strategic approach behaviors and "making good things happen," and a prevention system, which is organized around strategic avoidance and "keeping bad things from happening." The promotion and prevention systems have been extensively studied in behavioral paradigms, and RFT posits that prolonged perceived failure to make progress in pursuing promotion or prevention goals can lead to ineffective goal pursuit and chronic distress (Higgins, 1997).

Research has begun to focus on uncovering the neural correlates of the promotion and prevention systems in an attempt to differentiate them at the neurobiological level. Preliminary research suggests that the promotion and prevention systems have both distinct and overlapping neural correlates (Eddington, Dolcos, Cabeza, Krishnan, & Strauman, 2007; Strauman et al., 2013). However, little research has examined how individual differences in regulatory focus develop and manifest. The development of individual differences in regulatory focus is particularly salient during adolescence, a crucial topic to explore given the dramatic neurodevelopmental and psychosocial changes that take place during this time, especially with regard to self-regulatory abilities. A number of questions remain unexplored, including the potential for goal-related neural activation to be modulated by (a) perceived proximity to goal attainment, (b) individual differences in regulatory orientation, specifically general beliefs about one's success or failure in attaining the two kinds of goals, (c) age, with a particular focus on adolescence, and (d) homozygosity for the Met allele of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism, a naturally occurring genotype which has been shown to impact prefrontal cortex activation patterns associated with goal pursuit behaviors.

This study explored the neural correlates of the promotion and prevention systems through the use of a priming paradigm involving rapid, brief, masked presentation of individually selected promotion and prevention goals to each participant while being scanned. The goals used as priming stimuli varied with regard to whether participants reported that they were close to or far away from achieving them (i.e. a "match" versus a "mismatch" representing perceived success or failure in personal goal pursuit). The study also assessed participants' overall beliefs regarding their relative success or failure in attaining promotion and prevention goals, and all participants were genotyped for the COMT Val158Met polymorphism.

A number of significant findings emerged. Both promotion and prevention priming were associated with activation in regions associated with self-referential cognition, including the left medial prefrontal cortex, cuneus, and lingual gyrus. Promotion and prevention priming were also associated with distinct patterns of neural activation; specifically, left middle temporal gyrus activation was found to be significantly greater during prevention priming. Activation in response to promotion and prevention goals was found to be modulated by self-reports of both perceived proximity to goal achievement and goal orientation. Age also had a significant effect on activation, such that activation in response to goal priming became more robust in the prefrontal cortex and in default mode network regions as a function of increasing age. Finally, COMT genotype also modulated the neural response to goal priming both alone and through interactions with regulatory focus and age. Overall, these findings provide further clarification of the neural underpinnings of the promotion and prevention systems as well as provide information about the role of development and individual differences at the personality and genetic level on activity in these neural systems.

Grabbing Your Attention: The Impact of Finding a First Target in Multiple-Target Search

For over 50 years, the Satisfaction of Search effect, and more recently known as the Subsequent Search Miss (SSM) effect, has plagued the field of radiology. Defined as a decrease in additional target accuracy after detecting a prior target in a visual search, SSM errors are known to underlie both real-world search errors (e.g., a radiologist is more likely to miss a tumor if a different tumor was previously detected) and more simplified, lab-based search errors (e.g., an observer is more likely to miss a target ‘T’ if a different target ‘T’ was previously detected). Unfortunately, little was known about this phenomenon’s cognitive underpinnings and SSM errors have proven difficult to eliminate. However, more recently, experimental research has provided evidence for three different theories of SSM errors: the Satisfaction account, the Perceptual Set account, and the Resource Depletion account. A series of studies examined performance in a multiple-target visual search and aimed to provide support for the Resource Depletion account—a first target consumes cognitive resources leaving less available to process additional targets.

To assess a potential mechanism underlying SSM errors, eye movements were recorded in a multiple-target visual search and were used to explore whether a first target may result in an immediate decrease in second-target accuracy, which is known as an attentional blink. To determine whether other known attentional distractions amplified the effects of finding a first target has on second-target detection, distractors within the immediate vicinity of the targets (i.e., clutter) were measured and compared to accuracy for a second target. To better understand which characteristics of attention were impacted by detecting a first target, individual differences within four characteristics of attention were compared to second-target misses in a multiple-target visual search.

The results demonstrated that an attentional blink underlies SSM errors with a decrease in second-target accuracy from 135ms-405ms after detection or re-fixating a first target. The effects of clutter were exacerbated after finding a first target causing a greater decrease in second-target accuracy as clutter increased around a second-target. The attentional characteristics of modulation and vigilance were correlated with second- target misses and suggest that worse attentional modulation and vigilance are predictive of more second-target misses. Taken together, these result are used as the foundation to support a new theory of SSM errors, the Flux Capacitor theory. The Flux Capacitor theory predicts that once a target is found, it is maintained as an attentional template in working memory, which consumes attentional resources that could otherwise be used to detect additional targets. This theory not only proposes why attentional resources are consumed by a first target, but encompasses the research in support of all three SSM theories in an effort to establish a grand, unified theory of SSM errors.

Fluidity in Women's Sexuality

Sexual fluidity has been proposed as a key component of women’s sexuality. However, not all women acknowledge or experience fluidity in their sexual attractions and behaviors. Because this is the case, what proportion of women are experiencing sexual fluidity? Research has concluded that a “sizeable minority” of women are experiencing sexual fluidity, with the highest levels found among those that identify as a sexual minority. Furthermore, certain individual differences have been found to be associated with a heightened (or weakened) likelihood of experiencing or embracing sexual fluidity. Through extensive literature reviews on women’s sexuality and sexual fluidity, it has been concluded that sexual orientation identity status, as well as psychological, biological, and social factors, all play roles in the expression or degree of sexual fluidity experienced. This means that certain personal and environmental factors have the ability to both hinder and/or nurture fluidity in a woman’s sexual attractions, behaviors, and experiences. Accepting that women’s sexuality is fluid and teaching about the variability sometimes observed in women’s sexuality allows us to not only see that experiencing same-sex attractions, desires, or experiences is not necessarily abnormal, but also that it may be more common than originally assumed, which has the potential to reduce societal stigma associated with homosexuality.

Decoding Spontaneous Emotional States in the Human Brain.

Pattern classification of human brain activity provides unique insight into the neural underpinnings of diverse mental states. These multivariate tools have recently been used within the field of affective neuroscience to classify distributed patterns of brain activation evoked during emotion induction procedures. Here we assess whether neural models developed to discriminate among distinct emotion categories exhibit predictive validity in the absence of exteroceptive emotional stimulation. In two experiments, we show that spontaneous fluctuations in human resting-state brain activity can be decoded into categories of experience delineating unique emotional states that exhibit spatiotemporal coherence, covary with individual differences in mood and personality traits, and predict on-line, self-reported feelings. These findings validate objective, brain-based models of emotion and show how emotional states dynamically emerge from the activity of separable neural systems.

Neural mechanisms of negative reinforcement in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

BACKGROUND: Previous research has found accumulating evidence for atypical reward processing in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), particularly in the context of social rewards. Yet, this line of research has focused largely on positive social reinforcement, while little is known about the processing of negative reinforcement in individuals with ASD. METHODS: The present study examined neural responses to social negative reinforcement (a face displaying negative affect) and non-social negative reinforcement (monetary loss) in children with ASD relative to typically developing children, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). RESULTS: We found that children with ASD demonstrated hypoactivation of the right caudate nucleus while anticipating non-social negative reinforcement and hypoactivation of a network of frontostriatal regions (including the nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus, and putamen) while anticipating social negative reinforcement. In addition, activation of the right caudate nucleus during non-social negative reinforcement was associated with individual differences in social motivation. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that atypical responding to negative reinforcement in children with ASD may contribute to social motivational deficits in this population.

Sequence and Structural Determinants of Specificity Differences between Paralogous Transcription Factors

Transcription factors (TFs) control the temporal and spatial expression of target genes by interacting with DNA in a sequence-specific manner. Recent advances in high throughput experiments that measure TF-DNA interactions in vitro and in vivo have facilitated the identification of DNA binding sites for thousands of TFs. However, it remains unclear how each individual TF achieves its specificity, especially in the case of paralogous TFs that recognize distinct target genomic sites despite sharing very similar DNA binding motifs. In my work, I used a combination of high throughput in vitro protein-DNA binding assays and machine-learning algorithms to characterize and model the binding specificity of 11 paralogous TFs from 4 distinct structural families. My work proves that even very closely related paralogous TFs, with indistinguishable DNA binding motifs, oftentimes exhibit differential binding specificity for their genomic target sites, especially for sites with moderate binding affinity. Importantly, the differences I identify in vitro and through computational modeling help explain, at least in part, the differential in vivo genomic targeting by paralogous TFs. Future work will focus on in vivo factors that might also be important for specificity differences between paralogous TFs, such as DNA methylation, interactions with protein cofactors, or the chromatin environment. In this larger context, my work emphasizes the importance of intrinsic DNA binding specificity in targeting of paralogous TFs to the genome.