Disruptions in attention, salience and increased distractibility are implicated in multiple psychiatric conditions. The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is a potential site for converging information about external stimuli and internal states to be integrated and guide adaptive behaviours. Given the dual role of dopamine signals in both driving ongoing behaviours (e.g., feeding) and monitoring salient ...

Paternity uncertainty has proven to be a robust ultimate hypothesis for predicting the higher investment in grandchildren observed among maternal grandparents compared to that of the paternal grandparents. Yet the proximate mechanisms for generating such preferred biases in grandparental investment remain unclear. Here we address two different questions for better understanding the proximate mechanisms ...

Gender roles are formed in early childhood and continue to influence behavior through adolescence and adulthood, including the choice of academic majors and careers. In many countries, men are underrepresented in communal roles in health care, elementary education, and domestic functions (HEED fields, Croft et al., 2015), whereas women are underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering, ...

The majority of mindfulness research to date has reported only on the group-level effects of interventions. Therefore, there is a need to better understand who is most likely to benefit from mindfulness interventions. This study reports on moderation analyses from a two-centre randomised controlled trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) among 288 medical and psychology students. ...

A 2 × 2 × 2 experiment examined the role of immigrants’ religion and perceived acculturation strategy on majority members’ attitudes. Acculturation strategies were manipulated along the two dimensions of contact and culture maintenance. Italian majority members (N = 247) read fictitious but seemingly real interviews with Arab immigrants, in which the immigrants’ religion (Muslim vs. Christian) and ...

<i>Background</i> - The EQ-5D is the most widely used generic preference-based health-related quality of life measure. It comprises five dimensions: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort and anxiety/depression. The usual activities dimension asks respondents to evaluate the severity of problems in their usual activities, such as work, study, housework, family or leisure activities. ...

<i>Objectives</i> - Positive embodiment and healthy lifestyle habits seem to be related; therefore, stimulating positive embodiment should promote healthy lifestyle habits. In the current study, we delivered the Healthy Body Image (HBI) intervention among Norwegian high school students and examined the effects on healthy lifestyle habits.<p> <p><i>Methods</i> - The HBI intervention comprises three ...

Career development is a lifelong process that starts in infancy and is shaped by a number of different factors during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Even though career development is shaped through life, relatively little is known about the predictors of occupational aspirations in childhood. Therefore, in the present work we investigate how the stereotypicality of a mother’s occupation ...

Academic attrition is a worldwide problem representing a significant economic loss and a disadvantage for students in terms of health and career prospects. We focus on the roles of academic skills, academic self-efficacy, and students' integration in exploring their relation to attrition intentions. Based on existing research, we expected a negative relation between academic skills and attrition ...

<p><i>Background - </i>The quality of an expectant mother’s bonding to the fetus has been shown to be associated with important developmental outcomes. Previous studies suggest that bonding quality is predicted by, for example, social support, psychological well-being, and depression. However, little is known regarding the role of maternal cognition in maternal-fetal bonding. Early maladaptive schemas ...