BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Concerns about early childhood social transitions amongst transgender youth include that these youth may later change their gender identification (i.e., retransition), a process that could be distressing. The present study aimed to provide the first estimate of retransitioning and to report the current gender identities of youth an average of 5 years after their initial social transitions. METHODS The present study examined the rate of retransition and current gender identities of 317 initially-transgender youth (208 transgender girls, 109 transgender boys; M=8.1 years at start of study) participating in a longitudinal study, the Trans Youth Project. Data were reported by youth and their parents through in-person or online visits or via email or phone correspondence. RESULTS We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common amongst youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; the retransition often occurred before age 10. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent. More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way. Nonetheless, understanding retransitions is crucial for clinicians and families to help make them as smooth as possible for youth.
Recent neuroimaging evidence indicates neural mechanisms that support transient improvements in creative performance (augmented state creativity) in response to cognitive interventions (creativity cueing). Separately, neural interventions via tDCS show encouraging potential for modulating neuronal function during creative performance. If cognitive and neural interventions are separately effective, can they be combined? Does state creativity augmentation represent "real" creativity, or do interventions simply yield divergence by diminishing meaningfulness/appropriateness? Can augmenting state creativity bolster creative reasoning that supports innovation, particularly analogical reasoning? To address these questions, we combined tDCS with creativity cueing. Testing a regionally specific hypothesis from neuroimaging, high-definition tDCS-targeted frontopolar cortex activity recently shown to predict state creativity augmentation. In a novel analogy finding task, participants under tDCS formulated substantially more creative analogical connections in a large matrix search space (creativity indexed via latent semantic analysis). Critically, increased analogical creativity was not due to diminished accuracy in discerning valid analogies, indicating "real" creativity rather than inappropriate divergence. A simpler relational creativity paradigm (modified verb generation) revealed a tDCS-by-cue interaction; tDCS further enhanced creativity cue-related increases in semantic distance. Findings point to the potential of noninvasive neuromodulation to enhance creative relational cognition, including augmentation of the deliberate effort to formulate connections between distant concepts.
Historical Background: Dominance of Default PopulationsHenrich et al.(3) noted that social and behavioral research overwhelmingly relies on WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) samples, samples that they argue are quite literally weird in that they are especially unrepresentative of the world at large. A "heat map" showing the locations of major research universities and who gets studied by them, we hypothesize, would reveal steep mountains and broad, flat plains as the primary contours. The underrepresented groups include communities that have traditionally been minoritized or This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, "Pressing Questions in the Study of Psychological and Behavioral Diversity," held September 7-9, 2017, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/ pressing-questions-in-diversity.
Introduction The study examined young adult smokers’ neural response to graphic warning labels (GWLs) on cigarette packs using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods Nineteen young adult smokers (M age 22.9, 52.6% male, 68.4% non-white, M 4.3 cigarettes/day) completed pre-scan, self-report measures of demographics, cigarette smoking behavior, and nicotine dependence, and an fMRI scanning session. During the scanning session participants viewed cigarette pack images (total 64 stimuli, viewed 4 seconds each) that varied based on the warning label (graphic or visually occluded control) and pack branding (branded or plain packaging) in an event-related experimental design. Participants reported motivation to quit (MTQ) in response to each image using a push-button control. Whole-brain blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional images were acquired during the task. Results GWLs produced significantly greater self-reported MTQ than control warnings (p < .001). Imaging data indicate stronger neural activation in response to GWLs than the control warnings at a cluster-corrected threshold p <.001 in medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, medial temporal lobe, and occipital cortex. There were no significant differences in response to warnings on branded versus plain cigarette packages. Conclusions In this sample of young adult smokers, GWLs promoted neural activation in brain regions involved in cognitive and affective decision-making and memory formation and the effects of GWLs did not differ on branded or plain cigarette packaging. These findings complement other recent neuroimaging GWL studies conducted with older adult smokers and with adolescents by demonstrating similar patterns of neural activation in response to GWLs among young adult smokers.
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit a deficit in spontaneously recognizing abstract similarities that are crucial for generalizing learning to new situations. This may contribute to deficits in the development of appropriate schemas for navigating novel situations, including social interactions. Analogical reasoning is the central cognitive mechanism that enables typically developing children to understand abstract similarities between different situations. Intriguingly, studies of high-functioning children with ASD point to a relative cognitive strength in basic, non-abstract forms of analogical reasoning. If this analogical reasoning ability extends to abstract analogical reasoning (i.e., between superficially dissimilar situations) it may provide a bridge between a cognitive capability and core ASD deficits in areas such as generalization and categorization. This study tested whether preserved analogical reasoning abilities in ASD can be extended to abstract analogical reasoning, using photographs of real-world items and situations. Abstractness of the analogies was determined via a quantitative measure of semantic distance derived from latent semantic analysis. Children with ASD performed as well as typically developing children at identifying abstract analogical similarities when explicitly instructed to apply analogical reasoning. Individual differences in abstract analogical reasoning ability predicted individual differences in a measure of social function in the ASD group. Preliminary analyses indicated that children with ASD, but not typically developing children, showed an effect of age on abstract analogical reasoning. These results provide new evidence that children with ASD are capable of identifying abstract similarities through analogical reasoning, pointing to abstract analogical reasoning as a potential lever for improving generalization skills and social function in ASD.
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