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SummaryData analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. To assess the impact of this flexibility on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results, the same dataset was independently analyzed by 70 teams, testing nine ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytic approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyze the data. This flexibility resulted in sizeable variation in hypothesis test results, even for teams whose statistical maps were highly correlated at intermediate stages of their analysis pipeline. Variation in reported results was related to several aspects of analysis methodology. Importantly, meta-analytic approaches that aggregated information across teams yielded significant consensus in activated regions across teams. Furthermore, prediction markets of researchers in the field revealed an overestimation of the likelihood of significant findings, even by researchers with direct knowledge of the dataset. Our findings show that analytic flexibility can have substantial effects on scientific conclusions, and demonstrate factors related to variability in fMRI. The results emphasize the importance of validating and sharing complex analysis workflows, and demonstrate the need for multiple analyses of the same data. Potential approaches to mitigate issues related to analytical variability are discussed.

Background: Depressed patients are advised by clinicians to avoid making critical life decisions because their decision-making process might be influenced by their pathological mood states. In order to provide empirical support for this practice, we examined the influence of different mood states on risk-taking tendencies that govern one's decision during critical life decisions. Method: By means of viewing a happy, neutral or sad movie clip, participants were induced to a respective mood. Risk-taking tendencies were then measured with decision tasks modified from the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (Kogan N., Wallach, M.A., 1964. Risk Taking: A Study in Cognition and Personality, Holt, New York). Results: The findings (SS 5 54) indicated varying risk-taking tendencies in different mood states: individuals in induced depress mood were significantly more conservative in taking risk than those who were in neutral mood, whilst people in induced elated mood did not differ significantly from those in neutral mood. Correlation between mood-ratings with risk-taking tendency was positive (r 5 0.319, P , 0.05). Conclusions: People in induced depress mood would have a lower willingness to take risk than people in neutral and in positive mood. The manner in which decisions were influenced by negative mood was discussed. The asymmetry of influence of different mood states on risk-taking decisions was also discussed. 

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. Although increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes, as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resilience refers to the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. To gain mechanistic insights about the relationship between described psycho-social resilience factors and resilience specifically in the current crisis, we assessed resilience factors, exposure to Corona crisis-specific and general stressors, as well as internalizing symptoms in a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 24 languages during the most intense phase of the lockdown in Europe (22 March to 19 April) in a convenience sample of N = 15,970 adults. Resilience, as an outcome, was conceptualized as good mental health despite stressor exposure and measured as the inverse residual between actual and predicted symptom total score. Preregistered hypotheses (osf.io/r6btn) were tested with multiple regression models and mediation analyses. Results confirmed our primary hypothesis that positive appraisal style (PAS) is positively associated with resilience (p < 0.0001). The resilience factor PAS also partly mediated the positive association between perceived social support and resilience, and its association with resilience was in turn partly mediated by the ability to easily recover from stress (both p < 0.0001). In comparison with other resilience factors, good stress response recovery and positive appraisal specifically of the consequences of the Corona crisis were the strongest factors. Preregistered exploratory subgroup analyses (osf.io/thka9) showed that all tested resilience factors generalize across major socio-demographic categories. This research identifies modifiable protective factors that can be targeted by public mental health efforts in this and in future pandemics.

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The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. While increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resilience refers to the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. In order to gain mechanistic insights about the relationship between described psycho-social resilience factors and resilience specifically in the current crisis, we assessed resilience factors, exposure to Corona crisis-specific and general stressors, as well as internalizing symptoms in a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 24 languages during the most intense phase of the lockdown in Europe (March 22nd to April 19th) in a convenience sample of N=15,970 adults. Resilience, as an outcome, was conceptualized as good mental health despite stressor exposure and measured as the inverse residual between actual and predicted symptom total score. Preregistered hypotheses (osf.io/r6btn) were tested with multiple regression models and mediation analyses. Results confirmed our primary hypothesis that positive appraisal style (PAS) is positively associated with resilience (p&lt;0.0001). The resilience factor PAS also partly mediated the positive association between perceived social support and resilience, and its association with resilience was in turn partly mediated by the ability to easily recover from stress (both p&lt;0.0001). In comparison with other resilience factors, good stress response recovery and positive appraisal specifically of the consequences of the Corona crisis were the strongest factors. Preregistered exploratory subgroup analyses (osf.io/thka9) showed that all tested resilience factors generalize across major socio-demographic categories. This research identifies modifiable protective factors that can be targeted by public mental health efforts in this and in future pandemics.

Normative information on neuropsychological measures for Chinese people is scarce. This study addresses this inadequacy by providing norms on several tests, using a sample of 475 Cantonese-speaking Chinese aged from 13 to 46. Included are eight neuropsychological measures of attention, memory, and fluency, which provided an overview of some important neuropsychological functions along the verbal-nonverbal axis. Age, gender, and education were factors observed to have an effect on the test performance of these participants. This pattern is consistent with that reported in Western literature. These measures appear to be appropriate clinical instruments for use in Hong Kong Chinese society, although the usefulness of the current norms is limited to adolescents and, to a lesser extent, to young adults in that population. Also, because of possibly important differences in the linguistic and educational backgrounds of Hong Kong residents versus Chinese residents of other countries (including mainland China and North America), applicability of the current norms outside of Hong Kong is currently uncertain.

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