Affective and cognitive empathy are traditionally differentiated, the affective component being concerned with resonating with another’s emotional state, whereas the cognitive component reflects regulation of the resulting distress and understanding of another’s mental states (see Decety and Jackson, 2004 for a review). Adolescence is a critical period for the development of cognitive control processes necessary to regulate affective processes: it is only in young adulthood that these control processes achieve maturity (Steinberg, 2005). Thus, one should expect adolescents to show greater automatic empathy than young adults. The present study aimed at exploring the neural correlates of affective (automatic) and cognitive empathy for pain from adolescence to young adulthood. With this aim, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 32 participants (aged 11–39) in a task designed to dissociate these components. ERPs results showed an early automatic fronto-central response to pain (that was not modulated by task demand) and a late parietal response to painful stimuli modulated by attention to pain cues. Adolescents exhibited earlier automatic responses to painful situations than young adults did and showed greater activity in the late cognitive component even when viewing neutral stimuli. Results are discussed in the context of the development of regulatory abilities during adolescence.

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.

The intraindividual variability (IIV) of cognitive performance has been shown to increase with aging. While brain research has generally focused on mean performance, little is known about neural correlates of cognitive IIV. Nevertheless, some studies suggest that IIV relates more strongly than mean level of performance to the quality of white matter (WM). Our study aims to explore the relation between WM integrity and cognitive IIV by combining functional (fMRI) and structural (diffusion tensor imaging, DTI) imaging. Twelve young adults (aged 18–30 years) and thirteen older adults (61–82 years) underwent a battery of neuropsychological tasks, along with fMRI and DTI imaging. Their behavioral data were analyzed and correlated with the imaging data at WM regions of interest defined on the basis of (1) the fMRI‐activated areas and (2) the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) WM tractography atlas. For both methods, fractional anisotropy, along with the mean, radial, and axial diffusivity parameters, was computed. In accord with previous studies, our results showed that the DTI parameters were more related to IIV than to mean performance. Results also indicated that age differences in the DTI parameters were more pronounced in the regions activated primarily by young adults during a choice reaction‐time task than in those also activated in older adults.

Introduction: A growing body of research suggests that intraindividual variability (IIV) may bring specific information on cognitive functioning, additional to that provided by the mean. The present paper focuses on dispersion, that is IIV across tasks, and its developmental trend across the lifespan. Method: A total of 557 participants (9–89 years) were administered a battery of response time (RT) tasks and of working memory (WM) tasks. Dispersion was analyzed separately for the two types of tasks. Results: Dispersion across RT tasks showed a U-shaped age differences trend, young adults being less variable than both children and older adults. Dispersion across WM tasks (using accuracy scores) presented an opposite developmental trend. A cluster analysis revealed a group of individuals showing relatively little dispersion and good overall performance (faster in RTs and better in WM), contrasted with a group of individuals showing a large dispersion in the RT tasks as well as poorer overall performance. All young adults were grouped in the first cluster; children and older adults were distributed in both clusters. Conclusion: It is concluded that (a) across-task IIV is relatively large in the entire sample and should not be neglected, (b) children and older adults show a larger dispersion than young adults, but only as far as the RT tasks are concerned, (c) variability in RTs and variability in WM performance do not reflect the same phenomenon.

Within-task variability across trials (intra-individual variability (IIV)) has been mainly studied using latency measures but rarely with accuracy measures. The aim of the Geneva Variability Study was to examine IIV in both latency and accuracy measures of cognitive performance across the lifespan, administering the same tasks to children, younger adults, and older adults. Six processing speed tasks (Response Time (RT) tasks, 8 conditions) and two working memory tasks scored in terms of the number of correct responses (Working Memory (WM)—verbal and visuo-spatial, 6 conditions), as well as control tasks, were administered to over 500 individuals distributed across the three age periods. The main questions were whether age differences in IIV would vary throughout the lifespan according (i) to the type of measure used (RTs vs. accuracy); and (ii) to task complexity. The objective of this paper was to present the general experimental design and to provide an essentially descriptive picture of the results. For all experimental tasks, IIV was estimated using intra-individual standard deviation (iSDr), controlling for the individual level (mean) of performance and for potential practice effects. As concerns RTs, and in conformity with a majority of the literature, younger adults were less variable than both children and older adults, and the young children were often the most variable. In contrast, IIV in the WM accuracy scores pointed to different age trends—age effects were either not observed or, when found, they indicated that younger adults were the more variable group. Overall, the findings suggest that IIV provides complementary information to that based on a mean performance, and that the relation of IIV to cognitive development depends on the type of measure used.