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Alcohol craving is an urge to consume alcohol that commonly precedes drinking; however, craving does not lead to drinking for all people under all circumstances. The current study measured the correlation between neural reactivity and alcohol cues as a risk, and purpose in daily life as a protective factor that may influence the link between alcohol craving and the subsequent amount of consumption.Observational study that correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on neural cue reactivity and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) on purpose in life and alcohol use.Two college campuses in the United States.A total of 54 college students (37 women, 16 men, and 1 other) recruited via campus-based groups from January 2019 to October 2020.Participants underwent fMRI while viewing images of alcohol; we examined activity within the ventral striatum, a key region of interest implicated in reward and craving. Participants then completed 28 days of EMA and answered questions about daily levels of purpose in life and alcohol use, including how much they craved and consumed alcohol.A significant three-way interaction indicated that greater alcohol cue reactivity within the ventral striatum was associated with heavier alcohol use following craving in daily life only when people were previously feeling a lower than usual sense of purpose. By contrast, individuals with heightened neural alcohol cue reactivity drank less in response to craving if they were feeling a stronger than their usual sense of purpose in the preceding moments (bNeural sensitivity to alcohol cues within the ventral striatum appears to be a potential risk for increased alcohol use in social drinkers, when people feel less purposeful. Enhancing daily levels of purpose in life may promote alcohol moderation among social drinkers who show relatively higher reactivity to alcohol cues.

Mindful attention is characterized by acknowledging the present experience as a transient mental event. Early stages of mindfulness practice may require greater neural effort for later efficiency. Early effort may self-regulate behavior and focalize the present, but this understanding lacks a computational explanation. Here we used network control theory as a model of how external control inputs—operationalizing effort—distribute changes in neural activity evoked during mindful attention across the white matter network. We hypothesized that individuals with greater network controllability, thereby efficiently distributing control inputs, effectively self-regulate behavior. We further hypothesized that brain regions that utilize greater control input exhibit shorter intrinsic timescales of neural activity. Shorter timescales characterize quickly discontinuing past processing to focalize the present. We tested these hypotheses in a randomized controlled study that primed participants to either mindfully respond or naturally react to alcohol cues during fMRI and administered text reminders and measurements of alcohol consumption during 4 wk postscan. We found that participants with greater network controllability moderated alcohol consumption. Mindful regulation of alcohol cues, compared to one’s own natural reactions, reduced craving, but craving did not differ from the baseline group. Mindful regulation of alcohol cues, compared to the natural reactions of the baseline group, involved more-effortful control of neural dynamics across cognitive control and attention subnetworks. This effort persisted in the natural reactions of the mindful group compared to the baseline group. More-effortful neural states had shorter timescales than less effortful states, offering an explanation for how mindful attention promotes being present.

Online sharing impacts which information is widely available and influential in society. Yet, systematically influencing sharing behavior remains difficult. Past research highlights two factors associated with sharing: the social and self-relevance of the to-be-shared content. Based on this prior neuroimaging work and theory, we developed a manipulation in the form of short prompts that are attached to media content (here health news articles). These prompts encourage readers to think about how sharing the content may help them to fulfill motivations to present themselves positively (self-relevance) or connect positively to others (social relevance). Fifty-three young adults completed this pre-registered experiment while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Ninety-six health news articles were randomly assigned to three within-subject conditions that encouraged self-related or social thinking or a control. Invoking self-related or social thoughts about health-related news (vs control) (i) causally increased brain activity in a priori regions of interest chosen for their roles in processing social and self-relevance and (ii) causally impacted self-reported sharing intentions. This study provides evidence corroborating prior reverse inferences regarding the neural correlates of sharing. It further highlights the feasibility and utility of targeting neuropsychological processes to systematically facilitate online information spread.

Information sharing within social networks can catalyze widespread attitudinal and behavioral change and the chance to share information with others has been characterized as inherently valuable to people. But what are the sources of value and how might they be leveraged to promote sharing? We test ideas from the value-based virality model that the value of sharing increases when people perceive messages as more relevant to themselves and to people they know, resulting in stronger intentions to share. We extend this work by considering how sharing context-broadcasting to a wide audience or narrowcasting directly to someone-may alter these relationships. Six online studies with adults in the United States (N participants = 3,727; messages = 362; message ratings = 30,954) showed robust evidence that self and social relevance are positively and uniquely related to sharing intentions within- and between-person. Specification curve analysis showed these relationships were consistent across message content (COVID-19, voting, general health, climate change), medium (social media post and news articles), and sharing context (broad- and narrowcasting). A preregistered experiment showed that manipulating the self and social relevance of messages through a framing manipulation causally increased sharing intentions. These causal effects were mediated by changes in both self and social relevance, but the relative strength of the causal pathways differed depending on sharing context. These findings extend existing models of information sharing, and highlight self and social relevance as psychological mechanisms that motivate information sharing that can be targeted to promote sharing across contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Social neuroscience combines tools and perspectives from social psychology and neuroscience to understand how people interact with their social world. Here we discuss a relatively new method-hyperscanning-to study real-time, interactive social interactions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We highlight three contributions that fMRI hyperscanning makes to the study of the social mind: (1) Naturalism: it shifts the focus from tightly-controlled stimuli to more naturalistic social interactions; (2) Multi-person Dynamics: it shifts the focus from individuals as the unit of analysis to dyads and groups; and (3) Neural Resolution: fMRI hyperscanning captures high-resolution neural patterns and dynamics across the whole brain, unlike other neuroimaging hyperscanning methods (e.g., electroencephalogram, functional near-infrared spectroscopy). Finally, we describe the practical considerations and challenges that fMRI hyperscanning researchers must navigate. We hope researchers will harness this powerful new paradigm to address pressing questions in today's society.

Information transmission in a society depends on individuals’ intention to share or not. Yet, little is known about whether being the gatekeeper shapes the brain’s processing of incoming information. Here, we examine how thinking about sharing affects neural encoding of information, and whether this effect is moderated by the person’s real-life social network position. In an functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants rated abstracts of news articles on how much they wanted to read for themselves (read) or—as information gatekeepers—to share with a specific other (narrowcast) or to post on their social media feed (broadcast). In all conditions, consistent spatial blood oxygen level-dependent patterns associated with news articles were observed across participants in brain regions involved in perceptual and language processing as well as higher-order processes. However, when thinking about sharing, encoding consistency decreased in higher-order processing areas (e.g., default mode network), suggesting that the gatekeeper role involves more individualized processing in the brain, that is, person- and context-specific. Moreover, participants whose social networks had high ego-betweenness centrality (i.e., more likely to be information gatekeeper in real life) showed more individualized encoding when thinking about broadcasting. This study reveals how gatekeeping shapes our brain’s processing of incoming information.

Background and Objectives Social distancing, while effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), can increase social isolation. The current preregistered study examined purpose in life as a psychological resource that may buffer against loneliness and increase intentions to engage in health-protective behaviors. Research Design and Methods During the COVID-19 pandemic, 517 adults (mean = 37.71, SD = 11.30; range = 19–73) reported their levels of purpose in life, current and prepandemic levels of loneliness, and degrees to which they intended to engage in behaviors known to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Results Across age, having a stronger sense of purpose in life was associated with lower loneliness, as well as greater intentions to engage in COVID-protective behaviors. Higher loneliness was associated with lower intentions to maintain social distance and engage in additional health promotion behaviors such as handwashing. However, this link was not present at higher levels of purpose in life. Older age was also associated with less loneliness, but not for individuals with lower levels of purpose in life. Discussion and Implications Results suggest that psychological resources such as purpose in life are associated with increased protective health behaviors. Furthermore, purpose in life may reduce loneliness and counteract the negative effects of stressors that diminish the willingness to engage in health-protective behaviors. Our data also highlight resilience among older individuals in times of isolation during a global pandemic.

Humans are a fundamentally social species whose well-being depends on how we connect with and relate to one another. As such, scientific understanding of factors that promote health and well-being requires insight into causal factors present at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from brain networks that dynamically reconfigure across situations to social networks that allow behaviors to spread from person to person. The Social Health Impacts of Network Effects (SHINE) study takes a multilevel approach to investigate how interactions between the mind, brain, and community give rise to well-being. The SHINE protocol assesses multiple health and psychological variables, with particular emphasis on alcohol use, how alcohol-related behavior can be modified via self-regulation, and how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors unfold in the context of social networks. An overarching aim is to derive generalizable principles about relationships that promote well-being by applying multilayer mathematical models and explanatory approaches such as network control theory. The SHINE study includes data from 711 college students recruited from social groups at two universities in the northeastern United States of America, prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants completed at least one of the following study components: baseline self-reported questionnaires and social network characterization, self-regulation intervention assignment (mindful attention or perspective taking), functional and structural neuroimaging, ecological momentary assessment, and longitudinal follow-ups including questionnaires and social network characterization. The SHINE dataset enables integration across modalities, levels of analysis, and timescales to understand young adults’ well-being and health-related decision making. Our goal is to further our understanding of how individuals can change their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and of how these changes unfold in the context of social networks.

Cigarette smoking continues to be a leading cause of preventable deaths in the U.S., in part because the U.S. has not adopted the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, allowing the tobacco industry to counteract tobacco control policies. One way the tobacco industry in the U.S. counteracts tobacco control policies is by heavily advertising cigarettes at the point-of-sale in retailers (e.g., at the cash register), and by offering discounts on cigarettes.DesignA within-subject experimental design was used to investigate if point-of-sale cigarette promotions are smoking cues, and if exposure to point-of-sale cigarette promotions with a discount (vs. without) increases cigarette craving. The study also examined how smokers’ subjective social status (compared to others in the U.S.) relates to cigarette craving after exposure to point-of-sale cigarette promotions with and without a discount.ResultsExposure to smoking cues, including point-of-sale cigarette promotions, elicited increased craving, relative to non-smoking cues. Further, point-of-sale cigarette promotions with a discount elicited higher levels of craving compared to point-of-sale cigarette promotions without a discount. Furthermore, participants with a lower (vs. higher) subjective social status craved cigarettes more overall and there was no difference in their craving between promotions with and without a discount, while craving was higher for promotions with a discount than without for higher subjective social status participants.Conclusion1Point-of-sale tobacco marketing can causally increase smokers’ cravings. More restrictions on point-of-sale tobacco marketing might help reduce cigarette smoking and address status-related health inequities in the U.S.

We investigate the gap between sharing and reading information on social media by multiple methods. Analysis of a neuroimaging dataset shows that news articles with high click-throughs on Facebook evoked greater value-related brain activity, while greater affect-related brain activity was associated with high share-forwards, suggesting that affective response drove the share-versus-read gap. In a separate field study of 297,765 Facebook posts of news articles from 518 US news organizations, we again found that strong affective responses were associated with excess share-forwards. Lastly, participants (N = 298) in an intervention study who were nudged to shift their focus from affect to utility showed greater alignment between click-through and share-forward intentions. Combining different methodologies, these studies highlight the role of affect in our desire to share partial information with others, independent of our desire to read them in full.

There are pronounced individual differences in the extent to which affective responses are associated with daily stressor exposure. These individual differences have implications for health and well-being. We use 21 days of daily diary data in 167 participants (mean age = 25.37, SD = 7.34; 81.44% women) and test (1) the moderating effect of flourishing on daily stressor-related negative mood and (2) the moderating effect of daily curiosity on daily stressor-related negative mood. Results indicate that people high in flourishing show lower stressor-related negative mood and that stressor-related negative mood is higher than usual on days of lower than usual curiosity. Together, these findings extend a large body of work indicating associations between stressor-related negative mood and both psychopathology and poor physical health to trait and state markers of well-being.

In disciplines outside of communication, papers with women as first and last (i.e., senior) authors attract fewer citations than papers with men in those positions. Using data from 14 communication journals from 1995 to 2018, we find that reference lists include more papers with men as first and last author, and fewer papers with women as first and last author, than would be expected if gender were unrelated to referencing. This imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices of men and is slowly decreasing over time. The structure of men’s co-authorship networks partly accounts for the observed over-citation of men by other men. We discuss ways researchers might approach gendered citations in their work.

Objective Health-related norms in social networks can influence whether people are open to health behavior change. Yet, little is known about how social networks relate to the ways individual brains respond to persuasive health messaging. The current study focuses on ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) activity as an index of neural receptivity to health messages that may be related to behavior change. The study tested whether health-related norms and perceived physical activity levels within participants' social networks are associated with neural receptivity to health messages. Method Adults who initially reported under 200 minutes/week of physical activity (N = 146) rated the perceived physical activity levels of, and closeness to, each person in their core social network. VMPFC activity was monitored using fMRI while participants viewed persuasive health messages promoting physical activity. Longitudinal changes in sedentary behavior were objectively logged using wrist-worn accelerometers throughout a 2-week baseline and the month following the fMRI scan. Results Higher levels of perceived physical activity in participants' social networks were associated with greater VMPFC activity during message exposure, which in turn were associated with greater decreases in sedentary minutes. By contrast, greater closeness to physically inactive social ties was associated with lower VMPFC activity. Conclusions Perceived norms in social networks relate to neural receptivity to health messaging. In particular, closeness to physically inactive ties is associated with lower neural receptivity to health messages encouraging physical activity, which may undermine the effectiveness of health messages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Modifying behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, is difficult. Creating psychological distance between unhealthy triggers and one’s present experience can encourage change. Using two multisite, randomized experiments, we examine whether theory-driven strategies to create psychological distance—mindfulness and perspective taking—can change drinking behaviors among two samples of young adults without alcohol dependence via a 28-day smartphone intervention (Study 1, N = 108 participants, 5492 observations; Study 2, N=218 participants, 9994 observations). Study 2 presents a close replication with a fully remote delivery during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During weeks when they received daily smartphone reminders, individuals in the psychological distance interventions drank less frequently than control weeks, and less than control participants. Intervention reminders reduced drinking frequency but did not impact amount. We find that smartphone-based mindfulness and perspective-taking interventions, aimed to create psychological distance, can change behavior. This approach requires frequent reminders, which can be delivered viasmartphones.

A key challenge for understanding human experience is to capture the interplay between biology, environment, and culture. Because these levels of analysis operate across temporal scales from milliseconds to years, multimodal techniques are needed to provide insight into their operation and interaction. Data from brain scanning (e.g., neuroimaging) and smartphones are increasingly combined to provide complementary insights into the neurobiological correlates of dynamic psychiatric phenotypes as they unfold in real-world settings. We review literature published in the last three years highlighting how scanners and smartphones can be combined to push forward our understanding of brain-behavior relationships in health and disease.

Family conflict is a well-established predictor of well-being in youth. Traditional approaches focus on between-family differences in conflict. Daily fluctuations in conflict within families might also impact wellbeing, but more research is needed to understand how and why. Using 21 days of daily diary data and 6-times a day experience-sampling data (n=77 participants; mean age=21.18, SD=1.75; 63 women, 14 men), we captured day-to-day and within-day fluctuations in family conflict, anger, anxiety, and sadness. Using multilevel models, we find that days of higher than usual anger are also days of higher than usual family conflict. Examining associations between family conflict and emotions within days, we find that moments of higher than usual anger predict higher than usual family conflict later in the day. We observe substantial between-family heterogeneity in these patterns with implications for well-being; youth showing substantial interplay between family conflict and emotions across time had more perseverative family conflict and greater trait anxiety. Overall, findings indicate the importance of increases in youth anger for experiences of family conflict during young adulthood and demonstrate how intensive repeated measures coupled with network analytic approaches can capture long-theorized notions of circularly causal processes in daily family life.

BACKGROUND Digital tools can help cultivate states of well-being through psychological interventions. Interventions and policies with the most promise of influencing individual and population health and well-being in real-world contexts require understanding the dynamic relationships between different domains of well-being in daily life. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to consider multiple components of the health behavior–well-being system to identify potential targets for designing ecologically relevant interventions in everyday life. METHODS We used self-reported affective states, purpose in life, and physical activity collected via smartphone-based experience sampling twice per day over 28 days as participants (N=226 young adults; mean age 20.2, SD 1.7 years; 76% women and 25% men) went about their daily lives. We used a multilevel vector autoregressive model to isolate within- and between-person relationships among daytime physical activity, nighttime sleep duration, nighttime sleep quality, happiness, sadness, anger, anxiousness, and purpose in life. This approach generates 3 networks describing the relationships among variables of interest: (1) a directed temporal network revealing within-person, time-lagged, previous-day relationships among variables; (2) a contemporaneous undirected network revealing within-person same-day relationships among variables; and (3) an undirected between-person network identifying between-person differences in how variables are associated with one another. RESULTS Our complex-system approach to the health behavior–well-being system revealed significant interplay among physical activity, sleep, affect, and purpose in life. We found that when an individual had higher than their usual levels of physical activity on a particular day, they experienced an increase in happy affect the next day. Higher sleep quality on a particular day also predicted a decrease in negative affective states the next day. We found that purpose in life predicted decreased sad, anxious, and angry affect up to 2 days later. For contemporaneous relationships, higher than usual happiness predicted increased purpose in life and lower anger, anxiety, and sadness on the same day. We found that people who, on average, were happier tended to endorse a higher sense of purpose in life and experience increased sleep quality, whereas people who, on average, were sadder tended to have increased anxiety and anger. CONCLUSIONS Collectively, these findings suggest that behavioral interventions targeting sleep and physical activity may observe shorter-term (up to 1 day) effects on well-being, whereas interventions cultivating a sense of purpose in life can have slightly longer effects on well-being, bleeding into the next few days. Our findings suggest that approaches simultaneously considering whole-person well-being rather than just one domain of well-being hold promise for informing the design of behavior interventions with the most promise of influencing health in real-world contexts. Moving forward, digital health tools should incorporate tracking multiple domains of well-being in daily life to increase opportunities for whole-person health approaches in virtual care settings.

Physical activity, sleep, affect, and purpose in life are part of a system that reflects wellbeing in daily life. A holistic understanding of the naturalistic dynamics of the interactions within this system is key to promoting wellbeing. Using self-reported affect (happy, sad, angry, anxious) and physical activity periods collected twice per day via smartphone-based experience sampling over 28 days as young adult participants (n = 226 young adults; M = 20.2 years, SD = 1.7 years; 75% women) went about their daily lives, we examined the within-day associations between physical activity and affect that form a network of wellness behaviors and outcomes. Adding once per day reports of sleep duration, sleep quality, and purpose in life, we additionally examined day-to-day temporal dynamics among physical activity, sleep, affect, and purpose in life. Multilevel modeling showed that when individuals reported engaging in more than their usual level of physical activity, they reported increased happy and reduced anxious affect at the next prompt. At the daily level, multilevel vector autoregressive models that consider the network of wellness together showed that higher physical activity on a given day predicted an increase of happy affect the next day. In parallel, higher sleep quality on a given night predicted a decrease in negative affective states the next day. We found that purpose in life predicted decreased sad, anxious, and angry affect up to two days later. Collectively, these findings suggest that while the effects of sleep and physical activity on affective states and purpose in life may be shorter term (up to one day), a sense of purpose in life is a critical component of wellbeing that can have slightly longer effects, bleeding into the next few days.

OBJECTIVES: Psychological and neural evidence suggests that negative attitudes toward stigmatized individuals arise in part from failures to perceive them as social targets. Here, we tested whether experimentally up-regulating neural regions involved in social cognition would predict subsequent decreases in bias toward stigmatized individuals (i.e., people who use substances). METHODS: Participants underwent fMRI while completing either a lovingkindness intervention task or a control task, and each task was reinforced via daily text messages for a month following the one-time fMRI scan. Changes in implicit bias against stigmatized individuals were measured by Implicit Association Tests. RESULTS: The lovingkindness intervention task, compared to a control task, elicited greater baseline activity in right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), implicated in mentalizing, or the process of making inferences about others’ mental states. The lovingkindness task compared to the control task also produced marginal decreases in bias over the month of the intervention. Individual differences in initial RTPJ activity at baseline during the fMRI intervention tasks further predicted improved implicit attitudes toward stigmatized individuals a month later. CONCLUSIONS: The current study suggests that individual differences in people’s tendency to engage brain regions that support taking others’ perspectives are associated with greater changes in bias reduction over time. It is possible that strategies that up-regulate mentalizing activity, such as lovingkindness training and other strategies that increase social-cognitive processing, may be effective in shifting people’s biases against stigmatized individuals.

Exposure to media content (e.g. persuasive campaigns) affects daily behaviors, but these effects are partially determined by whether and how people who are exposed to the content share it with their peers. To decide whether to share, potential sharers need to compare and integrate diverse sources of information including characteristics of the media content and various social influences. What are the mechanisms that enable sharers to make such complex decisions quickly and effortlessly? We review evidence that sharing is preceded by a value-based decision-making process supported by three key characteristics of the so-called neural valuation system (domain-generality, value integration, and context-dependence). Finally, we describe theoretical and methodological advances that can be gained from conceptualizing sharing as a value-based decision-making process.

Counterarguing is a key obstacle to successful persuasion. However, the difficulty of directly measuring counterarguing during message exposure limits knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. The current study combines neuroimaging and linguistic measures to unpack neurocognitive and psychological mechanisms associated with counterarguing among a sample of established smokers in response to anti-smoking messaging. We capture participants’ neural activity in brain regions associated with effortful deliberation and negative argumentation during message exposure, and link it with their subsequent language patterns to further understanding of counterarguing in the brain. Greater brain activity within key regions of interest associated with deliberation and negative argumentation is associated with greater cognitive depth and less positivity in the post-scan message descriptions, respectively, among those who have lower intention to change their smoking behavior. We connect these neural representations of counterarguing with psychological theories and discuss implications that may increase the impact of persuasive communications.

What differentiates sharing with few, well-defined others (narrowcasting) from sharing with loosely defined crowds (broadcasting)? One possibility involves a trade-off where broadcasting is self-focused and self-serving, and narrowcasting is based on other-oriented, altruistic motives. We present neuroimaging data consistent with a second, parallel-processes perspective. According to this account, both narrow- and broadcasting simultaneously involve self-related and social motives since these concepts are strongly intertwined both on a psychological and neural level. We recorded brain activity within regions that are meta-analytically associated with self-related and social cognition while participants made decisions to narrow- or broadcast New York Times articles on social media. Results show increased involvement of brain regions associated with both self-related and social processing in narrow- and broadcasting, compared to a control condition. However, both processes were involved with higher intensity during narrowcasting, compared to broadcasting. These data help to disambiguate a theoretical discussion in communication science and clarify the neuropsychological mechanisms that drive sharing decisions in different contexts. Specifically, we highlight that narrow- and broadcasting afford differing intensities of two psychological processes that are crucial to persuasion and population-level content virality.

Campaign success is contingent on adequate exposure; however, exposure opportunities (e.g., ad reach/frequency) are imperfect predictors of message recall. We hypothesized that the exposure-recall relationship would be contingent on message processing. We tested moderation hypotheses using 3 data sets pertinent to “The Real Cost” anti-smoking campaign: past 30-day ad recall from a rolling national survey of adolescents aged 13–17 (n = 5,110); ad-specific target rating points (TRPs), measuring ad reach and frequency; and ad-elicited response in brain regions implicated in social processing and memory encoding, from a separate adolescent sample aged 14–17 (n = 40). Average ad-level brain activation in these regions moderates the relationship between national TRPs and large-scale recall (p < .001), such that the positive exposure-recall relationship is more strongly observed for ads that elicit high levels of social processing and memory encoding in the brain. Findings advance communication theory by demonstrating conditional exposure effects, contingent on social and memory processes in the brain.

Mindfulness is characterized by attentiveness to the present experience with nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance. Practicing mindfulness alters brain function to support the executive regulation of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. While early stages of practice are thought to require greater "neural effort" for later efficiency, current evidence relies on circular definitions of effort based on functional activity magnitude. Here we used network control theory as a model of how external control inputs, which operationalize effort, can distribute changes in neural activity across the macro-scale structural brain network. Further, we inferred the intrinsic timescale of activity to operationalize present-centered activity as shorter momentary timescales that discontinue the past and update the present. To explain effects of mindful regulation on alcohol consumption, we applied these methods to a randomized controlled intervention study with resting-state and task fMRI data. The task primed participants to either mindfully respond or naturally react to alcohol cues. Mobile text interventions and measurements of alcohol consumption were administered using ecological momentary assessments during the subsequent 4 weeks. We hypothesized that neural states of mindfulness require greater effort to enact and sustain. This effort may support deautomatized habitual natural reactions, discontinued processing, and updated present-centered neural dynamics. We found that mindful regulation of alcohol cues, compared to the natural reactions of the benchmark group, involved more effortful control of neural dynamics across cognitive control and attention networks. This effort persisted in the natural reactions of the mindful group compared to the benchmark group. Using resting-state fMRI, we found that more effortful neural states tended to occur over shorter timescales than less effortful states. Our findings provide an explanation for how neural dynamics with altered effort and stability, such as mindful states, tend to center the present experience.

Objective: Alcohol is theorized to be motivated by desires to regulate negative affect and/or to enhance positive affect. We tested the association between momentary affect and alcohol use in the daily lives of college students, hypothesizing that alcohol use would be more likely to follow increases in positive affect and that alcohol use would not be strongly associated with negative affect. Method: Using two ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies consisting of two prompts per day for 28 days, we used multilevel hurdle models to test for lagged associations between positive and negative affect and alcohol use. There were 108 participants (60.19%; mean age = 20.20, SD=1.69) in EMA study 1 and 268 participants (60.03%women, mean age = 20.22, SD=1.96) in EMA study 2. To provide context for the affect-alcohol associations, we collected data on whether participants drank alone or with others at each drinking occasion and the drinking motives of participants using the Drinking Motives Questionnaire. Results: Alcohol use was more likely to occur following increases in positive affect. No significant associations emerged between fluctuations in negative affect and alcohol use. This pattern of findings was observed across both ecological momentary assessment studies. The majority of alcohol use occurred in social contexts. Conclusions: College students who report primarily social and enhancement motives for drinking and who seldom drink alone are more likely to drink following increases in positive affect.

Self-reflection and thinking about the thoughts and behaviors of others are important skills for humans to function in the social world. These two processes overlap in terms of the component processes involved, and share overlapping functional organizations within the human brain, in particular within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Several functional models have been proposed to explain these two processes, but none has directly explored the extent to which they are distinctly represented within different parts of the brain. This study used multivoxel pattern classification to quantify the separability of self- and other-related thought in the MPFC and expanded this question to the entire brain. Using a large-scale mega-analytic dataset, spanning three separate studies (n = 142), we find that self- and other-related thought can be reliably distinguished above chance within the MPFC, posterior cingulate cortex and temporal lobes. We highlight subcomponents of the ventral MPFC that are particularly important in representing self-related thought, and subcomponents of the orbitofrontal cortex robustly involved in representing other-related thought. Our findings indicate that representations of self- and other-related thought in the human brain are described best by a distributed pattern rather than stark localization or a purely ventral to dorsal linear gradient in the MPFC.

Background The waxing and waning of negative affect in daily life is normative, reflecting an adaptive capacity to respond flexibly to changing circumstances. However, understanding of the brain structure correlates of affective variability in naturalistic settings has been limited. Using network control theory, we examine facets of brain structure that may enable negative affect variability in daily life. Methods We use diffusion weighted imaging data from 95 young adults (Mage = 20.19 years, SDage = 1.80; 56 women) to construct structural connectivity networks that map white matter fiber connections between 200 cortical and 14 sub-cortical regions. We apply network control theory to these structural networks to estimate the degree to which each brain region’s pattern of structural connectivity facilitates the spread of activity to other brain systems. We examine how the average controllability of functional brain systems relates to negative affect variability, computed by taking the standard deviation of negative affect self-reports collected via smartphone-based experience-sampling twice per day over 28 days as participants went about their daily lives. Results We find that high average controllability of the cingulo-insular system is associated with increased negative affect variability. We find that greater negative affect variability is related to the presence of more depressive symptoms, yet average controllability of the cingulo-insular system was not associated with depressive symptoms. Conclusions Our results highlight the role brain structure plays in affective dynamics as observed in the context of daily life, suggesting that average controllability of the cingulo-insular system promotes normative negative affect variability.