Depression and rumination often co-occur in clinical populations, but it is not clear which causes which, or if both are manifestations of an underlying pathology. Does rumination simply exacerbate whatever affect a person is experiencing, or is it a negative experience in and of itself? In two experiments we answer this question by independently manipulating emotion and rumination. Participants were allocated to sad or neutral (in Experiment 1), or sad, neutral or happy (Experiment 2) mood conditions, via a combination of emotionally evocative music and autobiographical recall. Afterwards, in both studies, participants either ruminated by thinking about self-relevant statements or, in a control group, thought about self-irrelevant statements. Taken together, our data show that, independent of participants' mood, ruminators reported more negative affect relative to controls. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting that self-focus is itself unpleasant, and illustrate that depressive rumination comprises both affective and ruminative components, which could be targeted independently in clinical samples.

When making decisions in real-life, we may receive discrete pieces of evidence during a time period. Although subjects are able to integrate information from separate cues to improve their accuracy, confidence formation is controversial. Due to a strong positive relation between accuracy and confidence, we predicted that confidence followed the same characteristics as accuracy and would improve following the integration of information collected from separate cues. We applied a Random-dot-motion discrimination task in which participants had to indicate the predominant direction of dot motions by saccadic eye movement after receiving one or two brief stimuli (i.e., pulse(s)). The interval of two pulses (up to 1s) was selected randomly. Color-coded targets facilitated indicating confidence simultaneously. Using behavioral data, computational models, pupillometry and EEG methodology we show that in double-pulse trials: (i) participants improve their confidence resolution rather than reporting higher confidence comparing with single-pulse trials, (ii) the observed confidence follow neural and pupillometry markers of confidence, unlike in weak and brief single-pulse trials. Overall, our study showed improvement of associations between confidence and accuracy in decision results from the integration of stimulus separated by different temporal gaps.

Moral dilemmas are a useful tool to investigate empirically, which parameters of a given situation modulate participants’ moral judgment, and in what way. In an effort to provide moral judgment data from a non-WEIRD culture, we provide the translation and validation of 48 classical moral dilemmas in Persian language. The translated dilemma set was submitted to a validation experiment with N = 82 Iranian participants. The four-factor structure of this dilemma set was confirmed; including Personal Force (Personal, Impersonal), Benefit Recipient (Self, Other), Evitability (Avoidable, Inevitable), and Intentionality (Accidental, Instrumental). When comparing moral judgments of Iranian participants to those of Spanish and Italian participants’ from previous research with the same dilemma set, differences emerged. Iranian participants’ moral judgments were more deontological (i.e., they refrained from harm), than Spanish and Italian participants. Religiosity made participants’ moral judgments more deontological, and also dysphoric mood resulted in a more deontological response style.

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Background: Executive dysfunction has been proposed as a fundamental impairment in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, existing findings are inconsistent. Objectives: The present study aimed at evaluating the behavioral profile for executive functions (EF) in adolescents compared to healthy individuals using the Farsi translation of the behavior rating inventory of executive function (BRIEF). Methods: In this study, 34 participants (aged 5-16) with ASD were compared to 36 age and gender matched typically developing (TD) children using the BRIEF and childhood autism rating scale (CARS), and raven progressive matrices (RPM). Results: All subscales of the BRIEF were significantly higher in children and adolescents with ASD. Working memory was impaired in 88% of the ASD group, and the inhibition subscale had the highest mean score. The visual response subscale of CARS correlated significantly with the metacognition index (MCI) and global executive composite (GEC) of the BRIEF. A slight negative significant correlation was found between the BRIEF planning/organization T-score and age in the group with ASD. Conclusions: Adolescents with ASD have difficulties in every day executive functioning, mostly in working memory and inhibition. These deficits are related to some aspects of social and sensory impairments seen in ASD.

Moral dilemmas are a useful tool to investigate empirically, which parameters of a given situation modulate participants’ moral judgment, and in what way. In an effort to provide moral judgment data from a non-WEIRD culture, we provide the translation and validation of 48 classical moral dilemmas in Persian language. The translated dilemma set was submitted to a validation experiment with N=82 Iranian participants. Data from Iranian participants confirmed the four-factor structure of this dilemma set including Personal Force (Personal, Impersonal), Benefit Recipient (Self, Other), Evitability (Avoidable, Inevitable), and Intentionality (Accidental, Instrumental). When comparing moral judgments of Iranian participants to those of Spanish and Italian participants’ from previous research with the same dilemma set, differences emerged. Iranian participants’ moral judgments were more deontological (i.e., they refrained from harm), than Spanish and Italian participants. Religiosity made participants’ moral judgments more deontological, and also dysphoric mood resulted in a more deontological response style.

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Objective: Depression has unfavourable effects on emotion perception, and potential downstream consequences on social functioning. However, it is not clear if depressed individuals themselves are aware of these effects. We explored the relation between the independent and interactive contributions of depressive symptoms and rumination on self-perceived emotion recognition ability. Method: Depressive symptoms and ruminative tendencies of 108 university students (54 females) were measured, and participants rated both their self-perceived ability to perceive emotion, and to recognize the change from one emotion to another, in other people. Results: Multiple regressions showed rumination and depressive symptoms both independently and interactively explain participants' beliefs about their emotion recognition skills but only among females. Female ruminators thought they were more accurate, whereas those with more severe depressive symptoms believed they were less accurate. Interestingly, the relation between rumination and accuracy depended on depressed mood, such that rumination predicted self-perceived emotion recognition to a greater extent as depression increased. The pattern of findings were weaker and non-significant for males. Conclusions: At least in women, both depression and rumination are, independently and interactively, correlated with self-perceived ability to recognize emotion. These findings have implications for both research and clinical practice. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic:(1) Depression has detrimental effects on emotion recognition, and possible downstream effects on social functioning. (2) It is not known whether depressed individuals themselves are aware of the effects of depressive symptoms on their social interactions.(3) The tendency towards prolonged, repetitive thinking about one's own thoughts, feelings, and problems -termed rumination -might explain depression-related emotion recognition deficiencies. What this topic adds:(1) The current study examined the independent and interactive effects of depressive symptoms and rumination on self-perceived emotion recognition. Overall, results revealed main and interaction effects of rumination and depressive symptoms on self-perceived emotion recognition but only among females.(2) Inspection of interaction effects revealed that somewhat counterintuitively, females with higher levels of rumination reported greater self-perceived emotion recognition, controlling for depression. (3) Among females, more depressed individuals who tended not to ruminate reported the least competency in detecting the emotions of others. Put another way, the negative relation between depression and self-perceived emotion recognition is stronger when people do not ruminate.