Intersubject electroencephalogram (EEG) coherence of 11 couples was measured during an individual and joint practice of a guided mindful breathing exercise. Additionally, the relationship of personality dimensions of agreeableness and extraversion with intersubject coherence was examined. There were four male-male pairs, five female-female pairs, and two male-female pairs. The age of the participants ranged between 18 and 28 (M = 22.3, SD = 2.9). During the counterbalanced joint and individual conditions, the same mindfulness listening tape (3 min) was played, while during the individual task, a screen was placed between the two participants. Results showed an increase in intersubject coherence during joint practice compared to individual practice in frontal (F8) and temporal (T5 and T6) electrodes in the alpha band. With respect to personality characteristics, higher agreeableness of a dyad was associated with an increase in intersubject coherence in in temporal (T6) theta band. The increase in intersubject coherence in the theta band in high agreeableness subjects during joint practice might be associated with theory of mind activation. This study provides new insights concerning brain coherence in healthy people during joint mindful breathing, including the association with personality characteristics.

We carried out two cross-sectional studies (N1 = 240; N2 = 334) on a population of native Polishspeaking young adults to examine the relationships between trait anger, grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and self-reported sarcasm use, measured with a Polish translation of the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS, Ivanko et al., 2004). We found that trait anger was significantly and positively associated with self-reported sarcasm use generally and on the face-saving subscale. Additionally, grandiose, but not vulnerable narcissism showed a pattern of positive correlations with self-reported sarcasm use, both generally as well as on the individual SSS subscales. Trait anger and grandiose narcissism were also significant predictors of self-reported sarcasm use, although the influence of narcissism weakened upon the inclusion of trait anger in the regression models, suggesting that trait anger might contribute to perceiving oneself as sarcastic among narcissistic individuals.

This paper reports an investigation of the influence of method effects on the measurement of reasoning and of the relationships of these effects to basic cognitive processes. For this purpose, the variation due to the item-position and difficulty effects was separated from the variation due to the measured latent source of inductive reasoning. Data were collected by means of inductive reasoning items and cognitive tasks measuring working memory (WM) updating, rule learning, and automatization. Confirmatory factor analysis models served the decomposition of the variation of inductive reasoning data into a purified version of inductive reasoning, item-position, and difficulty components. The investigation of the relationships of corresponding latent variables and basic cognitive processes revealed two major associations: (a) the purified version of reasoning correlated with WM updating and (b) the item-position effect correlated with variants of learning. These results could be interpreted as signifying a two-dimensional structure of reasoning associated with executive functioning and learning processes.