Since modern teaching is an emotional rollercoaster, maintaining emotional, and therefore, social comfort in a school environment is a prerequisite for all educators when preparing and cooperating with teachers. Due to the nature of teaching, certain emotions are clearly more dominant, and the teacher’s mental state is significantly affected by them. The current study, based on a mixedmethod approach, aimed to discover the types of emotions that accompany early career teachers at school. Furthermore, it landscapes a metaphorical map of the teacher’s emotional development according to the teachers’ attitude protocol (TAP), and the results imply that every stage brings distinct emotions affecting the teacher’s mental state, which might be especially useful when mentoring young teachers.

Alexithymia is understood as a multidimensional personality trait associated with deficits in emotional awareness. Previous research has indicated that dimensions of alexithymia are related to impaired emotional self-regulation. This study intended to verify whether alexithymia dimensions are linked to interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). IER is conceptualized as extrinsic (regulation of other peoples’ emotions) and intrinsic (regulation of one’s own emotions through social interaction). Two hundred seventy-two students of several bachelor’s and master’s programs at the University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, took part in the study and completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and two measures of IER: Managing the Emotions of Others Scale (MEOS) and The Interpersonal Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ). All alexithymia dimensions and their overall level were positively correlated with two nonprosocial extrinsic IER strategies – poor skills and emotion concealing. The overall severity of alexithymia and its two dimensions (externally oriented style of thinking and difficulty describing feelings) were negatively correlated with the extrinsic IER strategy of affect enhancement. The severity of the overall level of alexithymia and its dimensions were negatively related to the use of adaptive strategies to regulate one's own emotions during live social interaction. In addition, the study showed that all three alexithymia factors play a role as predictors of extrinsic and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. This study presents a picture of how the severity of alexithymia is linked to the management of other people's emotions and the regulation of one's own emotions in social situations.

The current study pioneers the exploration of the dynamic modulation of children's brain activities, specifically alpha power, in response to varying degrees of social engagement. Real-time electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring was employed on 97 children to investigate alpha power during two distinct social activities: sand-playing and story-listening, under three conditions: the presence of a parent, a stranger, or being alone. It is hypothesized a decrease in children's alpha power with the presence of others and that this alpha suppression effect would be stronger at higher levels of social engagement. Findings indicated a significant modulation of alpha power in response to social presence during story-listening, evidenced by a decrease in alpha amplitude when a parent or stranger is present compared to being alone. In contrast, during sand-playing activities, no significant differences were observed, suggesting that the social modulation of alpha power is context-dependent and relates to attentional engagement with the social stimulus. These results contribute to the understanding of the neural basis of social cognition in children, demonstrating that social presence and the level of attentional

The goal of the current study was to explore the differences in brain activity correlates of engagement of visual attention to emotional adjectives in high- and low-sensitivity participants, as scored on the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS). Out of 28 participants, data from 22 were analyzed (n = 10 classified as high sensitivity; n = 12 as low sensitivity). To ensure sustained attentional focus, the participants were presented with 42 positive, 42 negative, 42 neutral, and 126 pseudoadjectives in a subliminally presented masked lexical decision task. We found a trend-level significance in the amplitudes of the P2 component, and significant differences in the amplitudes of the P3 component, with higher amplitudes evoked for all stimuli in low sensitivity compared to high sensitivity participants. The effects were also visible on the low sensory threshold subscale of the HSPS. The results are interpreted in terms of decreased attentional focus in participants with a high level of sensory processing sensitivity. The research also points to possible links between high sensitivity and ADHD, which should be explored further in future ERP studies.

Depression, a multifaceted mental health disorder, is often associated with negative cognitive biases such as hostile attributions (HA). However, the borderline pattern, with its characteristic emotional dysregulation and complex interpersonal interactions, may have a significant role in this relationship. To better understand these associations, we analyzed data from two research studies. The first study, based on a reanalysis of data from a previous study conducted on the general population (N = 54), utilized electroencephalography (EEG) alongside the Personality Assessment Inventory Borderline Features (PAI-BOR) Scale. The second study (N = 189), conducted on the general population and prisoners, focused on negative affectivity and disinhibition, two domains of personality pathology that characterize borderline pattern. Results from both studies revealed a link between depression and HA, with features/domains of borderline pattern emerging as a key predictor of HA. Additionally, apart from negative affectivity, detachment predicted hostile attribution, and, not as hypothesized, disinhibition. Our findings suggest that in investigating hostile attributions, it is more important to consider depressive tendencies stemming from underlying personality pathology (i.e., borderline patterns) rather than mere symptoms of depression.

The current study activated a temporary letter sequence by successively presenting five letters and exploring how each of them were encoded once the long-term memory (LTM) sequence was relevant to the alphabet and the working memory (WM) sequence was relevant to temporary learning with serial overlapping in a letter long-term sequence classification task (Experiment 1), letter WM sequence classification task (Experiment 2), and letter color classification task (Experiment 3). The results showed that (a) the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect was present both in the LTM sequence and WM sequence within the letter LTM sequence classification task, (b) the SNARC effect was only present in the WM sequence within the letter WM sequence classification task, (c) the SNARC effect was only present in the WM sequence in the LTM sequence-response consistent condition in the letter color classification task, and (d) the SNARC effect on relevant WM and relevant LTM interacted in the letter WM sequence classification task and letter color classification task, but did not interact in the letter LTM sequence classification task. These results imply that (a) each specific sequence was explored to spatially encode letters in the LTM sequence and temporarily within the WM sequence when overlapping context was moderated by the cognitive task and (b) task orientation also determines whether individuals process LTM sequences and WM sequences in a parallel or serial manner.

Auditory attention orientation involves focusing on sound features, timing, or location, governed by bottom-up, top-down, and experiential mechanisms. While bottom-up attention is driven by salient stimuli, top-down attention is goal-oriented and conscious. Experiential mechanisms, particularly selection history, are less understood but crucial for attentional biases. Predictability, a key factor in attention, is explored through predictive coding theory, suggesting the brain predicts and updates expectations based on deviations from models. The current study examined how temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal predictability influences auditory attention using event-related potentials (ERPs). Four experiments, varying in acoustic scene complexity and predictability rules, were conducted. Results indicated reduced response times and enhanced P3 amplitude under predictable conditions. N1 component modulation revealed differential effects of attention and predictability. Frequency and order rules showed distinct facilitation roles in temporal and spatial dimensions, with complex scenes utilizing spatial cues more efficiently. The current study contributes to understanding attention dynamics and electrophysiological correlates, shedding light on how predictability shapes auditory attention. Variability in research outcomes is attributed to task variance and methodological considerations. By controlling these factors, the current study underscores the importance of predictability in auditory attention, offering insights into its neural mechanisms and temporal dynamics.

Visual memory contains conceptual and perceptual information, but existing evidence regarding their relative contributions is sparse and inconsistent. In the current study, we conducted a thorough experiment to see whether conceptual and perceptual information are encoded and retrieved the same to produce similar levels of false recognition and output interference (declining memory performance during testing). Participants studied images under different study times (20/500/2000 ms) and encoding tasks (conceptual/perceptual). Participants were tested with targets and foils with different levels of similarity to targets. We observed that foils with low conceptual similarity and high perceptual similarity (CLPH) and foils with high conceptual similarity and low perceptual similarity (CHPL) produced similar levels of false recognition and output interference when study time was 2000 ms and when the encoding task was perceptual-oriented. However, when study time was 20 ms or 500 ms and the encoding task focused on conceptual information, the CHPL foils produced a larger false alarm rate than the CLPH foils. The 20 ms and conceptual conditions also produced a larger decrease in false alarm rate (greater output interference) for the CHPL foils. The results indicate that, under a brief study time and a conceptual-oriented study procedure, conceptual information is encoded more strongly than perceptual information to play a more vital role in visual memory. We apply visual and verbal memory theories to account for our findings and show the potential to represent and describe memory processes across modalities using models of spreading activation and differentiation.