IL-2 is the first cytokine produced by naïve T helper cells after antigen recognition and is required for the initiation of T helper cell proliferation and differentiation. Previous work identified Ets-2 as a pre-induction silencer of IL-2: reducing its expression after T cell activation permits the cytokine gene to be transcribed. The new study asked how this change in Ets-2 expression is controlled, focusing on the STAT family of transcription factors because of their established role in regulating genes in T helper cells.

Bioinformatic analysis found potential STAT binding motifs in the promoter of Ets-2, providing a basis for testing whether STAT3 controls the gene directly. Investigators then examined STAT3, Ets-2, and IL-2 expression in activated Jurkat cells. Cell activation increased STAT3 messenger RNA and protein levels, while Ets-2 expression declined and IL-2 production rose. Ets-2 messenger RNA and protein were measured by real-time PCR and western blotting, respectively, allowing the researchers to track the response at both RNA and protein levels.

The study then tested the effect of changing STAT3 abundance. Overexpression of STAT3 significantly reduced Ets-2 messenger RNA and protein levels, whereas knocking down STAT3 increased Ets-2 expression. These gain- and loss-of-function results support a suppressive role for STAT3 in the regulation of Ets-2. The experiments also provide a functional connection between STAT3 activity, repression of Ets-2, and the relief of Ets-2-mediated silencing of IL-2.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation supplied more direct evidence for the proposed regulatory pathway. The researchers detected binding of phosphorylated STAT3 at the Ets-2 promoter. Specifically, the study found STAT3 phosphorylated at tyrosine 705 associated with promoter sequences, indicating that activated STAT3 can bind the Ets-2 regulatory region rather than acting only through an unidentified intermediate. Taken together, the promoter analysis, expression measurements, STAT3 manipulation, and binding assay support a model in which activation-induced STAT3 binds the Ets-2 promoter and suppresses its transcription. Lower Ets-2 expression then removes a pre-induction restraint on IL-2 production. The findings were obtained in a Jurkat T cell line model, so their relevance to primary T helper cells and to biological outcomes in people remains to be established through additional research.

Subject of Research: STAT3-mediated repression of the Ets-2 pre-induction silencer in activated T cells

Article Title: STAT3-mediated suppression of the pre-induction silencer Ets-2 in activated T helper cells

Article References: Theodoraki, V., Lazaris, C., Mouzaki, A., & Georgakopoulos, T. (2026). STAT3-mediated suppression of the pre-induction silencer Ets-2 in activated T helper cells. Molecular Biology Reports, 53(1), Article 1509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-026-12699-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11033-026-12699-6

Keywords: STAT3, Ets-2, IL-2, T helper cells, transcriptional regulation, T cell activation, chromatin immunoprecipitation, Jurkat cells, gene expression, STAT3-mediated, suppression, pre-induction

To understand why the shadow effect matters, it helps to picture how single-crystal castings are made. Directional solidification technology works by withdrawing a ceramic mold from a hot furnace zone into a cooler region, so that molten alloy solidifies from the bottom upward along a carefully controlled temperature gradient. The goal is for a single crystal orientation to propagate through the entire component. But when a cluster of large-caliber castings is arranged together in the furnace, the components block each other’s view of the cooling surfaces. One casting literally casts a thermal shadow on its neighbor, disrupting the local heat flow and the temperature gradient that the solidification front depends on. The result is one of the primary causes of casting defects in Ni-base single-crystal superalloy castings, including stray grains, freckles, and solidification pores that force manufacturers to scrap otherwise valuable parts.

The research team, led by Donghan Fan, Naicheng Sheng, and Yizhou Zhou of the University of Science and Technology of China and the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with AECC Shenyang Liming Aero-Engine Co., Ltd, investigated a novel central cooling and heating process as a way to fight back against this thermal shadowing. Instead of relying solely on the conventional withdrawal-based cooling from the outside, the CCH process introduces controlled cooling and heating from the center of the casting cluster. This central intervention changes the radiation heat transfer dynamics inside the furnace, so that each component in the cluster receives a more balanced share of the heat exchange. The approach effectively rewrites the thermal geometry of the casting environment, preventing any single casting from being thermally starved by its neighbors.

The experimental results are striking. In CCH-processed castings, the size of the S-pores—solidification pores that form during directional solidification and act as stress concentrators during service—is significantly reduced. Even more dramatically, the freckles are eliminated. Freckles are chains of equiaxed grains that form when segregated interdendritic liquid becomes buoyantly unstable in the mushy zone, the semi-solid region between fully liquid and fully solid material. These freckle chains are catastrophic for single-crystal integrity because they introduce grain boundaries into a component that is supposed to have none. Previous studies have linked freckle formation to geometric features such as edges, curvature, and abrupt cross-section changes in castings, and the mushy zone width plays a decisive role in whether the segregated liquid can destabilize. By narrowing the mushy zone, the CCH process removes the conditions that allow freckles to nucleate in the first place.

Simulation results provide quantitative backing for these experimental observations. The numerical analysis shows that the mushy zone width of CCH-processed castings is shortened by 47.9 percent—a nearly halving of the vulnerable semi-solid region where defects incubate. The temperature field distribution also becomes more uniform across the casting cluster, meaning that the solidification front advances more evenly and the local thermal gradients stay within the safe range for single-crystal growth. A narrower mushy zone reduces the time that segregated liquid spends in the buoyantly unstable state, suppressing the interdendritic fluid flow that drives freckle formation and the shrinkage feeding problems that generate pores.

To clarify exactly how much control the CCH process achieves over the shadow effect, the researchers performed an in-depth deduction of the view factor, a geometric quantity from radiation heat transfer theory that describes how efficiently two surfaces exchange thermal radiation. The view factor analysis demonstrates the radiation heat transfer efficiency inside the furnace and quantifies the level of control over the shadow effect achieved by the central cooling and heating process. In conventional cluster casting, the view factors between neighboring components and the cooling surfaces are distorted by shadowing, so some castings radiate heat inefficiently and solidify under degraded gradients. The CCH process corrects this distortion by inserting central thermal elements that rebalance the radiation exchange, ensuring that the heat extraction from each component stays within the controlled range needed for defect-free directional solidification.

The benefits extend beyond the casting stage into the mechanical performance of the finished crystals. During deformation, a hexagonal dislocation network forms at the deformed gamma/gamma-prime interface in CCH-processed castings. The gamma-prime phase is the ordered intermetallic precipitate that strengthens nickel-base superalloys, and the gamma/gamma-prime interface is where plastic deformation concentrates at high temperatures. Hexagonal dislocation networks at this interface are a well-known signature of effective creep resistance, because they lock the interface and impede dislocation motion through the crystal. The formation of this network enhances the rupture life of the castings, meaning that components produced with the CCH process can withstand high-temperature stress for longer before failing. This is a crucial advantage for turbine blades, which must survive thousands of hours of creep loading at temperatures approaching the melting point of the alloy.

The significance of this work becomes clear when considering the economics of superalloy casting. Single-crystal superalloy components contain expensive alloying elements such as rhenium, and every rejected casting represents a substantial loss of both material and furnace time. The shadow effect is inevitable when directional solidification technology is employed to fabricate a cluster of large-caliber castings, which means that manufacturers have historically accepted high rejection rates as the cost of doing business. A process that suppresses the shadow effect and improves the yield rate of the castings directly translates into lower production costs, less material waste, and more reliable supply chains for the aerospace industry. The CCH process achieves this without requiring changes to the alloy chemistry itself, making it compatible with existing superalloy compositions and casting infrastructure.

The research builds on a growing body of work on defect control in directional solidification. Earlier studies by the same group examined freckle formation during casting single crystal superalloys through the central cooling and heating process, published in the Journal of Alloys and Compd in 2025, and the effect of wall thickness on residual stress and microstructural evolution in multi-blade casting. Other researchers have developed thermal uniformity-based downward directional solidification technologies, non-uniform thickness molds for controlling temperature gradients, and digital twin models for single-crystal turbine blade solidification. The CCH process adds a new dimension to this toolkit by attacking the shadow effect at its geometric root—the distorted radiation exchange within casting clusters—rather than merely compensating for its downstream consequences.

Looking ahead, the combination of experimental validation, quantitative simulation, and view factor analysis demonstrated in this study offers a template for rational process design in superalloy casting. By deducing the radiation heat transfer efficiency from first principles, engineers can now predict how different furnace geometries and central thermal interventions will affect the shadow effect before committing to expensive trial castings. As the demand for single-crystal superalloy components grows with the expansion of commercial aviation and gas turbine power generation, processes like CCH that improve yield rates while enhancing rupture life will become increasingly valuable. The shadow effect has haunted superalloy casting for decades; with central cooling and heating, it may finally be losing its grip.

Subject of Research: Materials Science

Article Title: Suppression of the shadow effect during casting single-crystal superalloys through a central cooling and heating process

Article References: Fan, D., Sheng, N., Chu, Z., Liu, J., Sun, S., Fan, S., Hou, G., Li, J., Zhu, S., & Zhou, Y. (2026). Suppression of the shadow effect during casting single-crystal superalloys through a central cooling and heating process. Journal of Materials Science, 61(43), 33878-33895. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-026-13496-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10853-026-13496-z

Keywords: single-crystal superalloys, directional solidification, shadow effect, central cooling and heating, freckles, S-pores, mushy zone, view factor, turbine blades, nickel-base superalloys, Suppression, shadow

The study, published on 27 November 2025 in the Spanish Journal of Soil Science, systematically analyzed how the ratio of organic fertilizer (OF), slow-release fertilizer (SRF) and rice straw (RS) controls two competing outcomes in improved expansive soil: the crack ratio, a measure of fissure suppression, and the root content of vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides), a deep-rooting plant whose fibers act as a living geotextile. Led by Yonggang Huang and Hongri Zhang, the team used a Box-Behnken experimental design (BBD), a response surface methodology (RSM) framework, and quadratic polynomial regression models to map the entire three-factor landscape rather than testing each ingredient in isolation. The result is not just a list of optimal dosages but a set of critical thresholds—points where adding more of a good ingredient suddenly makes things worse.

The single most powerful finding concerns rice straw. Of the three factors, RS made the greatest contribution to fissure suppression: for every 0.1% increase in its content, the crack ratio dropped by 0.204% (p < 0.001). The mechanism is mechanical. The fibrous network of straw, pretreated with sodium hydroxide and cut to 30 millimeter lengths, randomly distributes tensile stresses within the soil mass, disrupting the continuity of capillary pressures that build up during drying and preventing the propagation of large, interconnected cracks. This aligns with earlier single-factor studies showing that straw can raise shear strength by up to 25% and that optimal straw contents fall between 0.55% and 0.65%. What the new research adds is a quantified picture of how that optimum shifts when straw is used alongside fertilizers—a multi-factor scenario not previously explored.

Organic fertilizer, by contrast, revealed a classic nonlinear trap. Within moderate ranges, humic acid in OF promotes clay aggregation and improves fertility. But once application exceeded 10%, the crack ratio rebounded significantly (β = 0.132, p < 0.001) because excessive organic matter holds water unevenly, exacerbating the non-uniformity of drying shrinkage. The quadratic term coefficient for OF in the root content model reached −0.22 (p = 0.001), confirming that its inhibitory effect on roots grows exponentially with concentration: within the 10%–15% range, every additional 1% of OF cut the root growth rate by 12%. The underlying cause appears to be a carbon-to-nitrogen imbalance that interferes with root nitrogen uptake. In other words, the very ingredient meant to feed the vetiver grass can, past a threshold, starve it and crack the soil at the same time.

Slow-release fertilizer played a subtler dual role. Its resin-coated granules, releasing 64% of their payload over 28 days, showed a positive linear effect on root content (β = +0.12, p = 0.023) by sustaining nutrient supply for cell division. Yet the same salts that nourish plants also cement clay particles, and this salt cementation inhibited root growth at high dosages (β = −0.042, p = 0.003). The interaction terms proved even more consequential than the main effects. SRF and RS worked synergistically to suppress cracks (p < 0.001): the straw provides tensile reinforcement while the released salts flocculate and cement clay particles, creating a reinforced, cemented matrix. In the best case, group 12 of the experiment—10% OF, 0.9 kg/m³ SRF and 0.75% RS—achieved a crack ratio of just 1.7%. Meanwhile, OF and RS synergistically increased root content (β = 0.104, p = 0.002), but OF and SRF antagonistically raised fissure risk (β = 0.042, p = 0.082), a trade-off the authors attribute to localized osmotic stress and nutrient overload.

The relationship between root development and cracking itself proved nonlinear, with a critical threshold at 1.0 mg/cm³ of root content. Below that level, roots reinforce the soil and the crack ratio stays low—at 0.62 mg/cm³ the crack ratio was only 1.8%. Above the threshold, the crack ratio climbed steeply: piecewise regression showed the growth rate jumping from 0.8% per mg/cm³ to 2.2% per mg/cm³. Dense roots can hinder uniform shrinkage and create local stress concentrations, and the large pores left behind by decomposing roots become channels for fissure expansion. The engineering recommendation is therefore counterintuitive but precise: keep root content below 1.0 mg/cm³ and compensate ecologically by raising straw content to at least 0.5% and optimizing SRF between 0.6 and 0.9 kg/m³.

Using a desirability function approach with weights of 0.7 for crack ratio and 0.3 for root content, the multi-objective optimization yielded three ready-to-use formulations. The fissure priority scheme—8.2% OF, 0.83 kg/m³ SRF and 0.70% RS—achieves a crack ratio of 1.5%, ideal for roadbeds where mechanical stability dominates. The balanced scheme—9.0% OF, 0.75 kg/m³ SRF and 0.65% RS—holds the crack ratio at 1.8% while maintaining root content of 1.02 mg/cm³, suited to farmland improvement. The ecological priority scheme—11.5% OF, 0.60 kg/m³ SRF and 0.55% RS—pushes root content to 1.25 mg/cm³ at the cost of a 2.3% crack ratio, designed for slope restoration where vegetation establishment matters most. Weight sensitivity analysis showed that every 0.1 increase in the crack-ratio weight lowers the crack ratio by 0.3% but costs 0.15 mg/cm³ of root content, allowing engineers to tune the recipe seasonally.

The statistical rigor behind these numbers is substantial. The crack ratio model explained 91% of variation (R² = 0.91, RMSE = 0.12%) and the root content model 93% (R² = 0.93, RMSE = 0.11 mg/cm³), with triplicate center-point tests showing a coefficient of variation of only 2.1% and prediction errors at or below 5%. Crack quantification relied on the Particles and Cracks Analysis System (PCAS) software from Nanjing University, which converts high-definition images of dried specimens into binary maps and extracts geometric crack information. Samples were compacted to a dry density of 1.56 g/cm³, cured for 28 days at 25 °C, and subjected to up to nine wet-dry cycles alternating between 36% water content and 40 °C drying. Vetiver grass was cultivated for 120 days before root scanning with WinRHIZO and oven-dried weight quantification.

The practical implications extend beyond the recipe itself. Because the ingredients are livestock manure compost and rice straw—agricultural wastes generated at more than 3 billion tons annually and often burned or landfilled, releasing PM2.5 and squashing resources—the strategy converts a disposal problem into a stabilization solution. The authors also flag risk controls: in areas with high OF content above 12%, drainage measures such as underground pipes with spacing of 1.5 meters or less are needed to manage salinization; where SRF exceeds 0.9 kg/m³, pipe spacing of 2 meters or less is advised; and where straw content surpasses 0.7%, mixing in 3% vermiculite can compensate for porosity. For high-straw zones, the verification deviation of the model in project application was at most 3.2%.

Limitations remain, and the authors are candid about them. The experiments ran under controlled laboratory conditions over 120 days, so long-term biodegradation of fertilizer and straw, root decay, seasonal climate variation and durability under repeated wet-dry cycles are still open questions. The soil came from a single site in Changsha, Hunan—a weakly expansive, montmorillonite-dominated material with a free swelling ratio of 50%—so generalization to illite- or kaolinite-dominated soils in other climates requires field validation. The proposed micro-scale mechanisms, inferred from macro-scale responses, await direct visual confirmation through scanning electron microscopy and X-ray computed tomography. Even so, the study delivers what single-factor paradigms never could: a quantitative, threshold-aware design basis for improving expansive soil with agricultural waste, proving that the performance of a bio-composite is governed less by what you add than by how the ingredients interact.

Subject of Research: Critical Thresholds for Crack Ratio Suppression and Multi-Factor Ratio Optimization: A Synergistic Strategy of Organic-Slow Release Fertilizer-Rice Straw for Expansive Soil Improvement

Article Title: Critical Thresholds for Crack Ratio Suppression and Multi-Factor Ratio Optimization: A Synergistic Strategy of Organic-Slow Release Fertilizer-Rice Straw for Expansive Soil Improvement

Article References: Huang, Y., Zhang, H., Wang, X., Wu, Y., Tan, X., & Xiong, K. (2025). Critical Thresholds for Crack Ratio Suppression and Multi-Factor Ratio Optimization: A Synergistic Strategy of Organic-Slow Release Fertilizer-Rice Straw for Expansive Soil Improvement. Spanish Journal of Soil Science, 15, Article 14998. https://doi.org/10.3389/sjss.2025.14998

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/sjss.2025.14998

Keywords: Critical, Thresholds, Crack, Ratio, Suppression, Multi-Factor, Optimization, Synergistic, Strategy, Organic-Slow, Release, Fertilizer-Rice

A new Research Topic in Frontiers in Neuroscience, summarized in an editorial by Jameel Rizwana Hussaindeen of Gulf Medical University in the United Arab Emirates and Ana Sanchez-Cano and Elvira Orduna-Hospital of the University of Zaragoza in Spain, was conceived to bridge laboratory evidence and clinical practice. Five articles, spanning normative measurement, neural mechanisms, clinical classification, and surgical treatment, together sketch a picture of how the field is moving from descriptive diagnosis toward mechanistic understanding. The editorial argues that the same visual system that fails in the clinic can reveal its inner workings when probed with the right paradigms, and that the two perspectives must inform each other.

The first contribution tackles a deceptively simple question: what counts as normal? Darko-Takyi and colleagues screened 2,300 Ghanaian school children aged 8 to 17 years and identified 510 who were asymptomatic and free of binocular vision anomalies, forming a normative sample for accommodative facility and vergence facility. The median values were 13 cycles per minute for both monocular and binocular accommodative facility and 14 cycles per minute for vergence facility. According to the authors, this is the first report of vergence facility norms from an African population, and the values differ from those reported in other ethnic groups. The spread of normal values was wide, and the team recommends that symptoms be considered when interpreting any single measurement against the range, a caution that challenges the one-size-fits-all approach embedded in many clinical charts.

Population-specific norms matter because clinicians routinely decide whether a child needs vision therapy based on cutoffs derived from other populations. If the distribution of facility rates in Ghanaian children is shifted or broader than in the populations where those cutoffs were established, children could be misclassified as abnormal, or genuine anomalies could be missed. The editorial highlights this as a priority for future work: ethnicity-specific normative data should be related not only to symptoms but also to treatment outcomes, so that the numbers on a report form translate into decisions that actually improve a patient’s life.

The second study overturns a long-standing assumption about attention in paralytic strabismus. Willeford and McPeek examined five patients, including Duane retraction syndrome type I and acquired sixth nerve palsy, conditions in which the eyes cannot move into certain regions of space. Earlier work had reported no cueing effects in such patients and concluded that spatial attention cannot be directed to a region the eyes cannot reach. Using a paradigm with multiple cue locations, a no-cue control condition, and both saccadic and keypress responses, the researchers found that all five patients showed the expected pattern: faster responses to targets near the cue and slower responses to targets away from it, in both hemifields and with either eye viewing.

The implication is striking. Attention is altered rather than absent in paralytic strabismus, and the priority maps in premotor structures appear to operate independently of the effector. In other words, the neural machinery that assigns attentional priority to locations in space does not require the eyes to be able to move there. Clinically, the findings caution against inferring an attentional deficit from a restriction in eye movement, a distinction that could change how patients with restrictive and paralytic disorders are assessed and counseled. The editorial notes, however, that the sample was small and limited to paralytic strabismus, and calls for the paradigm to be extended to comitant strabismus, amblyopia, and non-strabismic anomalies such as convergence insufficiency.

The third contribution brings modern neuroimaging to bear on the moment-to-moment struggle between the two eyes. Zhang and colleagues studied binocular color rivalry in 16 healthy adults using simultaneous eye tracking and functional near-infrared spectroscopy, capturing pupil dynamics and prefrontal cortex activation while participants experienced one eye’s percept dominating the other. Color rivalry was associated with pupil dilation and increased prefrontal activation, whereas a change in stimulus location was processed with less prefrontal involvement. When the two challenges were combined, activation was strongest in Brodmann area 10 and reaction times were most variable. Prefrontal oxyhaemoglobin was positively correlated with reaction time, suggesting that the prefrontal cortex is actively engaged in resolving interocular conflict.

These measures could have real diagnostic value. Suppression, the brain’s silencing of one eye’s input, and unstable fusion are hallmarks of several binocular disorders, yet clinicians currently rely on behavioral tests that are coarse and subjective. The combination of oculomotor markers such as pupil dilation and haemodynamic markers such as prefrontal oxyhaemoglobin offers a potential objective readout of the brain’s effort to keep the two eyes in dialogue. The editorial proposes exploring these markers in patients with suppression or unstable fusion to determine whether they have diagnostic or prognostic value, a step that could move binocular vision assessment from the phoropter toward the sensor array.

The fourth study addresses a condition that has surged with modern near work: acute acquired comitant esotropia in myopic patients. Li and colleagues evaluated 105 myopic patients with the condition and 107 myopic controls. Prolonged near work without spectacle correction was reported by 98 percent of the patients compared with 13 percent of the controls, while routine spectacle wear did not differ between the groups. The authors classified patients according to whether fusion could be maintained at the far point without correction. The compensatory group, 88 percent of the sample, had larger deviations at distance than at near, a larger deviation on the Maddox rod than on the cover test, and near-orthophoria at the far point, a pattern consistent with adaptation to an excessive convergence demand. The non-compensatory group was younger, less myopic, had larger angles of deviation, and poorer stereopsis.

Two practical lessons emerge. First, the cover test may underestimate the deviation in the compensatory group, meaning clinicians who rely on a single test could misjudge the magnitude of the problem. Second, near work without correction is a modifiable risk factor, a finding with obvious public health implications for myopic populations spending hours on screens and books without adequate optical correction. The editorial calls for further validation of the far point classification with objective measurement of near work, since self-reported exposure is notoriously unreliable, and for the paradigm to be tested in other populations.

The fifth contribution examines the surgical question at the heart of strabismus practice: which operation best restores not just alignment but binocularity? Qi and colleagues compared bilateral lateral rectus recession with unilateral recession-resection in 306 children with intermittent exotropia followed for 12 months. Motor success was similar between the two procedures, at 87.5 percent and 91.2 percent respectively. But the sensory outcomes diverged: the recession-resection group had better foveal stereopsis and binocular vision recovery, while the bilateral recession group showed greater improvement in sensory alignment on the synoptophore and a higher rate of early overcorrection. The study was retrospective and the groups differed at baseline, so the findings need confirmation in a randomized trial, but they demonstrate that motor alignment and sensory recovery are separate outcomes that a surgeon must weigh independently.

Taken together, the five studies trace an arc from normative measurement through neural mechanisms to clinical classification and treatment, and the editorial is candid about what remains unknown. Attention and rivalry paradigms were tested in small samples and healthy adults, and their value in amblyopia, convergence insufficiency, and other disorders is unproven. Surgical comparisons need prospective randomized trials with well-defined outcome measures, long-term follow-up, and endpoints based on binocular vision parameters rather than alignment alone. What the Topic makes clear is that binocular vision is not a single skill but a layered system, and that progress will come from measuring each layer, in each population, with tools that capture the brain’s effort as well as the eyes’ position. For a condition affecting a substantial share of clinical practice, that is a roadmap worth following.

Subject of Research: binocular vision neuroscience and clinical research

Article Title: Editorial: Neural mechanisms and clinical advances in binocular vision

Article References: Hussaindeen, J. R., Sanchez-Cano, A., & Orduna-Hospital, E. (2026). Editorial: Neural mechanisms and clinical advances in binocular vision. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 20, Article 2003551. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2026.2003551

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2026.2003551

Keywords: binocular vision, strabismus, stereopsis, vergence, accommodation, amblyopia, suppression, binocular rivalry, normative data, intermittent exotropia, prefrontal cortex, visual attention

Emotion regulation, the set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express them, has long been recognized as a cornerstone of psychological health. Decades of research, beginning with James Gross’s influential process model, have examined individual strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, typically asking how each strategy relates to well-being on average across a sample. But this variable-centered approach has a well-known limitation: it treats strategies as if they operated independently, when in reality people hold bundles of beliefs about emotions and deploy constellations of regulatory modes together. The new study takes the opposite, person-centered route, asking whether empirically identifiable types of emotion regulators exist in the population and whether those types differ meaningfully in their mental health.

The theoretical backbone of the research is Self-Determination Theory, the broad motivational framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that human flourishing depends on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Within this framework, a specific mode of regulation called integrative emotion regulation has attracted growing attention. Integrative regulation involves openly acknowledging emotions, exploring them, and allowing their information to be processed and assimilated, rather than pushing them away or acting them out. According to Self-Determination Theory, this integrative processing supports the organismic capacity to transform even difficult emotional experiences into coherent self-knowledge, whereas suppressive forms of regulation, which involve distancing oneself from emotional experience, are thought to frustrate basic needs and undermine well-being over time.

Alongside regulation modes, the researchers examined emotion beliefs, specifically beliefs about the usefulness of emotions and beliefs about the controllability of emotions. Prior work by Tamir, Ford, De Castella, and others has shown that people who view emotions as controllable tend to use more adaptive strategies and report fewer depressive symptoms, while those who believe emotions are uncontrollable are more prone to avoidance-based regulation and psychological distress. Beliefs about whether emotions are useful or useless similarly shape whether people approach or avoid their feelings. The Turkish study is among the first to combine these belief variables with regulation modes, including integrative regulation, suppression, and dysregulation, in a single cluster analysis, thereby capturing the whole configuration of emotion-related processes within each person.

The sample comprised 850 adults recruited from various institutions across Türkiye, including university students, academics, and employees. Women made up 65.9 percent of participants, and the mean age was 35.04 years with a standard deviation of 12.8. Participants completed a battery of validated instruments: the Emotion Regulation Inventory, the Beliefs About Emotions Questionnaire, the Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Frustration Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depression, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale, and the Flourishing Scale, a measure of overall psychological well-being developed by Ed Diener and colleagues. The inclusion of both ill-being indicators, such as depression and anxiety symptoms, and well-being indicators, such as need satisfaction and flourishing, allowed the researchers to test whether the emotion regulation profiles differentiated people on both sides of the mental health spectrum.

Methodologically, the study followed a rigorous two-stage clustering procedure. First, the researchers standardized scores on the emotion belief and regulation mode variables and applied Ward’s hierarchical clustering method, which merges individuals into groups in a way that minimizes within-group variance. Second, they used the resulting cluster centers as starting points for K-means refinement, an iterative algorithm that reassigns individuals to the nearest cluster center until the solution stabilizes. This combination, recommended in the methodological literature on person-centered analysis, helps guard against local optima and produces more stable groupings. Statistical guidance on power for cluster analysis, including work by Dalmaijer and colleagues, informed the design, and the sample size comfortably exceeded conventional recommendations for detecting reliable cluster structures.

The analysis yielded a parsimonious two-cluster solution. The first cluster, containing 43.9 percent of participants, reflected a maladaptive regulation profile. Individuals in this group showed higher levels of emotion dysregulation, stronger suppressive tendencies, and stronger beliefs that emotions are uncontrollable, alongside lower levels of integrative regulation and weaker beliefs in the usefulness of emotions. The second cluster, encompassing 56.1 percent of the sample, represented an adaptive regulation profile, marked by the mirror-image pattern: higher integrative regulation and usefulness beliefs, and lower suppression, dysregulation, and uncontrollability beliefs. The fact that beliefs and strategies cohered into just two broad configurations, rather than a fragmented array of mixed types, is itself notable, suggesting that emotion-related processes tend to travel together in internally consistent packages.

The between-profile comparisons were striking. Relative to individuals in the maladaptive profile, those in the adaptive profile reported significantly higher satisfaction of their basic psychological needs and higher flourishing, as well as lower symptoms of depression and anxiety. These findings align closely with the predictions of Self-Determination Theory: integrative emotion regulation is theorized to support need satisfaction by allowing emotional experience to be acknowledged and assimilated, while suppression and dysregulation are theorized to alienate people from their own feelings and frustrate the needs for autonomy and competence. The results also echo earlier cross-cultural work by Benita and colleagues, who found that integrative and suppressive regulation differentially predicted well-being through basic need satisfaction and frustration across three countries, and a person-centered COVID-era study by Waterschoot and colleagues that applied a similar framework during the pandemic.

The study carries practical implications for clinical and counseling psychology. If emotion regulation profiles can be identified reliably with brief self-report instruments, practitioners could potentially screen for maladaptive configurations, characterized by uncontrollability beliefs, suppression, and dysregulation, and target them directly in intervention. Existing evidence suggests that emotion malleability beliefs are themselves modifiable, and that changing beliefs about the controllability of emotions can improve regulation success and reduce symptoms. The person-centered approach adds nuance here: rather than treating a single strategy or belief in isolation, interventions could be designed to shift the entire configuration, for example by fostering usefulness beliefs and integrative processing while reducing reliance on suppression.

The authors are careful to note the study’s limitations. The design is cross-sectional, so the direction of the relationships between regulation profiles and psychological functioning cannot be established; it is equally plausible that depression and anxiety shape how people regulate their emotions as the reverse. The sample was a convenience sample drawn from Türkiye, and although it was diverse in occupation and age, generalization to other cultural contexts requires replication. Self-report measures may also be influenced by the very regulatory tendencies they assess, since high suppressors may be less willing to disclose emotional difficulties. Still, the findings represent a meaningful step forward in emotion regulation research, demonstrating that when the person, rather than the variable, is made the unit of analysis, two coherent and consequential regulatory types emerge, and the difference between them tracks the difference between flourishing and suffering. The study was supported in part by a TÜBİTAK National PhD Scholarship awarded to the first author, who conducted the work as part of her doctoral dissertation, and the data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Subject of Research: Emotion regulation profiles and their association with psychological functioning

Article Title: Emotion regulation processes and psychological functioning: a cluster analytical approach

Article References: Ataman, A., & Alkar, Ö. Y. (2026). Emotion regulation processes and psychological functioning: a cluster analytical approach. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10009-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10009-8

Keywords: emotion regulation, self-determination theory, cluster analysis, integrative emotion regulation, emotion beliefs, basic psychological needs, well-being, depression, anxiety, flourishing, suppression, person-centered approach

Executive functions are the brain’s general-purpose control toolkit, housed largely in the prefrontal cortex. They include inhibitory control, the ability to suppress automatic responses; cognitive flexibility, the capacity to shift between tasks or perspectives; and working memory and attentional processes that keep goals in mind while distractions compete for space. Metacognition, by contrast, is often described as thinking about thinking. It covers the monitoring and control of one’s own mental states, including awareness of thoughts and feelings and the strategies people use to manage them. Emotion regulation, the third player, refers to the processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express those emotions.

The theoretical reason to expect these systems to be linked is compelling. James Gross’s influential process model of emotion regulation holds that reappraisal, reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional event, depends on working memory and cognitive flexibility, while expressive suppression, clamping down on the outward signs of emotion, plausibly depends on inhibitory control. Philip Zelazo and William Cunningham have similarly argued that executive function is the mechanism underlying emotion regulation itself. Meanwhile, researchers such as Claudia Roebers have proposed unifying frameworks in which executive function and metacognition form a single continuum of cognitive self-regulation, and studies in children have repeatedly found longitudinal associations between the two. If the developing brain wires these systems together, one might expect them to travel together in healthy adults as well.

To test these ideas, the Brazilian team individually assessed each participant using a carefully chosen battery of instruments. Executive functions were measured with the Five Digit Test, a Stroop-like task that isolates different components of cognitive control, including reading automaticity, selective attention, inhibitory control, and flexibility. Metacognition was assessed with the Metacognition Scale of Thoughts and Feelings, an instrument the same group had previously constructed and validated to capture how people monitor and regulate their own thoughts and emotional states. Emotion regulation was measured with the Questionnaire of Emotional Regulation, adapted for the Brazilian population, which taps strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, suppression, and redirection of attentional focus. Because each participant was evaluated individually rather than through mass online questionnaires, the quality of the cognitive data is notably higher than in many correlational studies in this field.

The statistical analysis was deliberately robust. The researchers used the Mann-Whitney test to compare groups, Spearman correlations to probe monotonic relationships between the main constructs, and regression analysis to ask which specific subcomponents predicted which specific regulation strategies. This subcomponent-level approach is the study’s real innovation. Rather than collapsing executive function into a single score and metacognition into another, the team treated each construct as a family of distinct abilities, then asked which family members did the predictive work. That granularity matters, because aggregate scores can mask relationships that only appear when the right components are paired together.

The first headline finding is a genuine null result: executive functions and metacognition showed no correlation at all in this adult sample. For anyone steeped in the developmental literature, this is striking. In children, executive function and metacognitive monitoring appear to develop hand in hand, and several theoretical frameworks treat them as two faces of the same self-regulatory coin. The Bahia results suggest that whatever coupling exists early in life may loosen by adulthood, or that the two constructs, when measured with performance-based tasks versus self-report scales, capture genuinely separable dimensions of mental life. The finding echoes a long-standing methodological debate about whether performance measures and ratings of executive function assess the same underlying construct at all.

The second set of findings concerns how these systems feed into emotion regulation, and here the picture becomes beautifully specific. Cognitive flexibility predicted higher scores on attentional redirection, which makes intuitive sense: the ability to shift perspectives is exactly what allows a person to move their attention away from an upsetting stimulus and toward something more neutral or constructive. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, predicted higher suppression, the strategy of holding emotional expressions in check. This mapping is theoretically satisfying, because suppression is essentially an act of response inhibition applied to emotional behavior. The classic demonstration of this link comes from studies showing that people with stronger inhibitory control are better at keeping thoughts better left unsaid from becoming words actually spoken.

Metacognition told a different story. Metacognitive factors predicted cognitive reappraisal and the redirection of focus, two strategies that involve changing how one relates to an emotional situation rather than simply clamping down on its expression. This fits a growing body of work on decentering, the metacognitive capacity to observe thoughts and feelings as transient mental events rather than literal truths. Researchers modeling decentering have argued that metacognitive monitoring is what allows a person to step back from an emotion and reframe it, and clinical approaches such as metacognitive therapy build directly on the idea that beliefs about one’s own cognition regulate emotional distress. The new data provide correlational support for that framework in a typical, non-clinical population.

The practical implications ripple outward in several directions. For education, the results suggest that training programs targeting flexibility might bolster students’ capacity to redirect attention away from academic anxiety, while metacognitive training could strengthen reappraisal skills that protect well-being. For clinical psychology, the finding that distinct executive and metacognitive components predict distinct regulation strategies hints at more precise intervention targets: rather than treating emotion dysregulation as a single problem, therapists might assess which specific upstream ability is weak and tailor treatment accordingly. For everyday readers, the study is a reminder that emotional style is not a fixed personality trait but the downstream product of measurable cognitive machinery, machinery that varies from person to person and can, in principle, be exercised.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. The sample was recruited through snowball sampling, a method that can skew toward particular social networks, and the mean age of roughly 24 years means the oldest adults in the 18-to-55 range were underrepresented. Correlational and regression analyses cannot establish causal direction: it remains possible that habitual use of certain regulation strategies shapes executive and metacognitive abilities over time, rather than the other way around, or that both are shaped by a third factor such as education or socioeconomic background. Self-report measures of emotion regulation also carry well-known biases, since people are not always accurate reporters of their own strategies. Still, by showing that the architecture of self-regulation is more modular than unified, and by pinpointing exactly which components predict which strategies, the study gives researchers a sharper map of the mind’s emotional control system, and a compelling reason to stop treating executive function, metacognition, and emotion regulation as one undifferentiated blob.

Subject of Research: The relationships between executive functions, metacognition, and emotion regulation strategies in healthy adults

Article Title: Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults

Article References: Reis, R. M. A., dos Santos Aragão, E. W., da Conceição, J. R. B., & Abreu, J. N. S. (2025). Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Keywords: executive functions, metacognition, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, cognitive reappraisal, suppression, attentional redirection, prefrontal cortex, self-regulation, cognitive psychology, Trends in Psychology

The research team, led by Hsiu-Hua Shih and Tsai-Wei Huang of Taipei Medical University, searched five major biomedical databases—PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, and the Cochrane Library—through March 2026. Their sweep identified 28 studies encompassing 3,232 participants and spanning nine categories of cancer. To be eligible, studies had to include adults with physician-confirmed malignancy and HRV measured either by electrocardiography or by photoplethysmography, the optical sensing technology embedded in most modern smartwatches and fitness bands. The breadth of the evidence base matters, because HRV research in oncology has long been fragmented across individual small trials, leaving clinicians without a clear quantitative picture of how large the autonomic differences between cancer patients and healthy controls actually are.

A key methodological decision shaped the entire analysis. Time-domain HRV indices such as SDNN, the standard deviation of normal-to-normal heartbeat intervals, scale directly with the length of the recording: a 24-hour ambulatory measurement yields systematically larger values than a five-minute resting snapshot. Pooling studies with different recording durations would therefore conflate measurement artifacts with genuine biology. The researchers restricted their primary quantitative pooling—designated Part A of the review—to short-term resting recordings of five to ten minutes obtained with age-matched non-cancer controls. Only five studies met these strict criteria. Long-term ambulatory recordings of twelve to thirty hours were reported separately, and the remaining studies were synthesized narratively or examined for longitudinal change over time. The team used the DerSimonian–Laird random-effects model and graded the certainty of all findings with the GRADE framework, registering the protocol in advance as PROSPERO CRD42026130103.

The pooled results were unambiguous in direction. Cancer patients showed lower SDNN than controls by a mean difference of 14.05 milliseconds, with a 95 percent confidence interval spanning 9.90 to 18.20 milliseconds. RMSSD, the root mean square of successive heartbeat-interval differences and a sensitive marker of vagal parasympathetic activity, was lower by 16.76 milliseconds. pNN50, the percentage of consecutive heartbeat intervals differing by more than 50 milliseconds, was reduced by 6.05 percentage points. All three differences were statistically significant at p less than 0.001, and heterogeneity across studies was modest, with I-squared values between 22.1 and 33.7 percent—remarkably low for a meta-analysis of clinical studies. Leave-one-out sensitivity analyses, in which each study is removed in turn to test whether any single dataset drives the result, confirmed the robustness of the pooled estimates.

Not every HRV metric told the same story. High-frequency power, a frequency-domain index that also reflects parasympathetic modulation, showed no statistically significant difference between cancer patients and controls, with a p-value of 0.118. The divergence between suppressed time-domain indices and an unchanged high-frequency component is scientifically intriguing, and it underscores a broader point the authors stress: HRV is not a single number but a family of indices, each capturing different aspects of autonomic regulation and each vulnerable to different technical and physiological confounders. Time-domain measures computed over short recordings are particularly sensitive to overall beat-to-beat variability, while spectral measures depend heavily on breathing patterns, recording conditions, and the mathematical assumptions of the underlying algorithms.

Beyond the between-group comparison, the review examined how HRV relates to one of the most common and debilitating symptoms in oncology: cancer-related fatigue. Within individual cancer cohorts, studies consistently reported inverse correlations between HRV and fatigue severity—lower variability, greater exhaustion. This pattern aligns with a physiological substrate proposed by earlier work, including studies of breast cancer survivors showing that low HRV tracks with persistent fatigue long after treatment ends. If reduced vagal tone is genuinely linked to the fatigue experienced by millions of cancer survivors, HRV could eventually help clinicians identify patients at risk and monitor responses to interventions such as exercise programs, which prior meta-analytic work has suggested may partially reverse autonomic dysfunction in this population.

The longitudinal strand of the review adds a dynamic dimension. Studies that followed patients over time documented HRV trajectories across the cancer journey, from preoperative measurements through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, into survivorship. Perioperative vagal withdrawal, the cardiotoxic effects of certain chemotherapeutic agents, and the physiological burden of the malignancy itself can each leave distinct imprints on autonomic regulation. Some studies even explored whether HRV patterns differ by tumor location or disease progression, and whether nonlinear HRV measures—fractal and entropy-based indices known to predict cardiovascular mortality in other populations—might carry prognostic information in patients with brain metastases, gastric cancer, or colorectal cancer. These exploratory findings remain preliminary, but they sketch a research agenda in which autonomic monitoring could complement existing clinical assessment.

Yet the authors are emphatic about what the pooled estimate cannot do. Because the aggregate combines mechanistically distinct sources of HRV suppression—the malignancy itself, treatment-related cardiotoxicity, perioperative vagal withdrawal, and long-term survivorship remodeling—the pooled figure cannot attribute the observed suppression to any single cause. Moreover, GRADE assessment rated all pooled outcomes as Very Low certainty, the weakest tier on the five-level scale, reflecting limitations in study design, risk of bias, and imprecision. On this basis, the team explicitly declines to recommend HRV as an established clinical biomarker for cancer care. The distinction between a consistent research signal and a validated clinical tool is one that the field has sometimes blurred, and this review draws the line carefully.

The path forward, according to the authors, requires studies stratified by treatment phase, standardized measurement protocols, and the incorporation of nonlinear HRV indices alongside conventional time-domain and frequency-domain metrics. Wearable devices, which have already been used to classify cancer-related fatigue from HRV signals in recent observational studies, could make large-scale, longitudinal autonomic monitoring feasible outside the clinic. If future research confirms that HRV suppression tracks with symptom burden, treatment toxicity, or survival, the humble millisecond-to-millisecond wobble of the heartbeat could evolve from a research curiosity into a practical, non-invasive vital sign for oncology. For now, the message of this meta-analysis is one of cautious confirmation: the autonomic nervous system is measurably altered in cancer, the alteration is real and reproducible in short-term recordings, and understanding what it means for patients is the next great challenge.

Subject of Research: Heart rate variability suppression in cancer patients versus non-cancer controls: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article Title: Heart rate variability suppression in cancer patients versus non-cancer controls: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article References: Shih, H.-H., Chang, H.-C., Chen, P.-H., Chang, C.-L., Chuang, Y.-H., Lai, J.-H., Gautama, M. S. N., & Huang, T.-W. (2026). Heart rate variability suppression in cancer patients versus non-cancer controls: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(10), Article 1034. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11229-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11229-1

Keywords: Heart, rate, variability, suppression, cancer, patients, versus, non-cancer, controls, systematic, review, meta-analysis