Gabriele Chierchia

Most research on facial emotion recognition has focused on participants from a narrow range of Western cultures, thereby limiting its applicability to diverse populations. The present study aimed to validate a culturally relevant set of facial emotion photographs for use in regions of sub-Saharan Africa. We selected 206 facial expressions posed by models of Black African descent from the Racially Diverse Affective Expression (RADIATE) dataset (Conley et al., 2018). Fifty-four students from the University of Limpopo, South Africa, rated these stimuli in 2020. Using a 75% rater agreement threshold, we refined the rated images to a recommended set of 131 images, termed the Limpopo facial emotion stimulus set. These images demonstrated high recognition of the intended facial expressions and strong consistency between raters. We present psychometric results describing these open-access stimuli, intended to be informative for other researchers. Our validation process underscores the importance of adapting materials to match the cultural and social context of the target population. The Limpopo facial emotion stimulus set provides a locally validated set of emotional expression stimuli, filling a gap in the availability of culturally appropriate cognitive and emotional assessment tools, which we hope can enhance the ecological validity of emotion research in sub-Saharan Africa.

Introduction: Adolescents show a heightened propensity to take risks, relative to other age groups, especially in contexts involving peers. In the current study, we investigated whether peer contexts and age interact to promote collective risk taking, that is, when groups of peers decide to take a risk together. We further investigated whether experiencing the outcomes of collective decisions affected participants' choice to face the same decision collectively or alone. Methods: To investigate this, 248 United Kingdom‐based participants between the ages of 11 and 39, tested in 2020–2021, took part in a collective risk taking task. In an alone condition, participants chose between two risky gambles by themselves. In a collective condition, participants voted for one of the two gambles alongside four anonymous online peers. After experiencing the outcomes of their decisions, participants then chose whether to face the same decision collectively or alone. Results: When participants voluntarily joined collectives, they were more likely to take risks, compared with facing the same decisions alone. This risk‐enhancing effect of collectives declined with age between late adolescence and early adulthood. In addition, after experiencing the outcomes of decisions made alone, adolescents were more likely to join collectives than were adults. Adolescents also displayed more decision variability than adults when facing risks alone, and this was associated with preferences to join collectives. Conclusions: These findings suggest that adolescents are more likely than adults to take risks when deciding collectively, and more likely to voluntarily join those collectives.

Understanding how Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, develops and differs across individuals requires robust and easily applicable measures. Tasks involving open ended verbal responses such as the Triangles Task offer valid indicators of ToM, but their manual scoring is time-consuming and demands substantial training. In this study, we test the validity and reliability of TrAIngles, an automatic scoring software for the Triangles Task developed through fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). TrAIngles was trained on a dataset of N ~ 11,000 responses collected from 581 Italian-speaking participants aged between 8 and 81 years. LLM-based ToM scores showed high accuracy and reliability metrics (Cohen’s kappa, ICC, Krippendorff’s alpha, Spearman’s rho) comparable to human ratings and consistently exceeding commonly accepted thresholds for inter-rater agreement (i.e., > .80). Performance remained robust across age groups (children, adolescents, young adults, adults, and older adults). Our findings demonstrate that reliable and valid ToM indexes can be obtained from the Triangles Task using this new automated scoring system based on LLMs. TrAIngles thus provides an innovative tool for lifespan ToM assessments relying on open-ended responses, highlighting the potential of training automated scoring systems on archival, human-rated datasets. TrAIngles is openly available for use both as code and via a user-friendly graphical interface.

Social interactions can be deeply rewarding, yet they are marked by social uncertainty. The uncertainty arises because we can never truly know another’s mind. As a species, humans find uncertainty aversive and excessive. Intolerance of uncertainty is a risk factor for emotional disorders. One way to resolve uncertainty in novel situations is to rely on memories of past similar experiences, yet this process is largely unexplored in social contexts. A novel social decision-making task showed that individuals recruit both memories and incremental experiences of social rewards to guide decisions under social uncertainty. Further, individuals with elevated depressive symptoms showed better integration of positive social memories if they also had high levels of autobiographical memory specificity. These findings suggest that successfully recalling past positive social experiences improves navigation of social uncertainty, and may confer preventative advantages for those with high levels of affective disorder symptoms.

Traditionally, spatial perspective-taking (sPT) has been investigated as an ability to take the perspective of others when explicitly instructed to do so. However, more recent findings suggest that, even in the absence of explicit instruction, people sometimes take the visual perspective of others when observing a visual scene, that is, they engage in spontaneous sPT. To explain why, research has so far focused on features of the visual scene. Here, we focus on the observer. By developing a novel task, the Do You See What I See (DYSWIS) task, across 4 studies (N = 603; age range: 18-36 years), we find that some people are systematically more likely than others to choose the perspective of others across conditions and when tested 2 weeks apart. These individual differences in spontaneous sPT correlate with the ability to take the perspective of others when explicitly instructed to do so and with self-reported empathy in 3 out of 4 studies, while they are not associated with mental rotation or non-verbal reasoning abilities. These associations are stable across different visual scenes, even if some features of the scenes, such as the presence of humans or their implied movement, substantially enhance spontaneous sPT. Taken together, this work demonstrates that people systematically differ in their spontaneous tendency to take the visual perspective of others, highlighting the importance of investigating sPT not only as an ability, but also as a disposition or choice.

Introduction Scalable psychological treatments to address depression among adolescents are urgently needed. This is particularly relevant to low-income and middle-income countries where 90% of the world’s adolescents live. While digital delivery of behavioural activation (BA) presents a promising solution, its feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness among adolescents in an African context remain to be shown. Methods and analysis This study is a two-arm single-blind individual-level randomised controlled pilot trial to assess the feasibility, acceptability and initial efficacy of digitally delivered BA therapy among adolescents with depression. The intervention has been coproduced with adolescents at the study site. The study is based in the rural northeast of South Africa in the Bushbuckridge subdistrict of Mpumalanga province. A total of 200 adolescents with symptoms of mild to moderately severe depression on the Patient Health Questionnaire Adolescent Version will be recruited (1:1 allocation ratio). The treatment group will receive BA therapy via a smartphone application (the Kuamsha app) supported by trained peer mentors. The control group will receive an enhanced standard of care. The feasibility and acceptability of the intervention will be evaluated using a mixed methods design, and signals of the initial efficacy of the intervention in reducing symptoms of depression will be determined on an intention-to-treat basis. Secondary objectives are to pilot a range of cognitive, mental health, risky behaviour and socioeconomic measures; and to collect descriptive data on the feasibility of trial procedures to inform the development of a further larger trial. Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (MED20-05-011) and the Oxford Tropical Research Ethics Committee (OxTREC 34-20). Study findings will be published in scientific open access peer-reviewed journals, presented at scientific conferences and communicated to participants, their caregivers, public sector officials and other relevant stakeholders. Trial registration numbers This trial was registered on 19 November 2020 with the South African National Clinical Trials Registry (DOH-27-112020-5741) and the Pan African Clinical Trials Registry (PACTR202206574814636).

Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long‐standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence. In a reinforcement learning (RL) task, 77 participants aged 11–32 years (four men, mean age = 16.26) attempted to maximize monetary rewards by repeatedly sampling different pairs of novel options, which varied in their reward/punishment probabilities. Mixed‐effect models showed an age‐related increase in accuracy as long as learning contingencies remained stable across trials, but less so when they reversed halfway through the trials. Age was also associated with a greater tendency to stay with an option that had just delivered a reward, more than to switch away from an option that had just delivered a punishment. At the computational level, a confirmation model provided increasingly better fit with age. This model showed that age differences are captured by decreases in noise or exploration, rather than in the magnitude of the confirmation bias. These findings provide new insights into how learning changes during development and could help better tailor learning environments to people of different ages.Research Highlights: Reinforcement learning shows age‐related improvement during adolescence, but more in stable learning environments compared with volatile learning environments. People tend to stay with an option after a win more than they shift from an option after a loss, and this asymmetry increases with age during adolescence. Computationally, these changes are captured by a developing confirmatory learning style, in which people learn more from outcomes that confirm rather than disconfirm their choices. Age‐related differences in confirmatory learning are explained by decreases in stochasticity, rather than changes in the magnitude of the confirmation bias.

Matrix reasoning tasks are among the most widely used measures of cognitive ability in the behavioral sciences, but the lack of matrix reasoning tests in the public domain complicates their use. Here we present an extensive investigation and psychometric validation of the matrix reasoning item bank (MaRs-IB), an open-access set of matrix reasoning items. In a first study, we calibrate the psychometric functioning of the items in the MaRs-IB in a large sample adults participants (N=1501). Using additive multilevel item structure models, we establish that the MaRs-IB has many desirable psychometric properties: its items span a wide range of difficulty, possess medium- to-large levels of discrimination, and exhibit robust associations between item complexity and difficulty. However, we also find that item clones are not always psychometrically equivalent and cannot assumed to be exchangeable. In a second study, we demonstrate how experimenters can use the estimated item parameters to design new matrix reasoning tests using optimal item assembly. Specifically, we design and validate two new sets of test forms in an independent sample of adults (N=600). We find these new tests possess good reliability and convergent validity with an established measure of matrix reasoning. We hope that the materials and results made available here will encourage experimenters to use the MaRs-IB in their research.