Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemEndophenotyping social cognition in the broader autism phenotype(WILEY, 2023-11-30)Relatives of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may display milder social traits of the broader autism phenotype (BAP) providing potential endophenotypic markers of genetic risk for ASD. We performed a case-control comparison to quantify social cognition and pragmatic language difficulties in the BAP (n = 25 cases; n = 33 controls) using the Faux Pas test (FPT) and the Goldman-Eisler Cartoon task. Using deep phenotyping we then examined patterns of inheritance of social cognition in two large multiplex families and the spectrum of performance in 32 additional families (159 members; n = 51 ASD, n = 87 BAP, n = 21 unaffected). BAP individuals showed significantly poorer FPT performance and reduced verbal fluency with the absence of a compression effect in social discourse compared to controls. In multiplex families, we observed reduced FPT performance in 89% of autistic family members, 63% of BAP relatives and 50% of unaffected relatives. Across all affected families, there was a graded spectrum of difficulties, with ASD individuals showing the most severe FPT difficulties, followed by the BAP and unaffected relatives compared to community controls. We conclude that relatives of probands show an inherited pattern of graded difficulties in social cognition with atypical faux pas detection in social discourse providing a novel candidate endophenotype for ASD.
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ItemA Research Translation, Implementation and Impact Strategy for the Australian Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Research Network.(MDPI AG, 2023-07-18)Healthy Environments And Lives (HEAL) is the Australian national research network established to support improvements to health, the Australian health system, and the environment in response to the unfolding climate crisis. The HEAL Network comprises researchers, community members and organisations, policymakers, practitioners, service providers, and other stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and sectors. HEAL seeks to protect and improve public health, reduce health inequities and inequalities, and strengthen health system sustainability and resilience in the face of environmental and climate change, all with a commitment to building on the strengths, knowledge, wisdom, and experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture, and communities. Supporting applied research that can inform policy and practice, and effective research translation, implementation, and impact are important goals across the HEAL Network and essential to achieve its intended outcomes. To aid translation approaches, a research translation, implementation, and impact strategy for the HEAL Network was developed. The strategy has been created to inform and guide research translation across HEAL, emphasising communication, trust, partnerships, and co-design with communities and community organisations as well as the decision-makers responsible for public policies and programs. Development of the strategy was guided by research translation theory and practice and the Health in All Policies and Environment in All Policies frameworks. As described in this paper, the strategy is underpinned by a set of principles and outlines preliminary actions which will be further expanded over the course of the HEAL Network's activities. Through these actions, the HEAL Network is well-positioned to ensure successful research translation and implementation across its program of work.
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ItemObtaining Stable Predicted Distributions of Response Times and Decision Outcomes for the Circular Diffusion Model(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2023-12-01)Abstract The circular diffusion model represents continuous outcome decision making as evidence accumulation by a two-dimensional Wiener process with drift on the interior of a disk, whose radius represents the decision criterion for the task. The hitting point on the circumference of the disk represents the decision outcome and the hitting time represents the decision time. The Girsanov change-of-measure theorem applied to the first-passage time distribution for the Euclidean distance Bessel process yields an explicit expression for the joint distribution of decision outcomes and decision times for the model. A problem with the expression for the joint distribution obtained in this way is that the change-of-measure calculation magnifies numerical noise in the series expression for the Bessel process, which can make the expression unstable at small times when the drift rate or decision criterion is large. We introduce a new method that uses an asymptotic approximation to characterize the Bessel process at short times and the series expression for the large times. The resulting expressions are stable across all parts of the parameter space likely to be of interest in experiments, which greatly simplifies the task of fitting the model to data. The new method applies to the spherical and hyperspherical generalizations of the model and to versions of it in which the drift rates are normally distributed across trials with independent or correlated components.
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ItemMapping Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life(SPRINGERNATURE, 2023-12)UNLABELLED: The growing literature on interpersonal emotion regulation has largely focused on the strategies people use to regulate. As such, researchers have little understanding of how often people regulate in the first place, what emotion regulation goals they have when they regulate, and how much effort they invest in regulation. To better characterize features of the regulation process, we conducted two studies using daily diary (N = 171) and experience sampling methods (N = 239), exploring interpersonal emotion regulation in the context of everyday social interactions. We found people regulated others' emotions nearly twice a day, regulated their own emotions through others around once a day, and regulated both their own and others' emotions in the same interaction roughly every other day. Furthermore, not only did people regulate others' emotions more often than regulating their own emotions through others, but they also put in more effort to do so. The goals of regulation were primarily to make themselves or others feel better, most often through increasing positive emotions, rather than decreasing negative emotions. Together, these findings provide a foundational picture of the interpersonal emotion regulation landscape, and lay the groundwork for future exploration into this emerging subfield of affective science. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00223-z.
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ItemCumulative trauma load and timing of trauma prior to military deployment differentially influences inhibitory control processing across deployment(NATURE PORTFOLIO, 2023-12-05)Military personnel experience high trauma load that can change brain circuitry leading to impaired inhibitory control and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Inhibitory control processing may be particularly vulnerable to developmental and interpersonal trauma. This study examines the differential role of cumulative pre-deployment trauma and timing of trauma on inhibitory control using the Go/NoGo paradigm in a military population. The Go/NoGo paradigm was administered to 166 predominately male army combat personnel at pre- and post-deployment. Linear mixed models analyze cumulative trauma, trauma onset, and post-deployment PTSD symptoms on NoGo-N2 and NoGo-P3 amplitude and latency across deployment. Here we report, NoGo-N2 amplitude increases and NoGo-P3 amplitude and latency decreases in those with high prior interpersonal trauma across deployment. Increases in NoGo-P3 amplitude following adolescent-onset trauma and NoGo-P3 latency following childhood-onset and adolescent-onset trauma are seen across deployment. Arousal symptoms positively correlated with conflict monitoring. Our findings support the cumulative trauma load and sensitive period of trauma exposure models for inhibitory control processing in a military population. High cumulative interpersonal trauma impacts conflict monitoring and response suppression and increases PTSD symptoms whereas developmental trauma differentially impacts response suppression. This research highlights the need for tailored strategies for strengthening inhibitory control, and that consider timing and type of trauma in military personnel.
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ItemGreater target or lure variability? An exploration on the effects of stimulus types and memory paradigms.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2023-12-04)In recognition memory, the variance of the target distribution is almost universally found to be greater than that of the lure distribution. However, these estimates commonly come from long-term memory paradigms where words are used as stimuli. Two exceptions to this rule have found evidence for greater lure variability: a short-term memory task (Yotsumoto et al., Memory & Cognition, 36, 282-294 2008) and in an eyewitness memory paradigm (Wixted et al., Cognitive Psychology, 105, 81-114 2018). In the present work, we conducted a series of recognition memory experiments using different stimulus (faces vs. words) along with different paradigms (long-term vs. short-term paradigms) to evaluate whether either of these conditions would result in greater variability in lure items. Greater target variability was observed across stimulus types and memory paradigms. This suggests that factors other than stimuli and retention interval might be responsible for cases where variability is less for targets than lures.
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ItemIntegrating word-form representations with global similarity computation in recognition memory.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2023-11-16)In recognition memory, retrieval is thought to occur by computing the global similarity of the probe to each of the studied items. However, to date, very few global similarity models have employed perceptual representations of words despite the fact that false recognition errors for perceptually similar words have consistently been observed. In this work, we integrate representations of letter strings from the reading literature with global similarity models. Specifically, we employed models of absolute letter position (slot codes and overlap models) and relative letter position (closed and open bigrams). Each of the representations was used to construct a global similarity model that made contact with responses and RTs at the individual word level using the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model (Brown & Heathcote Cognitive Psychology, 57 , 153-178, 2008). Relative position models were favored in three of the four datasets and parameter estimates suggested additional influence of the initial letters in the words. When semantic representations from the word2vec model were incorporated into the models, results indicated that orthographic representations were almost equally consequential as semantic representations in determining inter-item similarity and false recognition errors, which undermines previous suggestions that long-term memory is primarily driven by semantic representations. The model was able to modestly capture individual word variability in the false alarm rates, but there were limitations in capturing variability in the hit rates that suggest that the underlying representations require extension.
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ItemDoes alcohol consumption elevate smoking relapse risk of people who used to smoke? Differences by duration of smoking abstinence.(Elsevier BV, 2024-04)BACKGROUND: Past research indicates dual users of tobacco and alcohol find it harder to quit smoking and may be more likely to relapse. This study investigated whether post-quit alcohol use predicted smoking relapse among ex-smokers, and whether this relationship varied by length of smoking abstinence. METHOD: The study included 1064 ex-smokers (18+ years) from Canada (n = 340), US (n = 314), England (n = 261), and Australia (n = 149) who participated in the 2018 and 2020 International Tobacco Control Four Country Smoking and Vaping Survey, and we conducted analyses using multivariable logistic regression. We assessed alcohol consumption in 2018 using AUDIT-C and coded as never/low, moderate or heavy level and used alcohol consumption to predict smoking status in 2020. RESULTS: Overall 26 % and 21 % of ex-smokers consumed alcohol at a moderate and heavy level, respectively. Compared to never/low alcohol consumption, risk of smoking relapse among those who consumed alcohol at a moderate level was significantly lower within the first year of abstinence (OR = 0.34, 95 % CI = 0.14-0.81, p = 0.015) but higher thereafter (OR = 2.44, 95 % CI = 1.13-5.23, p = 0.023). The pattern of results was similar for those who consumed alcohol at a heavy level. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, baseline alcohol consumption of ex-smokers did not predict their smoking relapse risk. As expected, risk differed by smoking abstinence duration. However, the pattern was unexpected among the short-term quitters as the subgroup who drank moderately/heavily had lower relapse risk than their counterparts who never drink or at low level, underscoring the need to replicate this unexpected finding.
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ItemExamining dependencies among different time scales in episodic memory - an experience sampling study.(Frontiers Media SA, 2023)We re-examined whether different time scales such as week, day of week, and hour of day are independently used during memory retrieval as has been previously argued (i.e., independence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, we used experience sampling technology to obtain test stimuli that have higher ecological validity. We also used pointwise mutual information to directly calculate the degree of dependency between time scales in a formal way. Participants were provided with a smartphone and were asked to wear it around their neck for two weeks, which was equipped with an app that automatically collected time, images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week retention interval, participants were presented with an image that was captured during their data collection phase, and were tested on their memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day of week, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous arguments, memories of different time scales were not retrieved independently. Moreover, through rendering recurrence plots of the images that the participants collected, we provide evidence the dependency may have originated from the repetitive events that the participants encountered in their daily life.
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ItemPerceptions of Australia's e-cigarette regulations and recommendations for future reforms: a qualitative study of adolescents and adults(BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP, 2024-02)OBJECTIVE: To assess public perceptions of the effectiveness of e-cigarette regulations in minimising use among adolescents and those who have never smoked. Specifically, we explored (1) perceived effectiveness of current regulations relating to e-cigarettes and (2) ideas for further regulations that could reduce use. DESIGN AND PARTICIPANTS: Focus groups (n=16) were conducted with Australian adolescents (14-17 years), young adults (18-24 years) and adults (25-39 years). Groups were stratified by age, gender and e-cigarette use status. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. SETTING: Focus groups were conducted in-person in two major Australian cities. RESULTS: Groups lacked a comprehensive understanding of e-cigarette regulations in Australia. When informed of these regulations, half of the groups considered the prescription model for nicotine e-cigarette products to be effective when enforced appropriately. Almost all groups considered access to non-nicotine products problematic. All groups suggested a range of demand reduction regulations, including plain packaging, health warnings, flavour restrictions and increased vape-free areas. Most groups (predominantly those who had never vaped) also recommended supply reduction regulations such as banning all e-cigarettes. The need for supply reduction measures to include addiction and mental health supports was discussed. CONCLUSIONS: The regulations recommended by participants largely align with those that are to be introduced in Australia, indicating that these reforms are likely to be accepted by the public. Ensuring these reforms are complemented by formal supports for young people experiencing nicotine dependence and related mental health concerns is critical.