The ability to adjust developmental trajectories based on experience is widespread in nature, including in humans. This plasticity is often adaptive, tailoring individuals to their local environment. However, it is less clear why some individuals are more sensitive to environmental influences than others. Explanations include differences in genes and differences in prior experiences. In this ar...

Optimism is generally accepted by psychiatrists, psychologists and other caring professionals as a feature of mental health. Interventions typically rely on cognitive-behavioural tools to encourage individuals to 'stop negative thought cycles' and to 'challenge unhelpful thoughts'. However, evidence suggests that most individuals have persistent biases of optimism and that excessive optimism is...

Creativity and innovation drive competitiveness in the 21st century enterprises. Dynamic hyper-intensive competitive markets demand widespread innovations from all employees in most global enterprises. Leaders influence and set the contextual environments under which their employees express creativity. This paper will examine how different leadership models relate with individual creativity. It...

Attentional biases reflect an individual's selective attention to salient stimuli within their environment, for example an experience of back pain. Eysenck suggests that different personality types show different attentional biases to threatening information. This study is the first to test Eysenck's theory within a chronic back pain population by investigating the attentional biases of four di...

In the present study, we examined the extent to which encoding specificity influences the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and episodic recall. Participants performed a paired associates cued recall task in which a rhyme or a semantic judgment was made during encoding. During recall participants were presented with the cue word along with either a rhyme o...

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether individuals with Asperger's disorder exhibit difficulty in switching attention from a local level to a global level. Eleven participants with Asperger's disorder and 11 age- and gender-matched healthy controls performed a level-repetition switching task using Navon-type hierarchical stimuli. In both groups, level-repetition was beneficia...

In the present study, we examined the extent to which encoding specificity influences the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and episodic recall. Participants performed a paired associates cued recall task in which a rhyme or a semantic judgment was made during encoding. During recall participants were presented with the cue word along with either a rhyme o...

Vertebrates' diets profoundly influence the composition of symbiotic gut microbial communities. Studies documenting diet-microbiota associations typically focus on univariate or categorical diet variables. However, in nature individuals often consume diverse combinations of foods. If diet components act independently, each providing distinct microbial colonists or nutrients, we expect a positiv...

The schooling behaviour of fish is of great biological importance, playing a crucial role in the foraging and predator avoidance of numerous species. The extent to which physiological performance traits affect the spatial positioning of individual fish within schools is completely unknown. Schools of juvenile mullet Liza aurata were filmed at three swim speeds in a swim tunnel, with one focal f...

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals' awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objective...