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Institute
Mental imagery is a transdiagnostic feature that has been increasingly researched in mental disorders in the past years. This study is the first to investigate mental imagery in individuals suffering from Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), a new disorder which will be included into the new edition of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).
Our objective was to find out to what extent patients suffering from PGD differ from healthy, but equally bereaved, controls in terms of mental imagery, and how mental imagery is related to psychopathology. Patients with PGD and matched bereaved healthy controls (n = 54) completed a mental imagery questionnaire specifically designed for the study, and other established measures of psychopathology. Patients suffering from PGD reported mental images more frequently, had less control over them, and described negative images as more vivid than did healthy controls. Also, in reaction to mental images, patients less frequently experienced joy, but more often grief, anger and guilt. Besides these group differences, significant correlations between mental imagery other psychopathological measures could be found. Mental imagery is clearly related to PGD. The underlying mechanisms on whether it is a developing or maintaining factor need to be addressed in future studies. Future research should also investigate in what way mental imagery might be used in therapeutic approaches.
Children often perform worse than adults on tasks that require focused attention. While this is commonly regarded as a sign of incomplete cognitive development, a broader attentional focus could also endow children with the ability to find novel solutions to a given task. To test this idea, we investigated children’s ability to discover and use novel aspects of the environment that allowed them to improve their decision-making strategy. Participants were given a simple choice task in which the possibility of strategy improvement was neither mentioned by instructions nor encouraged by explicit error feedback. Among 47 children (8—10 years of age) who were instructed to perform the choice task across two experiments, 27.5% showed a full strategy change. This closely matched the proportion of adults who had the same insight (28.2% of n = 39). The amount of erroneous choices, working memory capacity and inhibitory control, in contrast, indicated substantial disadvantages of children in task execution and cognitive control. A task difficulty manipulation did not affect the results. The stark contrast between age-differences in different aspects of cognitive performance might offer a unique opportunity for educators in fostering learning in children.
Humans accumulate knowledge throughout their entire lives. In what ways does this accumulation of knowledge influence learning of new information? Are there age-related differences in the way prior knowledge is leveraged for remembering new information? We review studies that have investigated these questions, focusing on those that have used the memory congruency effect, which provides a quantitative measure of memory advantage because of prior knowledge. Regarding the first question, evidence suggests that the accumulation of knowledge is a key factor promoting the development of memory across childhood and counteracting some of the decline in older age. Regarding the second question, evidence suggests that, if available knowledge is controlled for, age-related differences in the memory congruency effect largely disappear. These results point to an age-invariance in the way prior knowledge is leveraged for learning new information. Research on neural mechanisms and implications for application are discussed.
Personal values are considered as guiding principles for humans’ attitudes and behavior, what makes them an essential component of mental health. Although these notions are widely recognized, investigations in clinical samples examining the link between values and mental health are lacking. We assessed n = 209 patients with affective disorders, neurotic disorders, reaction to severe stress, and adjustment disorders and personality disorders and compared them to a stratified random sample (n = 209) drawn from the European Social Survey. Personal values were assessed using the Portraits Value Questionnaire. Severity of psychopathology was assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory and the Brief Symptom Inventory. Clinical participants showed a higher preference for the values power, achievement and tradition/conformity and a lower preference for hedonism compared to controls. Patients exhibited more incompatible value patterns than controls. Across diagnostic groups, patients with neurotic disorders reported incompatible values most frequently. Value priorities and value conflicts may have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of current and future actions and experiences in patients with mental disorders.
Background: Hebb repetition learning is a form of long-term serial order learning that can occur when sequences of items in an immediate serial recall task are repeated. Repetition improves performance because of the gradual integration of serial order information from short-term memory into a more stable long-term memory trace.
Aims: The current study assessed whether adolescents with non-specific intellectual disabilities showed Hebb repetition effects, and if their magnitude was equivalent to those of children with typical development, matched for mental age.
Methods: Two immediate serial recall Hebb repetition learning tasks using verbal and visuospatial materials were presented to 47 adolescents with intellectual disabilities (11–15 years) and 47 individually mental age-matched children with typical development (4–10 years).
Results: Both groups showed Hebb repetition learning effects of similar magnitude, albeit with some reservations. Evidence for Hebb repetition learning was found for both verbal and visuospatial materials; for our measure of Hebb learning the effects were larger for verbal than visuospatial materials.
Conclusions: The findings suggested that adolescents with intellectual disabilities may show implicit long-term serial-order learning broadly commensurate with mental age level. The benefits of using repetition in educational contexts for adolescents with intellectual disabilities are considered.
Cross-sectional findings suggest that volumes of specific hippocampal subfields increase in middle childhood and early adolescence. In contrast, a small number of available longitudinal studies reported decreased volumes in most subfields over this age range. Further, it remains unknown whether structural changes in development are associated with corresponding gains in children’s memory. Here we report cross-sectional age differences in children’s hippocampal subfield volumes together with longitudinal developmental trajectories and their relationships with memory performance. In two waves, 109 participants aged 6–10 years (wave 1: MAge=7.25, wave 2: MAge=9.27) underwent high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging to assess hippocampal subfield volumes (imaging data available at both waves for 65 participants) and completed tasks assessing hippocampus dependent memory processes. We found that cross-sectional age-associations and longitudinal developmental trends in hippocampal subfield volumes were discrepant, both by subfields and in direction. Further, volumetric changes were largely unrelated to changes in memory, with the exception that increase in subiculum volume was associated with gains in spatial memory. Longitudinal and cross-sectional patterns of brain-cognition couplings were also discrepant. We discuss potential sources of these discrepancies. This study underscores that children’s structural brain development and its relationship to cognition cannot be inferred from cross-sectional age comparisons.