Negative symptoms of schizophrenia have recently been proposed to result from a decoupling of (intact) hedonic experience and (diminished) approach behavior. The current study challenged this view by exploring the hypothesis that negative symptoms are driven by a specific type of emotional experience abnormality, a reduction in the positivity offset (i.e. the tendency to experience greater levels of positive relative to negative emotion in low-arousal contexts), which limits the production of approach behaviors in neutral environments.

Participants included outpatients with SZ (n = 44) and healthy controls (CN: n = 48) who completed one week of active (ecological momentary assessment surveys of emotional experience and symptoms) and passive (geolocation, accelerometry) digital phenotyping. Mathematical modeling approaches from Cacioppo's Evaluative Space Model were used to quantify the positivity offset in daily life. Negative symptoms were assessed via standard clinical ratings, as well as active (EMA surveys) and passive (geolocation, accelerometry) digital phenotyping measures.

Results indicated that the positivity offset was reduced in SZ and associated with more severe anhedonia and avolition measured via clinical interviews and active and passive digital phenotyping.

These findings suggest that current conceptual models of negative symptoms, which assume hedonic normality, may need to be revised to account for reductions in the positivity offset and its connection to diminished motivated behavior. Findings identify key real-world contexts where negative symptoms could be targeted using psychosocial treatments.

While emotional responses experienced in-the-moment appear to remain intact in Parkinson’s disease (PD), no study has tested whether this extends to the prediction of future emotional responses. The present study aimed to provide the first assessment of affective forecasting capacity in this cohort.

A positively and negatively valenced affective forecasting task and broader clinical battery were completed by a PD group (ns = 28 and 37, respectively) and a demographically matched neurotypical control group (ns = 38 and 39, respectively).

No group differences emerged on the two tasks, with the two groups underestimating their level of happiness and overestimating their level of negative affect to a similar degree. Affective forecasting error scores were unrelated to clinical characteristics.

Given that affective forecasting relies on self-projection into the future, a skill shown to often be disrupted in this cohort, impairments were expected. However, this study provides initial evidence that this may not be the case. These findings are potentially important given that how we think about and envisage the future affectively is a major determinant of goal-directed behavior. Further work is now needed to establish whether these findings are robust and generalize to other types of affective stimuli.

The integration of digital technologies into everyday life leads to transformation of various socio-cultural practices, including related to destructive behavior. Among them, cyberaggression holds a leading position, especially in younger generation, and causes direct lasting negative impact on the psychological state of participants and affects (Martínez-Monteagudo et al., 2019; Wright, Wachs, 2020).

The goal of the study is to analyze the relationship between offline and online aggressions and the strength of negative emotional experiences of adolescents and youth, as well as parents’ awareness of this experience with their children.

The questionnaire was completed by 3395 people: 1554 adolescents aged 12-17 and 736 young people aged 18-30 from 8 federal districts of Russia.

Respondents of all generations (64-74%) believe that people are more likely to experience painful or hostile situations in real life than online. Nevertheless, every fourth respondent (19-23%) says that events on the Internet can cause as much anxiety as events in real life. The least emotionally significant situations are flaming and cyberhate. Trolling causes strong feelings in every third adolescent, cyberstalking in every fifth, cyberbullying in every second. Both trolling and cyberstalking make girls more upset than boys, this is true for adolescents (12-13 and 14-17 years old) and youth (χ2=19.01-67.21, p<0.01, V=0.16-0.30).

Differences in emotional response to various types of cyberaggression require the development of differentiated approaches to the prevention of various situations of cyberaggression and the development of specific coping strategies in the collision with them. The reported study was funded by RFBR, project No. 20-013-00857.

The reported study was funded by RFBR, project No. 20-013-00857.