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Predictive model for cognitive flexibility, selective attention, depressive symptoms, and social anxiety symptoms. W1 = wave 1; W2 = wave 2; W3 = wave 3. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001
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Although both executive functions and internalizing symptoms go through important changes during adolescence, the role of executive functions in internalizing symptoms is unclear. Based on developmental cascade models of psychopathology, this study aimed to fill this gap by studying the bidirectional predictive relationship between executive functi...
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Citations
... 23 A longitudinal study also revealed that depressive symptoms predict deficits in executive functioning rather than vice versa. 24 In summary, social exclusion may increase boredom, reduce self-control, and eventually lead to short video addiction. Therefore, this study proposes H4: boredom and self-control sequentially mediate the relationship between social exclusion and short video addiction. ...
Background
Short video apps are very popular among Chinese college students, and some students even rely on them. Most of the current research has focused only on Internet addiction and has seldom focused on the phenomenon of short video addiction. Its influencing factors and formation mechanism are worth exploring.
Objective
This study aimed to explore the relationship between social exclusion and short video addiction among college students and the mediating roles of boredom and self-control.
Methods
This study adopted a multistage investigation and investigated 532 college students (39% male; mean age 19.32 ± 1.23 years) with a social exclusion scale, boredom proneness scale, self-control scale, and short video addiction scale. The mediating effect was tested with Process 3.1.
Results
The results showed that social exclusion has a positive predictive effect on college student’s short video addiction. The impact of social exclusion on college student’s short video addiction was mediated by boredom and self-control, and the chained mediation of boredom and self-control.
Conclusion
Theoretically, this study modified the I-PACE model, indicating that personal and distant social factors should be considered in individuals with behavioral addictions, such as short video addiction. Practically, the results suggested that schools should reduce peer rejection and improve students’ mental health literacy to reduce boredom and enhance self-control, thus effectively preventing short video addiction.
... A potential reason is that internalizing symptoms may reduce their sense of agency and motivation, which are needed to form strong commitments Becht et al., 2019). Another reason is that internalizing symptoms may hinder executive functions, such as cognitive flexibility (i.e., changing perspectives, adapting to situations, solving unexpected problems) and selective attention (i.e., staying focused on task at hand and suppressing distractors; Morea & Calvete, 2021), which are needed to evaluate and make decisions (Schiebener et al., 2015). Given that identity development involves an interplay of exploration, evaluation, and decision-making (Crocetti, 2018), individuals with internalizing symptoms may struggle to make commitments or feel confused in the exploration process. ...
Emerging adulthood (ages 18–25) is a period of identity exploration, particularly for young adults navigating the transition to post-secondary school. Little is known about how changes in identity exploration may be related to emerging adults’ mental health, or the role of social support plays in identity-related processes. In the present study, associations among identity exploration, internalizing symptoms, and perceived social support were examined. Participants included a diverse group of emerging adults (N = 1,125, Mage = 17.96 years) studying at a Canadian university. Random-intercept cross-lagged modeling demonstrated that within-person increases in exploration in breadth predicted fewer depressive symptoms over time, whereas within-person increases in exploration in depth predicted more depressive and anxious symptoms over time. A mediation effect from perceived support from significant other to depressive symptoms via exploration in breadth was also evident. Findings suggest that identity exploratory processes may be developmentally relevant in emerging adulthood, but their implications for mental health may differ. Perceived social support is also meaningfully related to identity exploration and mental health.
... Besides, for the cross-sectional nature of this study, as well as the reciprocal relationship between cognitive flexibility and anxiety, we preclude any causal deductions. 55 In addition, both behavioral problems and caregiver strain were evaluated by parents, so we retain the caution that the subjectivity of reporters might bias the results of this study. Finally, the sample sizes of the three groups were not well-matched, which may limit the statistical power of the present study. ...
Objective
Subthreshold attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been suggested to be a “morbid condition” which also needs medical attention.
Methods
The present study recruited 89 children with subthreshold ADHD (sADHD), 115 children with diagnosed ADHD (cADHD), and 79 healthy controls (HC) to explore the clinical manifestation, executive functions (EFs) of sADHD, and the caregiver strain. The clinical manifestation was evaluated through clinical interviews and parent-reports. Executive functions were assessed both experimentally and ecologically. Caregiver strain was measured by a parent-reported questionnaire.
Results
For the clinical manifestation, both sADHD and cADHD indicated impairments when compared with HC. The comorbidities and the scaled symptoms indicated that the externalizing behaviors were relatively less serious in sADHD than cADHD, whereas the internalizing behaviors between two groups were comparable. For ecological EFs, sADHD scored between cADHD and HC in inhibition and working memory. For experimental EFs, sADHD was comparable to cADHD in inhibition, shifting, and was worse than cADHD in verbal working memory. For the caregiver strain, all scores of sADHD were between that in cADHD and that in HC.
Conclusion
Our present findings supported the suggestion of subthreshold ADHD as “morbid condition,” which should be treated with caution in clinical practice, especially for the internalizing behaviors and some key components of EFs.
... While studies of interpretation (in)flexibility among adolescents are scarce, studies of adults underscore the importance of inflexibility by showing its association with higher levels of depression, social anxiety, and suicidality (above and beyond the effects of interpretation bias; Deng et al., 2022Deng et al., , 2023Everaert et al., 2018Everaert et al., , 2020Everaert et al., , 2021Kube & Rozenkrantz, 2021). In addition, depression and anxiety are associated with other types of cognitive and psychological inflexibility in children and adolescents, lending credence to the notion that internalizing symptoms may be encouraged by inflexible interpretations (e.g., Chahal et al., 2021;Harms et al., 2018;Morea & Calvete, 2021;Muris & Petrocchi, 2017;Patwardhan et al., 2021). ...
Interpretation biases and inflexibility (i.e., difficulties revising interpretations) have been linked to increased internalizing symptoms. Although adolescence is a developmental period characterized by novel social situations and increased vulnerability to internalizing disorders, no studies have examined interpretation inflexibility in adolescents. Additionally, no studies (on adolescents or adults) have examined interpretation flexibility as a protective factor against adverse outcomes of interpersonal events. Using a novel task and a 28-day diary we examined relations among interpretation bias and inflexibility, internalizing symptoms, and negative interpersonal events in a sample of children and adolescents (N = 159, ages 9-18). At baseline, negative interpretation bias was positively correlated with social anxiety symptoms, and positive interpretation bias negatively correlated with social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Inflexible positive interpretations were correlated with higher social anxiety and depressive symptoms, while inflexible negative interpretations were correlated with higher social anxiety. Finally, interpretation inflexibility moderated daily associations between negative interpersonal events and depressive symptoms in daily life, such that higher inflexibility was associated with stronger associations between interpersonal events and subsequent depressive symptoms, potentially increasing depressive symptom instability. These results suggest that interpretation biases and inflexibility may act as both risk and protective factors for adolescent anxiety and depression.
... The youth depression is an affective and psychological disorder with high incidence (Twenge et al., 2018). In addition to negative mood and other affective symptoms (Yang et al., 2019), youth depression is often associated with impairments in cognitive function (McDermott & Ebmeier, 2009), especially in executive function (Snyder, 2013), such as reduced inhibitory control (Sommerfeldt et al., 2016), impaired working memory (Wante et al., 2017), and poorer cognitive flexibility (Morea & Calvete, 2021). ...
Youth depression is often associated with impairments in cognitive function, especially in executive function. This study examines the effect of an 8-session-long mindfulness training that can improve executive function in youth with depression. Sixty youths (age range 15-27 years) with depression were selected as participants and were randomized into a mindfulness training group (MTG) and a waitlist-control group (WCG). The MTG received an 8-week mindfulness training while the WCG received no intervention. Both groups performed the Stroop, N-back, and More-odd shifting tasks at baseline and after eight weeks to examine inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility of executive function, respectively. The results showed that mind-fulness training significantly reduced the Stroop effect size for MTG (p < 0.001), but the effect on the switching cost was not statistically significant (p = 0.975). There was an age effect of mindfulness training on working memory. For young adults, mindfulness training improved accuracy on the N-back task (p < 0.01) and shortened reaction time, although this effect slightly exceeded the significance level (p = 0.075). However, mindfulness training failed to improve the working memory of adolescents with depression. In conclusion, mindfulness training improved inhibitory control in youth with depression. It also improved working memory in young adults with depression, but future studies with large samples are needed to validate the improvement in working memory.
... It is essential to clarify the relationship in-depth for preventive and therapeutic interventions. Studies on cognitive flexibility and constituents of social anxiety are few and generally conducted with adult samples, which was also reported by other researchers working on the issue (Morea & Calvete, 2021). ...
... Dysfunctional thoughts about interaction in social areas and influential negative beliefs toward establishing relationships are closely related to insufficient cognitive processing (Sluis et al., 2017). Adapting to new social environments and efficiently responding to interactional stimuli is a crucial part of the dynamics of cognitive flexibility (van Niekerk et al., 2017;Morea & Calvete, 2021). Cognitive flexibility, defined as coping with challenging situations and producing alternative solutions, is very low in people with high interaction and social anxiety (Sepahvand, 2020). ...
Social anxiety has an increasing pattern during adolescence and is common among university students. It is associated with many adverse outcomes. Although there is considerable progress in social anxiety literature, there are significant gaps, and more research is needed to clarify causal pathways and moderator and mediator effects. This study evaluated the mediating role of cognitive flexibility in the link between fear of negative evaluation and interaction anxiety, which are two main symptom clusters of social anxiety. The sample comprised 552 undergraduate university students, 453 (82.1%) female and 99 (17.9%) male and 4 (0.7%) unspecified, from various departments. The study used self-report measures. Results showed that the fear of negative evaluation is significantly related to interaction anxiety, and cognitive flexibility demonstrates a partial mediation effect in this relationship. These findings contribute to the current literature by revealing cognitive flexibility as a mediator between fear of negative evaluation and interaction anxiety. The results suggest that working on cognitive flexibility may help prevent the development of interaction anxiety in university students.
... Recent studies indicate that executive functions are also related to internalizing behaviors (Morea & Calvete, 2021;Patwardhan, Nelson, McClelland, & Mason, 2021;Quistberg & Mueller, 2020; Visu-Petra, Mărcuș, Buchwald, Moore, & Arenas-Landgrave, 2019), which appear when children direct their negative feelings toward themselves. Flexibility, for example, is affected by anxiety-depressive traits (Patwardhan, Nelson, McClelland, & Mason, 2021). ...
... Low flexibility contributes to difficulties in changing thoughts and overthinking in internalizing behaviors, especially those related to anxiety or depression (Visu-Petra, Mărcuș, Buchwald, Moore, & Arenas-Landgrave, 2019). Flexibility continues to be associated with internalizing behaviors during adolescence (Morea & Calvete, 2021). One longitudinal study found reciprocal relationships between flexibility and internalizing behaviors in 5-to-7-year-olds (Patwardhan, Nelson, McClelland, & Mason, 2021). ...
... More recent studies have shown that internalizing behavior is related to flexibility (Morea & Calvete, 2021;Patwardhan, Nelson, McClelland, & Mason, 2021) and working memory (Quistberg & Mueller, 2020). We included internalizing behaviors to corroborate these findings further. ...
Executive functions allow the regulation of behavior and emotions. This study aimed to analyze the association of executive functions with externalizing and internalizing behaviors in 30 Mexican preschoolers with typical development (age M = 53.63 months; SD = 7.83 months; 40% girls) from homes of middle-low socioeconomic status. Behavioral and cognitive measures were used to assess executive functions and analyzed them using robust statistical methods. We found that executive functions are related to externalizing and internalizing behaviors at the behavioral level. Only Forward Digit Span predicts attentional problems. Individual differences in children's cognitive development in a Mexican context were addressed, and they have clinical and educational implications.
... The Mixed Cognitive Problems index and risk propensity in the cold CCT mediated the relationship of Internalizing and Externalizing problems with risk propensity in the hot task. Our interpretation of indirect effects (i.e., from maladaptive psychological functioning to affective risk-taking through deliberative risk-taking) is consistent with recent findings that psychological symptoms precede the onset of neurocognitive deficits [35,36] and with the high prevalence of high-arousal dangerous behaviors (e.g., drug use, risky sexual behavior) in clinical samples [60,61]. The mediation model also revealed that only Difficulties Identifying Emotions were associated with risk propensity in the cold task (directly) and the hot task (indirectly), while behavioral emotion regulation strategies were ineffective to prevent risktaking in the present study. ...
... Therefore, to demonstrate that internalizing and externalizing symptoms and difficulties identifying emotions were linked with risk propensity in affective choices through deliberative processes, it would be better to test indirect effects using a longitudinal design in future research. Third, we did not include standard measures of cold executive functions as defined in previous research [32,35,36]. Because our results suggest that cognitive problems and executive functions are central to network structure, future research could expand the range of cognitive tests to isolate specific cognitive functions related to risk propensity in CCT. ...
Using network analysis, we investigated the relationships between maladaptive psychological functioning, difficulties in emotion regulation, and risk-taking in deliberative and affective behavioral decisions. Participants (103 adolescents aged between 13 and 19 years, 62% boys) took the Cold (deliberative) and Hot (affective) versions of the Columbia Card Task and completed the Youth Self-Report (YSR) and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). In contrast to the view that risk propensity increases from preadolescence to middle adolescence and decreases at later ages, our study revealed no age-specific trend. YSR syndrome scales were significantly correlated with risk propensity, but only in the Cold version. The YSR Thought Problems scale was the most central node in the network, linking internalizing and externalizing problems with risk propensity in the Cold CCT. Lack of emotional Clarity was the only DERS consistently linked with risk-taking both in correlation and network analyses. Maladaptive psychological functioning and difficulties in emotion regulation were linked with risk propensity in affective risky decisions through deliberative processes. The statistical significance of direct and indirect effects was further examined using nonparametric mediation analyses. Our study highlights the role of cognitive factors that in each variable set might account for risk-taking in teenagers
... One community study recently indicated that depressive status as measured by an epidemiological screening scale was associated with lower cognitive flexibility and selective attention. 10 However, another population-based study including adolescents from both urban and rural areas did not find a significant association. 11 One potential reason for these differences may be that certain social factors, such as adolescent living and study environments, may moderate that link, as the distribution of economic, healthcare and educational resources, 12 13 as well as some lifestyle behaviours (eg, physical activity and screen exposure), 14 15 can vary significantly based on an adolescent's home residence or school location, particularly in developing nations with large urban-rural socioeconomic disparities. ...
... That is, poor mental health associated with EF impairment even among general adolescents, supporting one recent study with nonclinical-based samples. 10 Studies from clinical patients indicated that the potential mechanism may be attributed to the dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary axis with hyper activity 37 and neural-immune crosstalk with elevated cytokine production. 38 When these occurred in the central nervous system, brain architecture, morphology and functional activity may be altered, thereby reducing an adolescent's EF. 2 39 More studies on the mechanisms behind the association between mental health and EF in general adolescents should be conducted in the future. ...
Objectives
To examine the association between mental health and executive dysfunction in general adolescents, and to identify whether home residence and school location would moderate that association.
Design
A population-based cross-sectional study.
Setting
A subsample of the Shanghai Children’s Health, Education, and Lifestyle Evaluation-Adolescents project. 16 sampled schools in Shangrao city located in downstream Yangtze River in southeast China (December 2018).
Participants
1895 adolescents (48.8% male) which were divided into three subpopulations: (A) adolescents who have urban hukou (ie, household registration in China) and attend urban schools (UU, n=292); (B) adolescents who have rural hukou and attend urban schools (RU, n=819) and (C) adolescents who have rural hukou and attend rural schools (RR, n=784).
Measures
The Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale-21 was used to assess adolescent mental health symptoms, and the Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function (parent form) was applied to measure adolescent executive dysfunction in nature setting.
Results
Mental health symptoms were common (depression: 25.2%, anxiety: 53.0%, stress: 19.7%) in our sample, and the prevalence rates were lower among UU adolescents than those among the RR and RU, with intersubgroup differences in screen exposure time explaining most of the variance. We found the three types of symptoms were strongly associated with executive dysfunction in general adolescents. We also observed a marginal moderating effect of urban–rural subgroup on the associations: UU adolescents with depression (OR 6.74, 95% CI 3.75 to 12.12) and anxiety (OR 5.56, 95% CI 1.86 to 16.66) had a higher executive dysfunction risk when compared with RR youths with depression (OR 1.93, 95% CI 0.91 to 4.12) and anxiety (OR 1.80, 95% CI 1.39 to 2.33), respectively.
Conclusions
Rural adolescents experienced more mental health symptoms, whereas urban individuals with mental health problems had a higher executive dysfunction risk.
... Increased risk for depression in adolescence has been linked with multiple psychosocial and behavioral constructs interacting against the backdrop of a range of developmental changes. Examples of such risk factors are personality traits (Klinger-Koenig et al., 2018), exposure to stressful life events (McLaughlin et al., 2012), changes in social relationships and greater autonomy (Fredrick et al., 2018;Thoits, 2011), difficulties with health-promoting behaviors such as sleep (Lovato and Gradisar, 2014;Schulte et al., 2019), risky behaviors such as alcohol use (Danzo et al., 2017), and impaired cognitive function (problems of attention, executive function, and visual memory) (Snyder et al., 2019;Morea and Calvete, 2021;Matthews et al., 2008;Porter et al., 2003). Given the heterogeneity of these risk factors and the low diagnostic validity and specificity of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnostic criteria for adolescent MDD (Henje-Blom et al., 2014), there is a growing trend in psychiatry research (Insel, 2014) to look beyond rigid diagnostic criteria by mapping corresponding symptoms onto continua of human functioning defined by the Research Domain Criteria framework (NIMH Research Domain Criteria -RDoC) (Infurna et al., 2016). ...
Background
Given the high prevalence of depressive symptoms reported by adolescents and associated risk of experiencing psychiatric disorders as adults, differentiating the trajectories of the symptoms related to negative valence at an individual level could be crucial in gaining a better understanding of their effects later in life.
Methods
A longitudinal deep learning framework is presented, identifying self-reported and behavioral measurements that detect the depressive symptoms associated with the Negative Valence System domain of the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC).
Results
Applied to the annual records of 621 participants (age range: 12 to 17 years) of the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA), the deep learning framework identifies predictors of negative valence symptoms, which include lower extraversion, poorer sleep quality, impaired executive control function and factors related to substance use.
Limitations.
The results rely mainly on self-reported measures and do not provide information about the underlying neural correlates. Also, a larger sample is required to understand the role of sex and other demographics related to the risk of experiencing symptoms of negative valence.
Conclusions
These results provide new information about predictors of negative valence symptoms in individuals during adolescence that could be critical in understanding the development of depression and identifying targets for intervention. Importantly, findings can inform preventive and treatment approaches for depression in adolescents, focusing on a unique predictor set of modifiable modulators to include factors such as sleep hygiene training, cognitive-emotional therapy enhancing coping and controllability experience and/or substance use interventions.
