MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit

Understanding ourselves within our peer environment is an important component of self-development during adolescence, the period of life between the onset of puberty and adulthood (between ages 10 and 24 years). We used a self-appraisal paradigm to investigate cross-sectionally the relationship between perceived friendship quality and self-judgements in adolescent girls. One hundred and sixty-three girls (9–15 years), recruited from London, United Kingdom, rated how well a set of positive and negative adjectives described themselves, or a chosen familiar other. Participants also completed a self-report friendship quality questionnaire. Higher perceived friendship quality predicted lower negative self-judgements and higher positive self-judgements. These relationships did not change across the age range tested, but there was an overall decrease in positivity effect (higher positive judgements compared to negative judgements) with age. These findings highlight the importance of investigating how different components of peer relationships are related to self-concept development in adolescence.

Apathy is a common symptom across a wide range of neurodegenerative and psychiatric conditions, characterised by a loss of goal-directed action. It is associated with faster rates of cognitive and functional decline, poor prognosis, and high caregiver burden. Effective treatments remain elusive. In this article, we propose that apathy is not merely the result of actions becoming undesirable due to insufficient reward or an inflated sense of cost. Instead, actions become unnecessary due to a loss of prior precision on action outcomes in the context of the 'Bayesian brain'. We outline the theoretical background and current evidence to support this framework and propose testable hypotheses regarding the behaviour, neuroanatomy, and neuropharmacology of apathy.

The health of the auditory nerve is a key factor for hearing outcomes in cochlear-implant patients. Many electrophysiological markers of auditory-neural health have been proposed, with varying predictive power and independence from non-neural factors. The “Failure Index” (FI), the ratio between stimulation current level and response magnitude of the electrically-evoked compound action potential (eCAP) was compared to the Panoramic eCAP method. Both methods predicted localized areas of reduced neural responsiveness in a group of human cochlear-implant users, but the FI showed a greater dependence on a non-neural factor, namely, the distances between the cochlear-implant electrodes and the auditory nerves.