William John Mitchell

Continuous self-report during ongoing experience provides a high-resolution window into subjective processing, yet concerns that it may disrupt the neural and cognitive processes being measured have limited its use in neuroimaging. We tested this by examining how expressing metacognitive judgment influences neural activity and behavior during complex social inference. Thirty-five participants underwent fMRI while watching an episode of a murder-mystery show and evaluating their certainty of a central character’s guilt. Participants continuously rated their certainty during one half of the episode (expressive metacognition) and viewed the other half without providing ratings (reflective metacognition), followed by surprise free recall and character evaluations. Expressive metacognition increased activation across salience, dorsal attention, and control networks, including medial frontal, parietal, and lateral prefrontal regions, whereas reflective metacognition yielded greater activation within a single anterior vmPFC cluster. The two conditions were also associated with increased intersubject synchrony in control and default mode networks, respectively. Despite these differences, they did not differ in which or how many scenes were recalled, recall order, or socioemotional character judgments, indicating that core aspects of episodic organization and social evaluation remain intact. However, expressive metacognition yielded greater episodic detail in recall. These findings show that expressing judgments reshapes neural processing and shared responses while leaving many downstream outcomes unchanged. supporting continuous self-report as a viable tool for studying dynamic cognition in naturalistic settings, provided its engagement of attention and control networks aligns with the research question.

Childhood abuse is often transmitted intergenerationally, leaving many families trapped in cycles of abuse. Because child abuse is transmitted through social interactions, developing effective intervention targets to disrupt these cycles may require understanding the mechanisms that support processing social feedback. This study examines whether neural biases in processing positive or negative social feedback moderate the link between history of childhood abuse and current expression of harsh parenting. Using fMRI and well-matched social and monetary feedback tasks, we studied female caregivers (N = 56; 46.16 ± 7.49 years) of adolescents. In the social feedback task, activation to negative relative to positive feedback in the anterior hippocampus, putamen, amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) moderated the link between childhood abuse and harsh parenting. Specifically, abuse severity was most strongly associated with harsh parenting among individuals with greater activation to negative relative to positive feedback. No comparable effects emerged from the monetary task. These findings suggest sensitivity to social feedback, and negative feedback in particular—may promote risk for intergenerational abuse transmission.

Successful emotion regulation (ER) requires effective strategy selection. Research suggests that disengagement strategies (e.g., distraction) are more often selected than engagement strategies (e.g., reappraisal) as emotional experiences intensify. However, the extent to which ER strategy choice in controlled circumstances reflects strategy usage during complex, multimodal events is not well understood. The present research uses dynamic, multimodal stimuli (i.e., a haunted house, horror movies) to examine the association between affective intensity and regulatory strategy usage among untrained participants-individuals given no prior regulation instructions or direction. Both a preliminary study (n = 54) and Study 1 (n = 118) failed to find relationships between emotional intensity and strategy usage to downregulate emotions as participants navigated a haunted house. Distraction was self-reported to be less successful than reappraisal at high intensities, contrary to expectations. Participants in Study 2 (n = 152) forecasted regulation strategy usage based upon descriptions of emotionally regulated experiences from the preliminary haunted house study. Affective intensity predicted which strategies forecasters predicted they would use; though, forecasters overpredicted how often distraction was used in practice. Study 3 (n = 242) incorporated strategy usage and forecasting within the same design by showing untrained participants video stimuli of varying intensity and capturing their regulatory responses. Forecasters again predicted using distraction more often than strategy users did in practice. Forecasters also overpredicted how effectively distraction reduced negative affective intensity relative to what strategy users reported. These results may highlight a disconnect between strategy fittedness when self-regulation occurs in uncontrolled, highly intense, or complex circumstances. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn the structure of existing social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of conversations may help individuals evaluate social relationships and may be associated with social-relational inference. Leveraging a naturalistic behavioral experiment (57 adults; 34,735 observations), participants watched a mid-season episode of a reality television show and evaluated the observed dyadic relationships between contestants. We employed novel person- and stimulus-focused approaches to: (1) investigate social-relational inference similarity between participants, (2) examine the association between distinct linguistic features and social-relational inference, and (3) explore the relationship between early season conversation similarity and later perceived relationship formation. We found high pairwise participant response similarity across two relational subtypes (friendship, rivalry), distinct associations between relational judgments and linguistic features, including semantic similarity, sentiment, and clout, and no evidence of an association between early conversation similarity and later friendship inference. These findings suggest that naturalistic conversational content is both a potential mechanism of social-relational inference and a promising avenue for future research.

Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn and integrate into novel social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of conversations may help individuals evaluate social relationships and may be associated with social-relational inference. Leveraging a naturalistic behavioral experiment (57 adults; 34,735 observations), participants watched a mid-season episode of Survivor and evaluated the observed dyadic relationships between contestants. We employed novel person- and stimulus-focused approaches to 1) investigate social-relational inference similarity between participants, 2) examine the association between distinct linguistic features and social-relational inference, and 3) explore the relationship between early season conversation similarity and later perceived relationship formation. We found high pairwise participant response similarity across three experimental conditions, distinct associations between relational judgments and linguistic features, including semantic similarity, sentiment, and clout, and no evidence of an association between early conversation similarity and later friendship inference. These findings suggest that naturalistic conversational content is both a potential mechanism of social-relational inference and a promising avenue for future research.

Despite the salient experience of encoding emotional events, memories of threatening events are prone to distortions and often non-veridical from encoding to recall. Further, threat states have been shown to preferentially disrupt the binding of item-context relationships and enhance goal-relevant information. While extensive work has characterized distinctive features of emotional memory, research has not fully explored the influence of threat on temporal memory, a process putatively supported by the binding of event features into a temporal context. Two primary competing hypotheses have been proposed; that threat can either impair or enhance temporal memory. We analyzed two datasets to assess temporal memory for an in-person haunted house experience. In study 1 (n = 47), we examined temporal structure of memory by characterizing memory contiguity in free recall as a function of individual levels of physiological arousal as a proxy of threat. In study 2 (n = 53), we replicated marginal findings of threat-related increases in memory contiguity found in study 1 and extended these findings by showing threat-related increases in recency discriminations, an explicit test of temporal order memory. Together, these findings demonstrate that threat experience enhances temporal memory both in terms of free recall structure and during explicit memory judgments.

Successful emotion regulation (ER) requires effective strategy selection. Research suggests that disengagement strategies (e.g., distraction) are more often selected than engagement strategies (e.g., reappraisal) as emotional experiences intensify. However, the extent to which ER strategy choice in controlled circumstances reflects strategy usage during complex, multimodal events is not well understood. The present research uses dynamic, multimodal stimuli (i.e., a haunted house, horror movies) to examine the association between affective intensity and regulatory strategy usage among untrained participants – individuals given no prior regulation instructions or direction. Both a preliminary study (n = 54) and Study 1 (n = 118) failed to find relationships between emotional intensity and strategy usage to downregulate emotions as participants navigated a haunted house. Distraction was self-reported to be less successful than reappraisal at high intensities, contrary to expectations. Participants in Study 2 (n = 152) forecasted regulation strategy usage based upon descriptions of emotionallyregulated experiences from the preliminary haunted house study. Affective intensity predicted which strategies forecasters predicted they would use; though, forecasters overpredicted how often distraction was used in practice. Study 3 (n = 242) incorporated strategy usage and forecasting within the same design by showing untrained participants video stimuli of varying-intensity and capturing their regulatory responses. Forecasters again predicted using distraction more often than strategy users did in practice. Forecasters also overpredicted how effectively distraction reduced negative affective intensity relative to what strategy users reported. These results may highlight a disconnect between strategy fittedness when self-regulation occurs in uncontrolled, highlyintense, or complex circumstances.

Across three studies, we used a combination of quasi-naturalistic contexts and a strategy choice paradigm to explore the influence emotional intensity has on emotion regulation strategy usage. These results suggest that emotional intensity predicts regulation choices in the abstract, but may be less predictive in real-world contexts.

Developmental studies have identified differences in prefrontal and subcortical affective structures between children and adults, which correspond with observed cognitive and behavioral maturations from relatively simplistic emotional experiences and expressions to more nuanced, complex ones. However, developmental changes in the neural representation of emotions have not yet been well explored. It stands to reason that adults and children may demonstrate observable differences in the representation of affect within key neurological structures implicated in affective cognition. Forty-five participants (25 children and 20 adults) passively viewed positive, negative and neutral clips from popular films while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Using representational similarity analysis to measure variability in neural pattern similarity, we found developmental differences between children and adults in the amygdala, nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC): children generated less pattern similarity within subcortical structures relative to the vmPFC—a phenomenon not replicated among their older counterparts. Furthermore, children generated valence-specific differences in representational patterns across regions; these valence-specific patterns were not found in adults. These results may suggest that affective representations grow increasingly dissimilar over the course of development as individuals mature from visceral affective responses to more evaluative analyses.

Developmental studies have identified differences in prefrontal and subcortical affective structures between children and adults, which correspond with observed cognitive and behavioral maturations from relatively simplistic emotional experiences and expressions to more nuanced, complex ones. However, developmental neurocognitive affective changes have not yet been well explored. It stands to reason that adults and children may demonstrate observable differences in the representation of affect within key neurological structures implicated in affective cognition. Forty-five participants (25 children; 20 adults) passively viewed positive, negative, and neutral clips from popular films while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Using representational similarity analysis to measure variability in neural pattern similarity, we found developmental differences between children and adults in the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, such that children generated contrasting patterns between subcortical structures and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex; a phenomenon not replicated among their older counterparts. Furthermore, children generated valence-specific differences in representational patterns across regions while adults failed to demonstrate similar valence-specific responses. These results may suggest that affective representations grow increasingly dissimilar over development as individuals mature from visceral affective responses to more evaluative analyses. Further research is required to determine how these differences correspond with affective expression and behavior.