Ahmed A Moustafa

Bond University · Psychology Clinic

Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental health disorder that imposes profound economic, societal, and personal burdens. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia (i.e., blunted affect, alogia, anhedonia, asociality, and avolition) are highly prevalent and pervasive in the psychotic disorder and pose significant resistance to available treatment options...

Background Deep‐learning (DL) methods are rapidly changing the way researchers classify neurological disorders. For example, combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and DL has helped researchers identify functional biomarkers of neurological disorders (e.g., brain activation and connectivity) and pilot innovative diagnostic models. H...

Research has suggested that near future events are typically viewed from a first-person (an own-eyes, also known as field) perspective while distant future events are typically viewed from a third-person (an observer) perspective. We investigated whether these distinct mental perspectives would be accompanied by distinct eye movement activities. We...

In this article, we, for the first time, provide a comprehensive overview and unified framework of the impact of poverty and low socioeconomic status (SES) on the brain and behaviour. While there are many studies on the impact of low SES on the brain (including cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and even neurotransmitters) and behaviours (including edu...

This research examines the factors that influence students' choices to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degrees in the United Arab Emirates. Our study investigates the impact of psychosocial variables, including math anxiety, educational stress, and family expectations, on the decision of 558 children to pursue STEM e...

This research examines the factors that influence students' choices to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degrees in the United Arab Emirates. Our study investigates the impact of psychosocial variables, including math anxiety, educational stress, and family expectations, on the decision of 558 children to pursue STEM e...

Background Math anxiety (MA) is a worldwide appearing academic anxiety that can affect student mental health and deter students from math and science‐related career choices. Method Using the Arabic version of the Modified‐Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (m‐AMAS), the prevalence of MA was investigated in a very large sample of students ( N = 10093)...

Background Future thinking and prospective memory are two cognitive processes oriented toward the future and reliant on the ability to envision oneself in future scenarios. Objective We explored the connection between future thinking and prospective memory in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods We invited both AD participants and c...

While prospective memory (i.e., the ability to execute a future plan) has been extensively researched, little is known about negative prospective memory (i.e., the ability to remember not to execute a future plan) in Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). We thus evaluated both prospective memory and negative prospective memory in KS, as well as the relationsh...

Impulsivity as a construct has caught the attention of researchers and clinicians because it has some links to some risk-taking behaviors and psychological disorders (Bakhshani, 2014). According to the American Psychiatric Association (2013a, 2013b) and Herman et al.(2018), neuropsychiatric disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder...

Human beings are social agents operating in an environment that serves as an agency. When one becomes involved in chronic human behaviors, they appear consistent and time-consuming, and these behaviors are labeled as addictive by behavior managers or specialists (Alavi et al., 2012). According to Alavi et al.(2012), professionals in behavioral scie...

Introduction Hyperpyrexia algesia and inflammation are pathological disorders which are treated with synthetic as well as herbal medications. Aims: The basic aim of the present study is to evaluate the ethnopharmacological activities of phytoconstituents that are present in C colocynthis (fruit extract) by using in vivo and in silico studies. Metho...

Anxiety about performing numerical calculations is becoming an increasingly important issue. Termed mathematics anxiety, this condition negatively impacts performance in numerical tasks which can affect education outcomes and future employment. The disruption account proposes poor performance is due to anxiety disrupting limited attentional and inh...

The Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum is a unique spectrum of cognitive impairment that typically involves the stages of subjective memory complaints (SMC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD dementia. Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS), such as apathy, anxiety, stress, and depression, are highly common throughout the AD continuum. However, ther...

Destination memory, which is the ability to remember to whom one has sent information, is intimately associated with social cognition. We assessed whether processing attributes of destinations would improve destination memory in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this cross-sectional study, we tested the destination memory of 24 patient...

Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) have been associated with poor sleep quality and increased suicide risk. However, the association between PLEs, insomnia and suicide risk has not been thoroughly investigated in prior studies. In this study, we aimed to explore as to whether insomnia moderates the association between PLEs and suicidal ideation. The...

The extent to which adolescents are influenced by their peers has been the focus of developmental psychological research for over 50 years. That research has yielded contradicting evidence and much debate. This study consists of a systematic review and meta-analysis, with the main aim of quantifying the effect of peer influence on adolescent substa...

Introduction Cryptocurrency investment and trading are rapidly growing activities due to the development of applications and platforms that offer fast, continuous, and easy entry into the cryptocurrency world. To understand decision making in cryptocurrency holders, we assessed temporal discounting, that is, whether Bitcoin holders disregard reward...

Many current statistical and machine learning methods have been used to explore Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its associated patterns that contribute to the disease. However, there has been limited success in understanding the relationship between cognitive tests, biomarker data, and patient AD category progressions. In this work, we perform explora...

Background Several studies have reported the association of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). It has been hypothesized that both constructs might share overlapping backgrounds. This study aimed to investigate the relationships between childhood trauma, depression, PLEs and lifetime characteristics of NSSI. Met...

Background: Self-imagination refers to a mnemonic strategy of imagining oneself at a scene related to a cue. Objective: We tested the effect of self-imagination on memory recall in Alzheimer's disease (AD) Method: Individuals with AD and healthy controls were invited to perform two conditions. In the control (i.e., semantic elaboration) conditio...

Mindfulness is a multi-faceted construct that involves paying attention to thoughts and emotions without automatically reacting and being critical of them. Recent research has suggested that mindfulness might play an important role in reducing problematic alcohol use. Further, Readiness to Change (RTC) is related to motivation to change drinking be...

Background When making decisions, one often faces a trade-off between immediate and long-term rewards. In these situations, people may prefer immediate over later rewards, even if immediate rewards are smaller than later ones; a phenomenon known as temporal discounting. In this study, we, for the first time, assessed temporal discounting in three p...

Open market environments consist of a set of participants (vendors and consumers), which dynamically leave or join the market. As a result, the arising dynamism leads to uncertainties in supply and demand of the resources in these open markets. In specific, in such uncertain markets, vendors attempt to maximise their revenue by dynamically changing...

Background: The hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and fusiform gyrus are brain areas that deteriorate during early-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). The ApoE4 allele has been identified as a risk factor for AD development, is linked to an increase in the aggregation of amyloid ß (Aß) plaques in the brain, and is responsible for atrophy of the hippocam...

While research has consistently demonstrated how autobiographical memory triggers visual exploration, prior studies did not investigate gender differences in this domain. We thus compared eye movement between women and men while performing an autobiographical retrieval task. We invited 35 women and 35 men to retrieve autobiographical memories while...

Background Associative inference refers to an adaptive ability that allows flexible recombination of information acquired during previous experiences to make new connections that they have not directly experienced. This cognitive ability has been widely associated with the hippocampus. Aims We investigated associative inference in patients with Al...

We investigated destination memory, defined as the ability to remember to whom a piece of information was previously transmitted, for emotional destinations (i.e., a happy or sad person) in Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). We asked patients with KS and control participants to tell facts to neutral, positive, or negative faces. On a subsequent recognition...

Drinking motives have been identified as important predictors of alcohol consumption. Similarly, the degree of readiness to change (RTC) can predict behavioral changes when drinking alcohol. However, the link between drinking motives and RTC has not been explored in previous research. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the four drinkin...

In this study, we investigated the ability of commonly used neuropsychological tests to detect cognitive and functional decline across the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum. Moreover, as preclinical AD is a key area of investigation, we focused on the ability of neuropsychological tests to distinguish the early stages of the disease, such as indiv...

Objective: Little research has investigated decision making in patients with Korsakoff syndrome (KS). Specifically, to our knowledge, there is a lack of research investigating whether patients with KS may tend to prefer immediate over future rewards (i.e., temporal discounting). Further, we investigated the relationship between temporal discountin...

Background This study examined the psychometric properties (factor structure, measurement invariance, convergent and criterion validity, inter-correlations, and reliabilities) of an Arabic version of the modified-Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (m-AMAS) and gender differences in math anxiety in an Arabic speaking Middle Eastern country, Qatar. Meth...

Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder with genetic and environmental factors involved in its aetiology. Genetic liability contributing to the development of schizophrenia is a subject of extensive research activity, as reliable data regarding its aetiology would enable the improvement of its therapy and the development of new methods of tr...

Community Question Answering (CQA) sites have spread and multiplied significantly in recent years. Sites like Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange are becoming popular amongst people interested in finding answers to diverse questions. One practical way of finding such answers is automatically predicting the best candidate given existing answers and co...

Background Within the concept of the self, a distinction can be made between ideal self (i.e., what would like to become) and feared self (i.e., what would not like to become in the future). Objective We investigated ideal self and feared self in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We have also measured these self-related processes in rel...

Background Gastric antral vascular ectasia (GAVE) is an uncommon but important cause of gastrointestinal bleeding in cirrhotic patients. Argon plasma coagulation (APC) is the standard therapy for GAVE. Endoscopic band ligation (EBL) is an emerging, safe and effective treatment for GAVE. The best way of applying EBL in the management of GAVE is not...

Digital self-harm (DSH) is a relatively new form of virtual self-harm that occurs mostly in young people, and has been defined as both the act of cyberbullying oneself (Fictitious Online Victimisation; FOV), and engaging with online spaces in a way that is detrimental to one’s psychological wellbeing. In our overview of DSH we aim to provide an und...

In the last two decades, advancements in artificial intelligence and data science have attracted researchers' attention to machine learning. Growing interests in applying machine learning algorithms can be observed in different scientific areas, including behavioral sciences. However, most of the research conducted in this area applied machine lear...

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is an insidious neurodegenerative disease characterised by a precipitous decline in cognition, sleep disturbances, motor impairment and psychiatric features. Recently, criteria for prodromal DLB (pDLB) including clinical features and biomarkers have been put forward to aid the classification and research of this ambi...

Background Verbal fluency tasks are widely used to assess cognitive and linguistic abilities in older adults. In this study, we investigated whether pupillometry can be used to measure verbal fluency in healthy older adults. Methods We invited 45 older adults (Mean age = 66.55 years, SD = 4.32) to perform a verbal fluency task, which involves gene...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is currently diagnosed using a mixture of psychological tests and clinical observations. However, these diagnoses are not perfect, and additional diagnostic tools (e.g., MRI) can help improve our understanding of AD as well as our ability to detect the disease. Accordingly, a large amount of research has been invested into...

Understanding the psychosocial factors that positively and negatively impact academic performance is important to help students succeed and persist in higher education. In this article, we conducted a scoping review to clarify and identify the psychosocial factors affecting university students' academic performance. The initial search returned 1657...

Purpose Diabetes mellitus (DM) increases the risk of morbidity and mortality after liver resection. Albuminuria is associated with a higher risk for all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. This study evaluated albuminuria as a predictor of the outcome of living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) in patients with pre-existing DM. Methods This retro...

Background Obesity is a risk factor for cholelithiasis. Besides, rapid weight loss after bariatric surgery upsurges the rate of cholelithiasis and acute cholecystitis. This study aimed to compare gallstone development frequency after LSG under ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) prophylaxis. Methods This prospective controlled study included 332 patients...

Background While event-based prospective memory refers to enacting intending action in response to a specific event or cue (“e.g., When I tell you there are 10 minutes left, please give me this stopwatch”), time-based prospective memory refers to enacting intending action in relation to a specific time (“In 10 minutes time, please ask me for a penc...

The degree to which people take advice, and the factors that influence advice-taking, are of broad interest to laypersons, professionals, and policy-makers. This meta-analysis on 346 effect sizes from 129 independent datasets ( N = 17, 296) assessed the weight of advice in the judge-advisor system paradigm, as well as the influence of sample and ta...

The aim of the present study is to conduct a dimensional investigation of personality disorder traits based on the three-dimensional model of personality self-regulation (TDMPS). This model includes the following three basic elements for self-regulation: self-control, self-knowledge/mindfulness, and self-compassion. A total of 432 university studen...

Heroin is highly addictive drug that users use in spite of its negative consequences. Many research on drug dependence, persistence and relapse confirmed that there is a relationship between drug addiction and negative mood states. The present review article investigated the relationship between depression, negative mood, and drug abuse. In additio...

Anger and aggression have large impact on people’s safety and the society at large. In order to provide an intervention to minimise aggressive behaviours, it is important to understand the neural and cognitive aspects of anger and aggression. In this systematic review, we investigate the cognitive and neural aspects of anger-related processes, incl...

Purpose Obesity is associated with fat accumulation in ectopic sites such as the pancreas, the so-called pancreatic steatosis (PS). Bariatric surgery has been shown to be associated with reducing pancreatic fat. This study investigated the effect of laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) on pancreatic volume and its fat content and glucose homeostas...

Vitamin D deficiency has been reported in several cultures and regions, including the Middle East, North Europe, and Australia. In this review, we summarize and discuss existing studies on factors underlying vitamin D deficiency across different regions. In particular, we explain key roles played by lifestyle, including sun exposure, season change,...

Background: There is a recent interest in pupil dilation during the retrieval of autobiographical memory. We pursued this line of research by measuring pupil diameter during the retrieval of self-defining memories, that is, memories that are highly vivid, emotionally intense, and are retrieved to reflect enduring concerns in a person's life. Meth...

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to an increase in psychological distress. However, protective factors such as social support, psychological flexibility, and coping mechanisms can help individuals cope with the effects of psychological distress. This study aimed to test a recent hypothesis suggesting that psychological flexibility is not neces...

Background Low caloric diet can reduce liver volume; however, there is no consensus regarding preoperative weight reduction before bariatric surgery. This study evaluates the effect of preoperative very-lowcalorie diet (VLCD) in patients undergoing laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG). Methods This prospective study included patients scheduled fo...

Recent studies have shown that alpha oscillations (8–13 Hz) enable the decoding of auditory spatial attention. Inspired by sparse coding in cortical neurons, we propose a spiking neural network model for auditory spatial attention detection. The proposed model can extract the patterns of recorded EEG of leftward and rightward attention, independent...

Background: Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a common cause of dementia with poor prognosis and high hospitalization rates. DLB is frequently misdiagnosed, with clinical features that overlap significantly with other diseases including Parkinson's disease (PD). Clinical instruments that discriminate and track the progression of cognitive impairm...

Periodontal regeneration aims are restoring of the destructed bone, cementum and periodontal ligament. The new strategies of regeneration is very challenging, one of these strategies is tissue engineering, including stem cells and it's considered very promising solution. This paper aims to review the use of stem cells for the treatment of peri-impl...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play critical roles in gene expression, cell differentiation, and immunity against viral infections. In this study, we have used the computational tools, RNA22, RNAhybrid, and miRanda, to predict the microRNA-mRNA binding sites to find the putative microRNAs playing role in the host response to infl...

Purpose Secondary hyperparathyroidism (SHPT) is linked to obesity. Bariatric surgery may be associated with calcium and vitamin D deficiencies leading to SHPT. This study aimed to detect the prevalence of SHPT before and after bariatric surgery. Methods This prospective study assessed the prevalence of SHPT after sleeve gastrectomy (SG, n = 38) co...

Creativity is related to finding novel, surprising, and useful solutions. We argue that creative cognitive processes, divergent thinking, abstraction, and improvisation, are constructed on different novelty-based processes. The prefrontal cortex plays a role in creative ideation by providing a control mechanism. Thinking about novel solutions activ...

A new Monte Carlo model of optical photon transport has been developed for application to scintillation pillars with side surfaces modeled using their measured 3D topography. The model addresses deficiencies of existing models specifically pertinent to high aspect ratio scintillator geometries. Inaccuracies with these models’ description of the ref...

Purpose Bariatric surgery is evolving as a successful tool for managing morbid obesity and T2DM. This study aimed to identify predictors of diabetes remission after two types of bariatric procedures. Methods This prospective study enrolled 172 patients with morbid obesity associated with T2DM scheduled for bariatric surgery. Two laparoscopic baria...

A spiking neural network model inspired by synaptic pruning is developed and trained to extract features of hand-written digits. The network is composed of three spiking neural layers and one output neuron whose firing rate is used for classification. The model detects and collects the geometric features of the images from the Modified National Ins...

It is well established that pupil activity indexes cognitive processing. For instance, research has consistently demonstrated that the pupil reacts to working memory span task performance. However, little is known about pupil reaction to cognitive processing in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). We thus investigated whether span tasks can modulate pupil siz...

To help address the increasing challenges related to the provision of dementia care, dementia registries have emerged around the world as important tools to gain insights and a better understanding of the disease process. Dementia registries provide a valuable source of standardized data collected from a large number of patients. This review explor...

A large body of research attributes learning deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) to the systems involved in value representation (prefrontal cortex, PFC) and reinforcement learning (basal ganglia, BG) as well as to the compromised connectivity of these regions. In this study, we employed learning tasks hypothesized to probe the function and interaction...

Many studies on the drift-diffusion model (DDM) explain decision-making based on a unified analysis of both accuracy and response times. This review provides an in-depth account of the recent advances in DDM research which ground different DDM parameters on several brain areas, including the cortex and basal ganglia. Furthermore, we discuss the cha...

In the next 30 years, Alzheimer’s disease cases are predicted to drastically increase. Consequently, there is a critical need for research that can counteract the increasing number of Alzheimer’s disease patients. However, current methods of Alzheimer’s disease research have significant limitations. For example, Alzheimer’s disease research is ofte...

Several studies have shown that depression is a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Further, depressive symptoms can increase symptom severity (e.g., memory decline and executive dysfunction) and reduce the quality of life in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to review existing literature on s...

In this review, we discuss human and animal studies on how vitamin D deficiency can lead to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Unlike other reviews in this area, we further discuss the neural and cognitive correlates associated with vitamin D deficiency, which eventually lead to several AD symptoms. In addition, we also discuss how s...

In this article, we review prior studies that analyze the relationship between stress, anxiety, depression, and dementia. We evaluate anxiety as a risk factor for dementia, its prevalence within different types of dementia, and anxiety in early versus late stages of dementia. In addition, we discuss the role of psychological stress in the developme...

While many prior studies and reviews focus on investigating the role of the hippocampus and cerebral cortex in memory formation and retrieval and how they are impacted by Alzheimer’s disease, other brain regions did not receive the same attention. Accordingly, in this chapter, we review various studies that discuss the impact of Alzheimer’s disease...