In the last decade, no other branch of clinical pharmacology has been subject to as much criticism of failed innovation and unsatisfactory effectiveness as psychopharmacology. Evolutionary psychiatry can offer original insights on the problems that complicate pharmacological research. Considering that invalid phenotyping is a major obstacle to drug development, an evolutionary perspective suggests targeting clinical phenotypes related to evolved behavior systems because they are more likely to map onto the underlying biology than constructs based on predetermined diagnostic criteria. Because of their emphasis on symptom remission, pharmacological studies of psychiatric populations rarely include functional capacities as the primary outcome measure and neglect the impact of social context on the effects of psychiatric drugs. Evolutionary psychiatry explains why it is appropriate to replace symptoms with functional capacities as the primary target of psychiatric therapies and why social context should be a major focus of studies assessing the effectiveness of drugs currently used and new drugs under development. When the focus of research shifts to those questions that go beyond the \"disease-based\" concept of drug action, evolutionary psychiatry clearly emerges as a reference framework to assess drug effectiveness and to optimize clinicians\' decisions about prescribing, deprescribing, and non-prescribing.

BACKGROUND: Paranoia is a key feature of psychosis that can be highly debilitating. Theories of paranoia mostly interface with short-scale or cross-sectional data models, leaving the longitudinal course of paranoia underspecified.
METHODS: We develop an empirical characterisation of two aspects of paranoia - persecutory and referential delusions - in individuals with psychosis over 20 years. We examine delusional dynamics by applying a Graphical Vector Autoregression Model to data collected from the Chicago Follow-up Study (n = 135 with a range of psychosis-spectrum diagnoses). We adjusted for age, sex, IQ, and antipsychotic use.
RESULTS: We found that referential and persecutory delusions are central themes, supported by other primary delusions, and are strongly autoregressive - the presence of referential and persecutory delusions is predictive of their future occurrence. In a second analysis we demonstrate that social factors influence the severity of referential, but not persecutory, delusions.
CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that persecutory delusions represent central, resistant states in the cognitive landscape, whereas referential beliefs are more flexible, offering an important window of opportunity for intervention. Our data models can be collated with prior biological, computational, and social work to contribute toward a more complete theory of paranoia and provide more time-dependent evidence for optimal treatment targets.

The necessity for introducing interactionist and parallelism approaches in different branches of cognitive science emerged as a reaction to classical sequential stage-based models. Functional psychological models that emphasized and explained how different components interact, dynamically producing cognitive and perceptual states, influenced multiple disciplines. Chiefly among them were experimental psycholinguistics and the many applied areas that dealt with humans\' ability to process different types of information in different contexts. Understanding how bilinguals represent and process verbal and visual input, how their neural and psychological states facilitate such interactions, and how linguistic and nonlinguistic processing overlap, has now emerged as an important area of multidisciplinary research. In this article, we will review available evidence from different language-speaking groups of bilinguals in India with a focus on situational context. In the discussion, we will address models of language processing in bilinguals within a cognitive psychological approach with a focus on existent models of inhibitory control. The paper\'s stated goal will be to show that the parallel architecture framework can serve as a theoretical foundation for examining bilingual language processing and its interface with external factors such as social context.

Alcohol consumption occurring in a social or solitary setting often yields different behavioural responses in human subjects. For example, social drinking is associated with positive effects while solitary drinking is linked to negative effects. However, the neurobiological mechanism by which the social environment during alcohol intake impacts on behavioural responses remains poorly understood. We investigated whether distinct social environments affect behavioural responses to ethanol and the role of the dopamine system in this phenomenon in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The wild-type Canton-S (CS) flies showed higher locomotor response when exposed to ethanol in a group setting than a solitary setting, and there was no difference in females and males. Dopamine signalling is crucial for the locomotor stimulating effect of ethanol. When subjected to ethanol exposure alone, the dopamine transport mutant flies fumin (fmn) with hyper dopamine displayed the locomotor response similar to CS. When subjected to ethanol in a group setting, however, the fmn\'s response to the locomotor stimulating effect was substantially augmented compared with CS, indicating synergistic interaction of dopamine signalling and social setting. To identify the dopamine signalling pathway important for the social effect, we examined the flies defective in individual dopamine receptors and found that the D1 receptor dDA1/Dop1R1 is the major receptor mediating the social effect. Taken together, this study underscores the influence of social context on the neural and behavioural responses to ethanol.

UNASSIGNED: Little is known about how the brains of autistic children process language during real-world \"social contexts,\" despite the fact that challenges with language, communication, and social interaction are core features of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
UNASSIGNED: We investigated the neural bases of language processing during social and non-social contexts in a sample of N=20 autistic and N=20 neurotypical (NT) preschool-aged children, 3 to 6 years old. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure children\'s brain response to \"live language\" spoken by a live experimenter during an in-person social context (i.e., book reading), and \"recorded language\" played via an audio recording during a non-social context (i.e., screen time). We examined within-group and between-group differences in the strength and localization of brain response to live language and recorded language, as well as correlations between children\'s brain response and language skills measured by the Preschool Language Scales.
UNASSIGNED: In the NT group, brain response to live language was greater than brain response to recorded language in the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ). In the ASD group, the strength of brain response did not differ between conditions. The ASD group showed greater brain response to recorded language than the NT group in the right inferior and middle frontal gyrus (IMFG). Across groups, children\'s language skills were negatively associated with brain response to recorded language in the right IMFG, suggesting that processing recorded language required more cognitive effort for children with lower language skills. Children\'s language skills were also positively associated with the difference in brain response between conditions in the right TPJ, demonstrating that children who showed a greater difference in brain response to live language versus recorded language had higher language skills.
UNASSIGNED: Findings should be considered preliminary until they are replicated in a larger sample.
UNASSIGNED: Findings suggest that the brains of NT children, but not autistic children, process language differently during social and non-social contexts. Individual differences in how the brain processes language during social and non-social contexts may help to explain why language skills are so variable across children with and without autism.

BACKGROUND: Cannabis became legal in Canada in 2018. Since then, calls for research to evaluate the impact of legalization on youth have been at the forefront of public and academic discussions. Research addressing these calls has largely focused on issues of risk and harm, with limited attention to the role of social context in shaping youth cannabis use. This paper presents the findings of a study that centered youth perspectives on cannabis use in the context of health and social inequities.
METHODS: Between 2021 and 2022, we undertook an exploratory and critical qualitative interview study with 56 youth from across Canada who use cannabis and who reported experiences with health or social struggles, broadly self-defined. Our analysis followed a reflexive thematic approach and leveraged theoretical perspectives from critical drug studies to interrogate youths\' variegated cannabis use risks and risk environments, whilst facilitating inquiry into their interface with overlapping forms of hardship and inequity.
RESULTS: We developed three interconnected themes: (i) cannabis use risks as contextually situated; (ii) cannabis use as a practice of care; and (iii) cannabis use as a survival tool in connection with trauma and violence. Findings within and across these themes centre on the nexus of intentionality and agency in youth narratives of using cannabis and situates their cannabis use in connection with, and in response to, intersecting health and social inequities.
CONCLUSIONS: This study underscores opportunities for a reconsideration or reconceptualization of risks in the context of youth cannabis use, so that approaches to supporting youth who use cannabis are more resonant and credible with those who experience health and social inequities. Findings offer direction for youth cannabis policy and programming, including to decenter individual pathology, support harm reduction goals, and further consider relationships between cannabis use and context, marginalization, and oppression.

Moral judgments are often viewed as the outcome of affective and deliberative processes that could be impacted by social factors and individual characteristics. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between gender and social context on moral judgment. Participants included 315 undergraduate students (67.3% female). The participants completed the Moral Decision-Making Task while seated at row tables facing the front of the room or round tables facing other participants. The results indicated that males responded in a more utilitarian manner (harm one to save five) than females for moral impersonal (MI) and moral personal (MP) dilemmas regardless of seating arrangements. When seated at round tables, all participants were more likely to respond deontologically (cause no harm) to the moral impersonal dilemmas. In addition, we calculated a moral reasoning difference score for each participant as the difference between the MI and MP scores to represent additional reactivity due to the idea of taking direct action. The moral reasoning difference score was consistent for females but indicated a more deontological response from males at round tables and a more utilitarian response from males at row tables. These results suggest that males are more utilitarian than females and are more likely to be influenced by social context when responding to moral dilemmas. More broadly, the current results indicate that moral judgments are affected by social context particularly in males in ways that have not been incorporated in many models of moral decision making.

Research highlights racial and ethnic disparities in suicide, but Asian American suicide receives very little attention in the literature. This is the first comprehensive, large-scale, nationally representative study of completed suicide among Asian Americans in the United States. Descriptive and multilevel regression techniques compared the risk factors for completed suicide across 227,786 Asian American, White, African American, Hispanic, and American Indian suicide decedents from 2003 to 2019. Results indicated that Asian American suicide decedents were significantly less likely than their counterparts to have several risk factors for suicide. Asian Americans were less likely to be male, uneducated, and unmarried. Asian Americans were less likely to use alcohol and drugs, to have mental health problems, and to die by firearm, relative to other suicide methods. Asian Americans were less likely to have a history of prior suicide attempts, to have intimate partner problems, and to have criminal legal problems. Conversely, Asian Americans were more likely to reside in places with higher levels of concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, and population density. The results underscore the need for race-specific suicide prevention strategies that, for Asian Americans in particular, take into account cultural values and barriers to help-seeking behavior.

How do children decide when it is appropriate to ask a question? In Study 1 (preregistered), 50 4- and 5-year-olds, 50 7- and 8-year-olds, and 100 adults watched vignettes featuring a child who had a question, and participants indicated whether they thought the child should ask the question \"right now.\" Both adults and children endorsed more question-asking to a well-known informant than to an acquaintance and to someone doing nothing than to someone busy working or busy socializing. However, younger children endorsed asking questions to someone who was busy more often than older children and adults. In addition, Big Five personality traits predicted endorsement of question-asking. In Study 2 (preregistered, N = 500), mothers\' self-reports showed that children\'s actual question-asking varied with age, informant activity, and informant familiarity in ways that paralleled the results of Study 1. In Study 3 (N = 100), we examined mothers\' responses to their children\'s question-asking and found that mothers\' responses to their children\'s question-asking varied based on the mother\'s activity. In addition, mothers high in authoritarianism were less likely to answer their children\'s questions when they were busy than mothers low in authoritarianism. In sum, across three studies, we found evidence that the age-related decline in children\'s question-asking to their parents reflects a change in children\'s reasoning about when it is appropriate to ask a question.

Although prior research has implied that emotional contagion occurs automatically and unconsciously, convincing evidence suggests that it is significantly influenced by individuals\' perceptions of their relationships with others or with collectives within specific social contexts. This implies a role for self-representation in the process. The present study aimed to offer a novel explanation of the interplay between social contexts and emotional contagion, focusing on the contextualized nature of self-representation and exploring the social factors that shape emotional contagion. It further posits a causal loop among social contexts, self-representation, and emotional contagion. Drawing from the lens of self-representation, this study concludes with a discussion on potential research directions in this field, commencing with an exploration of the antecedents and consequences of emotional contagion and self-representation.