2022 has been prolific, leading us into 2023 which will be a turning point for ACP and our Editorial Team. However, we first wish to express once more and with the utmost sincerity our gratitude to our Editorial Board, Authors, and Reviewers. It is moving to see the generosity, insight and commitment of scientists worldwide to the idea of quality and open science.

The current study aimed to uncover the structure of common latent processes underlying the execution of several tasks that hypothetically measure spontaneous and adaptive cognitive flexibility, providing evidence for their convergent validity. A group of healthy volunteers (N = 121) completed two sets of tasks to assess spontaneous and adaptive cognitive flexibility. Spontaneous flexibility measures included a divergent thinking test (to assess fluency and flexibility of thinking) and a verbal fluency test. Adaptive flexibility measures involved a set-switching test as a measure of switch costs and an attentional set-shifting test as a measure of learned irrelevance and perseveration). A vocabulary knowledge test provided a proxy measure of crystallized intelligence. Hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method revealed the existence of two separate subgroups of variables. The first group comprised fluency and flexibility of thinking, crystallized intelligence, verbal fluency, and switch costs. The second group included attentional shift variables, that is, learned irrelevance and perseveration. We consider these results meaningful and indicative of two separate factors contributing to cognitive flexibility: (a) speed of switching and (b) overcoming of prepotent responses. We discuss the implications of our results for the assessment of cognitive flexibility.

Romantic relationships can greatly enhance our lives, creating intimacy and bonding. Yet, not all relationships succeed, and when they fail, the resulting feelings can be intense, often leaving us feeling regret. The regret we feel is determined in part by whether we decide to take action or rely on inaction. Research shows that actions typically elicit more regret than inactions. However, research also shows gender differences for romantic regret, with men sometimes reporting more regret over inactions and women more regret over actions or equal regret for actions and inactions. The decision justification theory posits that regret is driven by two components: the event’s outcome and self-blame. In the current investigation, we manipulated self and other blame in a hypothetical romantic situation and showed that when blame is attributable to one’s self, actions (e.g., breaking up) elicited more regret than inactions (e.g., staying in a relationship). However, when blame for relationship failure is attributed to one’s partner, participants reported equal regret for actions or inactions. More specific analyses showed that men and women both have more regret for actions when self-blame is involved but when other-blame is involved, women showed equal regret for actions and inactions whereas men trended toward more regret for inactions.

Using a 2 (regulatory focus: promotion/prevention-focused) × 2 (decision-making strategies: intuitive/ rational strategies) experimental design, the current study explored the influence of regulatory focus and decision-making strategies on moral judgment. The results are as follows: (a) The main influencing effect of regulatory focus was statistically significant. Specifically, participants that were promotion-focused tended to make utilitarian moral judgments while participants that were prevention-focused tended to make deontological moral judgments. (b) The interaction effect of regulatory focus and decision-making strategies was also statistically significant. Specifically, moral judgement scores from participants that were promotion-focused were higher when they adopted intuitive rather than rational strategies while the scores of participants that were prevention-focused were higher when they adopted rational rather than intuitive strategies. These results suggest that the fit between regulatory focus and decision-making strategies can influence moral judgment.

Similar events may reduce the likelihood of the cognitive system to accurately remember a specific memory. Similarity leads to overlap between mnemonic traces, which, in turn, interferes with the discrimination of the traces. Therefore, it is important to determine how and when overlapping is detrimental to the discrimination between the traces. According to the Act-In memory model, the specificity of a memory trace is determined by the sensory overlap as well as by the number of participating sensory modalities on which overlap occurs (unimodal vs. multimodal). Increasing overlap should only be critical when the memory traces are the most difficult to discriminate from each other, which is more likely for unimodal than multimodal traces. As such, multimodal events might be more efficient than unimodal events to allow memory specificity. In two experiments, participants had to reproduce visuospatial sequences in a 2 × 2 matrix. The level of sensory overlap (high vs. low) and the number of components on which overlap occurs in the memory traces (unimodal vs. multimodal-discrimination) were manipulated. The results showed that memory span was lower when the visual overlap was at its highest, but more significantly, when trace discrimination was unimodal (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, for visually richer stimuli, visual overlap was shown to be detrimental to specific memory only in a condition of visual degradation. Taken together, the results suggest that the sensory overlap is essentially critical to specific memory when it is at its highest, which is the most likely for low richness unimodal stimuli.

Historically, an unusual persuasion highlighting the worst possible outcome of an uncertain option has successfully persuaded people to risk death. To explore the effectiveness of this persuasion, guided by an “equate-to-differentiate” account, we conducted three studies and found that (a) participants who agreed more with the persuasion highlighting the worst possible outcome of the uncertain option reported a smaller relative difference between options on the worst-possible- outcome dimension and thus were more uncertainty-seeking, (b) participants exposed to the persuasion highlighting the worst possible outcome estimated a smaller relative difference on the worst-possible-outcome dimension and thus were more uncertainty-seeking than those who did not experience the persuasion, and (c) exposing to the persuasion highlighting the worst possible outcome did not increase participants’ perceived winning probability for the uncertain option, and if participants agreed with the persuasion, they reported a smaller relative difference on the worstpossible- outcome dimension, which predicted their uncertainty preference.

Existing collaborative memory research has shown statistically significant detrimental and beneficial effects (i.e., collaborative inhibition, error pruning, and post-collaborative memory benefit). However, it remains unknown yet whether they are modulated by stimulus emotionality of adjacent stimuli and whether they would differ in distinct memory tasks (item memory vs. source memory). To address these issues, the current study adopted the emotional timeout procedure, where participants individually studied a series of triplets (a preceding neutral word, a modulator word of taboo, nontaboo negative, neutral, or positive emotionality, and a following neutral word) displayed in red or green, and three recall sessions and a surprise recognition test was conducted afterwards. Results revealed reliable beneficial effects of collaboration. (a) The error pruning was reliably observed within ongoing and lasting collaboration in item memory tasks while it faded away post-collaboration in source memory conditions. (b) The post-collaborative memory benefit was confirmed in all word positions. It occurred in taboo, neutral, and positive words for modulators of different emotionality, while that of the preceding and following neutral words were insensitive to the emotionality of the modulator. The effect was only present in item memory, offering compelling evidence for dual-process models. (c) Collaboration facilitated the picked-up effect and the formation of shared memory. However, the detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition was absent in both memory tasks. These findings demonstrated that the mechanisms of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis (RSDH) took effect under the emotional timeout procedure to a certain degree.

The nursing profession has been associated with an increased risk of occupational burnout, and elevated rates of burnout have been reported in nurses from around the world, including psychiatric nurses. As a workplace, a psychiatric hospital is one where particularly stressful factors accumulate, including those related to unpredictable patterns of behaviors revealed by patients with severe mental illness, and many psychiatric nurses are exposed to this long-term stress, thus increasing the risk of burnout. Workplace related burnout may in turn adversely affect other spheres of psychosocial functioning in nurses, including their own mental somatic health. The aim of the current study was to assess the incidence of burnout and symptoms of mental health among psychiatric nurses from six European countries and to analyze the possible contribution of burnout to the nurses’ mental health. The study was conducted between November 2019 and February 2020 and involved 327 nurses (87% women) working at psychiatric hospitals in six European countries: Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Hungary. Participants filled in the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) the General Health Questionnaire–28 (GHQ-28). The reported levels of occupational burnout differed significantly across the countries. The highest levels of burnout were found in psychiatric nurses from Germany and lowest in nurses form Slovakia. Men showed higher depersonalization than women, but women reported more problems anxiety and insomnia. Results also showed that depersonalization lowers with age and with work experience, while the sense of personal accomplishment increases with age. Emotional exhaustion was the only burnout factor that worsened with time. However, nearly all mental health symptoms worsened with age and work experience. Symptoms of burnout and mental health problems proved to be related. Emotional exhaustion was the strongest predictor of poor mental health. The degree of depersonalization and occupational burnout associated with a self-perceived sense of personal accomplishment among the nurses included in the study decreased with age, total work experience, and work experience with the same employer. Emotional exhaustion increased with age and total work experience. As burnout increased, mental health symptoms worsened. Nurses with secondary education (without university degrees) showed a significantly higher level of burnout caused by their low sense of personal accomplishment.

Stuttering is a challenging condition characterized by disfluencies which prior work has found to be momentarily improved during whispering. The present study explores the clinical potential of whispering by examining whether the benefits of whispering remain stable with short-term use, extend to conversation tasks, and are feasible in daily life. Sixteen adult persons who stutter completed tests assessing the amount of stuttering for normal voiced speech and whispering during both conversation and reading-aloud tasks. Participants then used whispered communication in their daily lives and reported their subjective experiences. After three weeks, effectiveness tests were repeated. Stuttering severity was significantly lower for whispered speech (vs. typical speech) during a conversation task (50% reduction), although this effect was smaller than for the reading-aloud task (85% reduction). This reduction remained present and comparable in magnitude after three weeks of approximately 5 to 10 minutes of daily whispering. Participants subjectively indicated positive experiences with respect to the effects of whispering on fluency and reported that whispering helped reduce stuttering-related anxiety. However, four participants (25%) reported negative voice side effects (e.g., hoarseness, vocal-fold strain), associated with regular whispering. Occasional use of whispering can effectively reduce stuttering and related behaviors during both reading-aloud and conversational speech. This result paves the way for future technological applications that convert whispered speech into natural sounding speech in real-time.