The primary objective of this study was to determine the adult attachment styles that play a role in the onset and continuation of chronic pain in fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) patients, and to evaluate the relationship between the dimensions of adult attachment and depression.The secondary objective of this study was to determine whether social interaction and assessment of emotions via face expressions are impaired in FMS patients and to evaluate the relationship between said impairment, if any, with depression. The patient group consisted of 65 individuals diagnosed with FM in accordance with the American College of Rheumatology criteria published in 2010 and 2016. The control group consisted of 70 volunteers with sociodemographic characteristics that matched those of the patient group. A sociodemographic data form, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) Scale were used to collect the research data. No statistically significant difference was found between the patient and control groups in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, that is, gender, place of residence, educational level, marital status, and occupation. However, there were significant differences between the patient and control groups in terms of both attachment and theory of mind (ToM) functions.I FM patients reported anxious and avoidant attachment more than the control subjects. Categorically, the fearful attachment style was more prominent. A weak correlation, albeit not statistically significant, was observed between ToM functions and attachment styles and depression in both the patient and control groups. The findings of this study related to attachment and ToM indicate that developmental factors may play a role in the etiology of FMS. In this context, a combined approach that also includes psychiatric treatment methods may prove more effective in the treatment of FM patients. Accordingly, assessing the mental profiles and attachment styles of FMS patients jointly with psychiatrists may strengthen the weak relations of these patients with their environment and the physician and create a positive effect on their self-perception, benefiting the patient's follow-up and treatment processes.

Previous research, mainly focusing on the situational preconditions of rule violations, indicates that feelings of being watched by other agents promote rule compliance. However, the cognitive underpinnings of this effect and of rule violations in general have only attracted little scientific attention yet. In this study, we investigated whether cues of being observed not only reduce the likelihood of violating rules but also affect the underlying cognitive processes of such behavior when still putting a rule violation into action. Therefore, we applied a motion-tracking paradigm in which participants could violate a simple stimulus-response mapping rule while being faced with pictures of either open or closed eyes. In line with prior research, temporal and spatial measures of the participants’ movements indicated that violating this rule induced substantial cognitive conflict. However, conflict during rulebreaking was not moderated by the eye stimuli. This outcome suggests that rule retrieval constitutes an automatic process which is not or is only barely influenced by situational parameters. Moreover, our results imply that the effect of perceived observation on rule conformity is driven by normative influences on decision-making instead of social facilitation of dominant action tendencies.

Recent research on empirical aesthetics conducted in a laboratory setting has shown that the beauty felt in response to an artwork depends on its interactivity and suggested that interactivity might shape aesthetic experience. The current study tested the role of availability of interacting with installations on naïve viewers’ understanding, liking, and affect. Participants were presented with contemporary installations alongside differing levels/degrees of interactions with them: (a) own-interaction, that is, own interactions and optional observing other viewers when interacting (in an art gallery), (b) other-interaction, that is, observing the viewer when interacting (in a laboratory setting), and (c) nointeraction, that is, interaction unavailable at all (control condition—in a laboratory setting). In Conditions B and C, artwork reproductions were presented. The results showed that in the own-interaction condition, participants liked the artworks more than in the laboratory setting conditions (when data from other-interaction and no-interaction conditions were combined). However, this result should be explained by the gallery effect rather than the degree of interactions. At the same time, subjective understanding and affective state did not differ depending on the level of interaction. Moreover, we tested what kind of affective state correlates with a greater tendency to interact with installations when viewing them in the art gallery. The variance of engagement in interaction with installations was statistically significantly positively explained (overall 42%) by valence (more positive states), subjective significance (more significant) and origin of affective states (metaphorically originating more from reasons of the mind, i.e., more deliberated upon and rational).

Personality is one of the factors that has been suggested as an important predictor of burnout; however, the precise relationships between the main personality factors and burnout have not been fully explained thus far. The aim of the current study was to examine the relationships between the main personality factors as proposed by the six-factor personality model (HEXACO) and occupational burnout as conceptualized in Schaufeli’s four-factor model in a sample of recreational diving instructors when controlling for the effects of basic. sociodemographic variables. The study sample consisted of 1188 recreational diving instructors (72.2% men). The participants completed an online battery of questionnaires measuring burnout symptoms (Burnout Assessment Tool), main personality factors (HEXACO PI-R 60) and sociodemographic and occupation-related variables. It was found that 10.6% of the recreational diving instructors were at risk or very high risk of occupational burnout at the time of the study. Women reported significantly higher levels of burnout symptoms than men. Age and length of work experience were significantly but weakly negatively correlated with burnout severity. Among the main personality factors, emotionality was positively associated with burnout, whereas honesty-humility, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience were all negatively correlated with burnout. Burnout was more strongly associated with conscientiousness in men than in women and more strongly associated with openness to experience in women than in men. Similar amounts of variance in burnout were explained by personality in both men and women; however, slightly different predictors of burnout were found to be significant for men and women. The findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge on burnout by elucidating possible gender differences in the risk of burnout and its associations with personality factors in a large occupational sample that has not been the subject of such research thus far.

Abductive reasoning is the process of finding the best explanation for a set of observations. As the number of possible observations and corresponding explanations may be very high, it is commonly accepted that working memory capacity is closely related to successful abductive reasoning. However, the precise relationship between abductive reasoning and working memory capacity remains largely opaque. In a reanalysis of two experiments (N = 59), we first investigated whether reasoning performance is associated with differences in working memory capacity. Second, using eye tracking, we explored the relationship between the facets of working memory and the process of visuospatial reasoning. We used working memory tests of both components (verbal-numerical/spatial) as well as an intelligence measure. Results showed a clear relationship between reasoning accuracy and spatial components as well as intelligence. Process measures suggested that working memory seems to be a limiting factor to reasoning and that looking-back to previously relevant areas is compensating for poor mental models rather than being a sign of a particularly elaborate one. Following, high working memory ability might lead to the use of strategies to optimize the content and complexity of the mental representation on which abductive reasoning is based.

Although previous studies have investigated how ordinal stimuli are encoded in contexts that vary in locational congruency, conclusions regarding the encoding mechanism are inconsistent. The present study utilized Chinese Heavenly Stem characters, which are an ordinal sequence used to record astronomical phenomena in ancient China and are still frequently used to date, as stimuli to investigate the influence of rotation angle and task demands on the encoding of ordinal stimuli in contexts that varied in locational congruency. We randomly presented six of these characters at varying rotation angles (0° or 180°) on the left or right side of the screen. Participants were then instructed to classify the stimulus order (Experiment 1), location (Experiment 2) and color (Experiment 3) in a bimanual classification task. The results were as follows: (a) When participants classified stimuli according to order, both the ordinal position effect and the Simon effect were detected for unrotated stimuli. However, only the ordinal position effect was detected for rotated stimuli. (b) When participants classified stimuli according to spatial location, we observed only the spatial stimulus–response compatibility effect. (c) When participants classified stimuli according to color, we observed the Simon effect in all trials. However, the ordinal position effect was detected only in location-congruent trials. These results suggest that encoding of ordinal stimuli in contexts that varied in locational congruency was moderated by the processing difficulty of the stimuli and the task demands.

Ensemble encoding abstracts multiple bits of information efficiently. Some researchers have found that ensemble encoding occurs automatically, while others have found the process is not automatic, because it involves both feedforward and feedback loops. We explored the automaticity in ensemble encoding under the adaptation paradigm by examining whether the orientation and emotion averaging were resistant to task load and attention distribution. In the adaptation stage, multiple orientations (Experiment 1) or emotions (Experiment 2) with different combinations of stimulus variance and intensity (manipulated task load) were presented either in the foveal or peripheral field of vision (manipulated attention distribution), and participants were asked to estimate the test stimulus. The combination of high variance and low perceived stimulus intensity reduced the extent to which these individual features contributed to estimates of both average orientation and emotion, and thus were applied to manipulate the task load. The visual system obtained varied attention among stimuli in the different fields of vision, which were used to manipulate attention distribution. Contrary to previous findings, the orientation ensemble was more easily influenced by task load and was not immune to the interaction between task load and attention distribution, while the process of emotion ensemble was nearly free from those restrictions and was also influenced to only a small degree by individual positive or negative emotional valence, implying higher automaticity in ensemble encoding of social information. Our findings support the domain-specific proposal, implying that automaticity might stem from the initial informational registration and happen in the early perceptual course.

The current study aimed to examine how pathological internet users (PIUs) process emotional stimuli on the internet and in real contexts. Twenty-one PIUs and 25 normal controls (NCs) were recruited based on their score on the Adolescent Pathological Internet Use Scale. They were asked to judge the valence of emotional words in a subliminal priming task. The results showed that participants responded more slowly to and had smaller P1 amplitudes for negative emotional words than for positive emotional words. Moreover, the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude for PIUs was smaller than that for NCs. Results showed a larger LPP of negative words in the internet-related priming context for NCs and the internet-unrelated priming context for PIUs. These findings indicate that pathological internet use affects emotional stimuli processing, especially in the late stage of cognitive processing.