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The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting measures can be regarded as a global stressor. Cross-sectional studies showed rather negative impacts on people’s mental health, while longitudinal studies considering pre-lockdown data are still scarce. The present study investigated the impact of COVID-19 related lockdown measures in a longitudinal German sample, assessed since 2017. During lockdown, 523 participants completed additional weekly online questionnaires on e.g., mental health, COVID-19-related and general stressor exposure. Predictors for and distinct trajectories of mental health outcomes were determined, using multilevel models and latent growth mixture models, respectively. Positive pandemic appraisal, social support, and adaptive cognitive emotion regulation were positively, whereas perceived stress, daily hassles, and feeling lonely negatively related to mental health outcomes in the entire sample. Three subgroups (“recovered,” 9.0%; “resilient,” 82.6%; “delayed dysfunction,” 8.4%) with different mental health responses to initial lockdown measures were identified. Subgroups differed in perceived stress and COVID-19-specific positive appraisal. Although most participants remained mentally healthy, as observed in the resilient group, we also observed inter-individual differences. Participants’ psychological state deteriorated over time in the delayed dysfunction group, putting them at risk for mental disorder development. Consequently, health services should especially identify and allocate resources to vulnerable individuals.
Early maternal care may counteract familial liability for psychopathology in the reward circuitry
(2018)
Reward processing is altered in various psychopathologies and has been shown to be susceptible to genetic and environmental influences. Here, we examined whether maternal care may buffer familial risk for psychiatric disorders in terms of reward processing. Functional magnetic resonance imaging during a monetary incentive delay task was acquired in participants of an epidemiological cohort study followed since birth (N = 172, 25 years). Early maternal stimulation was assessed during a standardized nursing/playing setting at the age of 3 months. Parental psychiatric disorders (familial risk) during childhood and the participants’ previous psychopathology were assessed by diagnostic interview. With high familial risk, higher maternal stimulation was related to increasing activation in the caudate head, the supplementary motor area, the cingulum and the middle frontal gyrus during reward anticipation, with the opposite pattern found in individuals with no familial risk. In contrast, higher maternal stimulation was associated with decreasing caudate head activity during reward delivery and reduced levels of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the high-risk group. Decreased caudate head activity during reward anticipation and increased activity during delivery were linked to ADHD. These findings provide evidence of a long-term association of early maternal stimulation on both adult neurobiological systems of reward underlying externalizing behavior and ADHD during development.
Substantial evidence shows that physical activity and fitness play a protective role in the development of stress related disorders. However, the beneficial effects of fitness for resilience to modern life stress are not fully understood. Potentially protective effects may be attributed to enhanced resilience via underlying psychosocial mechanisms such as self-efficacy expectations. This study investigated whether physical activity and fitness contribute to prospectively measured resilience and examined the mediating effect of general self-efficacy. 431 initially healthy adults participated in fitness assessments as part of a longitudinal-prospective study, designed to identify mechanisms of resilience. Self-efficacy and habitual activity were assessed in parallel to cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, which were determined by a submaximal step-test, hand strength and standing long jump test. Resilience was indexed by stressor reactivity: mental health problems in relation to reported life events and daily hassles, monitored quarterly for nine months. Hierarchical linear regression models and bootstrapped mediation analyses were applied. We could show that muscular and self-perceived fitness were positively associated with stress resilience. Extending this finding, the muscular fitness–resilience relationship was partly mediated by self-efficacy expectations. In this context, self-efficacy expectations may act as one underlying psychological mechanism, with complementary benefits for the promotion of mental health. While physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness did not predict resilience prospectively, we found muscular and self-perceived fitness to be significant prognostic parameters for stress resilience. Although there is still more need to identify specific fitness parameters in light of stress resilience, our study underscores the general relevance of fitness for stress-related disorders prevention.
According to embodied cognition accounts, viewing others’ facial emotion can elicit the respective emotion representation in observers which entails simulations of sensory, motor, and contextual experiences. In line with that, published research found viewing others’ facial emotion to elicit automatic matched facial muscle activation, which was further found to facilitate emotion recognition. Perhaps making congruent facial muscle activity explicit produces an even greater recognition advantage. If there is conflicting sensory information, i.e., incongruent facial muscle activity, this might impede recognition. The effects of actively manipulating facial muscle activity on facial emotion recognition from videos were investigated across three experimental conditions: (a) explicit imitation of viewed facial emotional expressions (stimulus-congruent condition), (b) pen-holding with the lips (stimulus-incongruent condition), and (c) passive viewing (control condition). It was hypothesised that (1) experimental condition (a) and (b) result in greater facial muscle activity than (c), (2) experimental condition (a) increases emotion recognition accuracy from others’ faces compared to (c), (3) experimental condition (b) lowers recognition accuracy for expressions with a salient facial feature in the lower, but not the upper face area, compared to (c). Participants (42 males, 42 females) underwent a facial emotion recognition experiment (ADFES-BIV) while electromyography (EMG) was recorded from five facial muscle sites. The experimental conditions’ order was counter-balanced. Pen-holding caused stimulus-incongruent facial muscle activity for expressions with facial feature saliency in the lower face region, which reduced recognition of lower face region emotions. Explicit imitation caused stimulus-congruent facial muscle activity without modulating recognition. Methodological implications are discussed.