No abstract

With the fierce labor market competition, the family population’s size continues to expand, and the conflict between work and family requirements for individual roles becomes increasingly intense. Most studies focus on work–family conflict as an antecedent variable, and few studies use work–family conflict as an outcome variable. This study aimed to explore the underlying mechanism of the relationship between gender role attitudes and work–family conflict. Two models were tested using conditional process analysis for testing direct and indirect effects on a sample of 324 employees: A serial multiple mediation model, and the multiple mediation model including the moderating role of education level and subjective socioeconomic status. The results suggested that (1) gender role attitudes significantly and positively predicted work–family conflict. (2) Parental sacrifice and subjective well-being played multiple mediating roles between gender role attitudes and work–family conflict. (3) Education level moderated the relationship between gender role attitudes and parental sacrifice, as evidenced by the fact that low education level amplified the positive predictive effect of gender role attitudes on parental sacrifice. (4) Subjective socioeconomic status moderated the relationship between gender role attitudes and subjective well-being, suggesting that high subjective socioeconomic status amplified the negative predictive effect of gender role attitudes on subjective well-being. This work contributes to the understanding of the process underlying the relationship between gender role attitudes and work–family conflict, and to the literature reporting the possible moderated role of education level and subjective socioeconomic status on the influence outcomes of gender role attitudes. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by reduced dynamic with abnormal slowness in emotion, thought/cognition, and movements. Is the reduced dynamic also manifest in visual perception and neural activity of occipital cortex? Various findings show reduced activity in occipital cortex including in subareas like human MT complex (hMT+) cortex in MDD; its meaning for the dynamics of visual perception in MDD remains yet unclear, though. Combining novel data in three independents acute MDD samples (totally, 109 MDD, 113 HC), we characterize hMT+ in MDD in a dynamic way on perceptual (visual motion paradigm) and neural (rest/task fMRI) levels. Our main findings in MDD are: (i) reduced duration threshold difference for discriminating fast and slow-speed stimuli, leading to (ii) the perception of a longer distance for faster-speed moving gratings; (iii) reduced global representation of the brain’s spontaneous activity in hMT+ in especially faster infra slow frequencies with reverberation to subcortical and higher-order cortical regions; (iv) reduced beta value in hMT+ and higher-order cortical regions to especially faster visual stimuli; (v) correlation of these psychophysical and neural changes with symptom severity. We demonstrate reduced occipital activity in faster timescales on perceptual, and neural levels. Occipital cortex (hMT+) activity in MDD is characterized by reduced dynamics which shapes these subjects’ visual perception in an abnormal way. Beyond further establishing a basic dynamic deficit characterizing the visual system in MDD on both neural and perceptual levels, our results provide clinical opportunities for occipital-based diagnostic markers and novel therapeutic interventions in MDD.

Although it has been found that self-esteem and self-concept clarity are positively correlated, self-determination theory shows that the positive relationship might be lowered for individuals whose basic psychological needs are chronically thwarted. The exact neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity are still not fully understood. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) plays an important role in monitoring basic psychological needs, considering that it is more active when some basic psychological needs are actually or potentially thwarted. To better understand the neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity, we investigated the differences in the relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity among healthy adults with different levels of spontaneous activities of the dACC using rs-fMRI combined with amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF). As expected, the results showed that the positive relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity was modulated by the ALFF value of the right dACC, which indicated that the positive relationship was significant when the ALLF value of the right dACC was lower, but the positive relationship was not significant when the ALFF value of the right dACC was higher. The modulating roles of right dACC might also reflect that the individuals with higher ALFF value of dACC might experience chronically thwarted relatedness of basic psychological needs, which means the more disturbed by thwarting relatedness information in individuals, the lower positive relationship emerged.