Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used behavioral paradigm for studying associative learning in rodents. Despite early recognition that subjects may engage in a variety of both conditioned and unconditioned responses, the last several decades have seen the field narrow its focus to measure freezing as the sole indicator of conditioned fear.…

Despite the fact that third parties are present during a substantial amount of face-to-face interviews, bystander influence on respondents' response behavior is not yet fully understood. We use nine waves of the German Family Panel "pairfam" and apply fixed effects panel regression models to analyze effects of third-party presence on…

Prior work has revealed sex/gender-dependent autistic characteristics across behavioural and neural/biological domains. It remains unclear whether and how neural sex/gender differences are related to behavioural sex/gender differences in autism. Here, we examined whether atypical neural responses during mentalizing and self-representation are…

Based on the framework of testlet models, the current study suggests the Bayesian random block item response theory (BRB IRT) model to fit forced-choice formats where an item block is composed of three or more items. To account for local dependence among items within a block, the BRB IRT model incorporated a random block effect into the response…

The present study examined the startle reflex as a physiological marker of behavioral inhibition. Participants were 7 to 12-year-old children who had been previously identified as inhibited or uninhibited as part of an ongoing longitudinal study on the role of behavioral inhibition in the development of anxiety disorders. Analysis of their scores…