Chronic cannabis use is associated with blunted stress reactivity. Future research is needed to determine whether this helps to confer resiliency or vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology as well as the mechanisms underlying this effect.

A college education is becoming increasingly expensive, and the burden of this cost is often felt disproportionately by marginalized students. One aspect of rising college costs are textbook prices, which have increased at a rate that far surpasses inflation. Open educational resources (OER; free, openly-licensed course materials) are often proposed as a solution to this problem. It is not clear, however, whether these materials are equivalent in quality to standard commercial textbooks. During one semester, half of the Introductory Psychology sections at a large, public university were assigned to use OER while the other half were assigned to use the incumbent commercial textbook. Participants were asked to self-report the behaviors they engage in as a result of high textbook costs. We also examined student performance in the courses and students' perceptions and use of the two books. We found no significant differences between textbook groups on course performance or perceptions of the book, but marginalized students (first-generation students and/or ethnic minority students) reported engaging in negative behaviors (i.e., dropping a class) more often than their peers as a result of textbook costs. These findings suggest that textbook costs disproportionately affect our most vulnerable students and the use of OER may be one solution to this problem, particularly given the equivalent performance across textbook groups.

Individuals with high trait anxiety tend to be worse at flexibly adapting goal-directed behavior to meet changing demands relative to those with low trait anxiety. Past research on anxiety and cognitive flexibility has used tasks that involve overcoming a recently acquired rule, strategy, or response pattern after an abrupt change in task requirements (e.g., choice X led to positive outcomes but now leads to negative outcomes). An important limitation of this research is that many decision making situations require overcoming a preexisting bias (e.g., deciding whether to withdraw a historically winning investment that has experienced recent losses). In the present study we examined whether anxiety differences in the ability to overcome an acquired response extend to the ability to overcome a preexisting bias, when the bias produces objectively disadvantageous decisions. High anxiety (n = 78) and low anxiety participants (n = 76) completed a commonly used measure of cognitive flexibility, reversal learning, and a novel Framed Gambling Task that assessed the extent to which they could make advantageous decisions when the normatively correct choice was inconsistent with a preexisting framing bias. High anxiety participants showed the expected diminished reversal learning performance and also had poorer ability to make advantageous choices that were inconsistent with the framing bias. Worse performance in the Framed Gambling Task was not driven by poor knowledge of risk contingencies, because high anxiety participants reported the same explicit knowledge as low anxiety participants. Instead, the results suggest high anxiety is associated with general deficits in resolving interference from prepotent responses.

Older adults showed significant improvement over trials in their ability to decrease bias-driven choices, but younger showed greater flexibility. Age-differences in task performance were based on differences in learning and corresponding representations of task-relevant information.

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