Jessica K. Ljungberg

• Professor
• Head of subject in Psychology at Luleå University of Technology

BACKGROUND Studies have shown that emotion dysregulation, depression symptoms, and escapism motives are associated with Gaming Disorder (GD) symptoms. Findings indicate a discrepancy between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) GD symptoms frameworks. OBJECTIVE The current study aimed to investigate th...

Lifelong learning can be indispensable for the adaptation to continuously evolving labor markets and societal demands. In the current study, we examined psychological factors, notably aspects of personality (personality traits in the five-factor model and trait curiosity), self-reflection and motivation in relation to attitudes to lifelong learning...

Lifelong learning can be indispensable for the adaptation to continuously evolving labor market and societal demands. In the current study, we examined psychological factors, notably aspects of personality (personality traits in the five-factor model and trait curiosity), self-reflection and motivation in relation to attitudes to lifelong learning....

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is the tendency to react negatively on affective, cognitive and behavioural levels to uncertain situations and to harbour negative beliefs about the implications of uncertainty. IU has been linked to psychopathology and shown to impact treatment outcomes. This study systematically reviewed the literature and performe...

Improved understanding of what it takes to be a pilot is an ongoing effort within aviation. We used an exploratory approach to examine whether there are personality‐related differences in who completes the Swedish military pilot education. Assessment records of 182 applicants, accepted to the education between the years of 2004 and 2020 were studie...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) impact distraction by unexpected deviant sounds and vibrations. The hypothesis was a difference between individuals with low and high ADHD symptom severity in deviance distraction. In a cross-modal oddball task, we measured the impact of...

Introduction The inclusion of Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) in the fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM‐5 ) by the American Psychiatric Association and Gaming Disorder in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases ( ICD‐11 ) by the World Health Organization requires consistent psy...

Objective: Treatments for adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are understudied, compared to children and adolescents with the same condition. In this systematic review and random-effects meta-analysis, we aim to evaluate the outcomes of computerized cognitive training (CCT) interventions in randomized controlled trials (RCT...

What causes interference in short-term memory? In this paper, we report the novel finding that immediate memory for visually-presented verbal items is sensitive to disruption from task-irrelevant vibrotactile stimuli. Specifically, short-term memory for a visual sequence is disrupted when a concurrently presented sequence of vibrations is presented...

Aim This study investigates the effects of degree of multilingualism on cognitive functions in adulthood, with focus on episodic memory recall and including measures of verbal fluency as well as global cognition. Design We studied a large population-based cohort cross-sectionally, and we also assessed changes over time through longitudinal measure...

Background and aims The present systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to synthesize the available literature on the relationship between gaming motivations and gaming disorder symptoms. Specifically, to (1) explore what gaming motivation questionnaires and classifications are used in studies on gaming disorder symptoms and (2) investigate the r...

Introduction The negative cognitive effects of the startle response are not yet fully understood. Ecological observations in the aviation field indicate risk for severe outcomes in complex or pressured situations, while sparse previous research suggests milder negative effects on simple cognitive tasks. Neuroticism is proposed as a factor related t...

Esports is an often time-consuming activity that has become increasingly popular with billions of players all over the world. The objective of this study was to investigate if there is a relationship between skill level in the strategy video game Dota 2, a game that places many demands on decision making to be successful, and decision making under...

An increasing number of people around the world communicate in more than one language, resulting in them having to make decisions in a foreign language on a daily basis. Interestingly, a burgeoning body of literature suggests that people’s decision-making is affected by whether they are reasoning in their native language (NL) or their foreign langu...

The aim of this study was to investigate occupational cognitive complexity of main lifetime occupation in rela�tion to level and 15-year change in episodic memory recall in a sample of older adults (≥ 65 years, n = 780). We used latent growth curve modelling with occupational cognitive complexity (O*NET indicators) as independent variable. Subgroup...

Individual differences in cognitive performance increase with advancing age, reflecting marked cognitive changes in some individuals along with little or no change in others. Genetic and lifestyle factors are assumed to influence cognitive performance in aging by affecting the Journal Pre-proof 3 magnitude and extent of age-related brain changes (i...

In the present study, we decomposed between- and within-person effects and examined moderators of the longitudinal physical activity-cognition association. Participants (N = 1722) were drawn from the Betula study and we included four waves of data across 15 years. Bayesian multilevel modeling showed that self-reported physical activity did not pred...

Alarm systems may take advantage of the tactile modality for allocation of attentional resources during the performance of demanding tasks in complex environments. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a tactile warning during increasing levels of mental workload in a primary task. Three simulated flight task conditions va...

High mental demands at work was examined as a possible protective factor to reduce the risk of dementia in 1,277 initially dementia-free participants, aged 60 years and older. The cohort was followed for a mean of 13.6 years. During follow-up, 376 participants developed all-cause dementia (Alzheimer’s disease = 199; vascular dementia = 145). The as...

The impact of linguistic distance or the relatedness between two languages, on bilinguals' episodic memory performance and verbal fluency is an understudied area. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine if differences in linguistic distances have differential effects on these abilities. Measures of episodic recognition, categorical fluency...

Today, there are a lack of studies focusing on the relationship between occupational complexity and executive functioning. This is noteworthy since executive functions are core aspects of cognitive processing. The present study was aimed to investigate if three occupational complexity factors (with data, people, and things) of main lifetime occupat...

Bilinguals often show a disadvantage in lexical access on verbal fluency tasks wherein the criteria require the production of words from semantic categories. However, the pattern is more heterogeneous for letter (phonemic) fluency wherein the task is to produce words beginning with a given letter. Here, bilinguals often outperform monolinguals. One...

Media multitasking is an increasingly prominent behavior in affluent societies. However, it still needs to be established if simultaneous use of several modes of media content has an influence on higher cognitive functions, such as divided attention. In this study, attention shifting was the primary focus, since switching between tasks is assumed t...

Emotional stimuli are argued to capture attention and consume attentional resources differently depending on their emotional content. The present study investigates the impact of the automatic detection of unexpected and to‐be‐ignored emotional stimuli on human behavioral responses, and aims to unravel the differences in distraction between two neg...

The notion that the long-term practice of managing two languages is beneficial for the executive control system is an ongoing debate. Criticism have been raised that studies demonstrating a bilingual advantage often suffer from small sample sizes, and do not control for fluid intelligence as a possible confound. Taking those suggested factors into...

In this study a cross-modal oddball task was employed to study the effect that words spoken either non-urgently or urgently would have on a digit categorization task and if women would exhibit greater behavioral inhibitory control. The words were unrelated to the task itself, but related to the action required to complete the task. Forty participan...

Data used in the present study. (XLSX)

The main objective of this study was to investigate reading habits in older adults in relation to level and 15-year changes in verbal fluency and episodic recall. We examined a sample of 1157 participants (≥55 years at baseline) up to 15 years after the baseline assessment using latent growth curve modeling of cognitive measures with baseline readi...

It has been suggested that deviance distraction is caused by unexpected sensory events in the to-be-ignored stimuli violating the cognitive system’s predictions of incoming stimuli. The majority of research has used methods where the to-be-ignored expected (standards) and the unexpected (deviants) stimuli are presented within the same modality. Les...

An ongoing debate surrounds whether bilinguals outperform monolinguals in tests of executive processing. The aim of this study was to investigate if there are long-term (10 year) bilingual advantages in executive processing, as indexed by dual-task performance, in a sample that were 40–65 years at baseline. The bilingual (n = 24) and monolingual (n...

This collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of g...

Recent findings indicate that bilingualism delay the onset of dementia. Using data from the Betula longitudinal cohort study on memory, health and aging ( www.betula.su.se ) the issue of a possible protective effect of bilingualism was addressed. Monolingual ( n = 736) and bilingual ( n = 82) participants (≥ 60 years) without dementia at inclusion...

Research of the distractor value of hearing the own name has shown that this self-referring stimulus captures attention in an involuntary fashion and create distraction. The behavioral studies are few and the outcomes are not always clear cut. In this study the distraction by own name compared to a control name was investigated by using a cross-mod...

Typically, studies of cognitive advantages in bilinguals have been conducted previously by using executive and inhibitory tasks (e.g. Simon task) and applying cross-sectional designs. This study longitudinally investigated bilingual advantages on episodic memory recall, verbal letter and categorical fluency during the trajectory of life. Monolingua...

Previous research has indicated that sensory sensitivity/intolerance to a specific modality may be part of a more general environmental hypersensitivity, and possibly mediated by stress. This study investigated the relationship between noise sensitivity, perceived stress, and odor sensitivity in a group of men. A quasi-experimental design was used....

Unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels have been shown to capture attention in an ineluctable manner and distract participants away from ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks. We extend the study of this phenomenon by reporting the first within-participant comparison of deviance distraction in the ta...

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated stream of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli (deviant sounds among standard sounds) are known to capture attention and impact negatively on ongoing behavioral performance (behavioral oddball distraction). Traditional views consider such distraction as the ineluctable consequence of the deviant sounds' low p...

Both the behavioural and subjective impacts of single-word spoken warnings were examined. Behaviourally, the effect of infrequently occurring warnings was studied through their disruptive impact on a visually presented serial recall task. In separate experiments, ratings of the same words were elicited. Experiment 1 showed a localized effect of the...

The objective was to study the involuntary capture of attention by spoken words varying in intonation and valence. In studies of verbal alarms, the propensity of alarms to capture attention has been primarily assessed with the use of subjective ratings of their perceived urgency. Past studies suggest that such ratings vary with the alarms' spoken u...

Past research has demonstrated that the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels captured attention in an obligatory fashion, hindering behavioral performance in ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks and generating orientation and re-orientation electrophysiological responses. We report t...

Vehicle drivers are often exposed to noise, whole-body vibration (WBV), and mental loads, but the knowledge of how combined effects from multiple environmental stressors affect mental load and performance is sparse. Studies have shown that the effect of both vibration and noise combined can differ from those of either vibration or noise alone. For...

Unexpected events often distract us. In the laboratory, novel auditory stimuli have been shown to capture attention away from a focal visual task and yield specific electrophysiological responses as well as a behavioral cost to performance. Distraction is thought to follow ineluctably from the sound's low probability of occurrence or, put more simp...

In this article we outline a "sub-process view" of working memory capacity (WMC). This view suggests that any relationship between WMC and another construct (e.g., reading comprehension) is actually a relationship with a specific part of the WMC construct. The parts, called sub-processes, are functionally distinct and can be measured by intrusion e...

The aim of this review is to shed light on a research area that concerns the studies of psychological responses to combined exposures of noise and whole-body vibration (WBV). Vehicle drivers are a group of workers that are often exposed to multiple stressors like noise, WBV and mental loads. Degraded performance because of environmental stressors m...

The aim of this review is to shed light on a research area that concerns the studies of psychological responses to combined exposures of noise and whole-body vibration (WBV). Vehicle drivers are a group of workers that are often exposed to multiple stressors like noise, WBV and mental loads. Degraded performance because of environmental stressors m...

This study investigated the effects on attention performance after exposure to noise and whole-body vibration in relation to subjective noise sensitivity. Sixteen high and 16 low sensitivity male students, as determined by the Weinstein Noise Sensitivity Questionnaire, participated in a within-subjects experiment. Noise and vibration stimuli simila...

This study investigates the effects of noise and whole-body vibration on saliva cortisol levels and subjectively rated difficulty and stress while performing cognitive tasks. In the first experiment, 24 men completed a logical reasoning task and a short-term memory task while, on separate occasions, being exposed to noise, vibration, combined stimu...

This study investigated if vehicle noise and whole-body vibrations produce negative after-effects on performance in an attention task and on ratings of alertness, difficulty, and annoyance. The task was applied before and after exposure, and after a rest. Participants had degraded performance immediately after exposure in all conditions, but no eff...

An experimental study with 24 male subjects between 21 and 30 years (X= 25, SD= 2.4) was conducted. The objective was to investigate post-exposure effects in attention performance after exposure to noise, a whole-body vibration, both factors combined and a control condition. Another aim was to explore if participants would have more degraded perfor...

The goal of this study was to examine the effects of noise and whole-body vibration, individually and combined, and at various stimulus intensity levels, on cognitive performance and subjective experience. Fifty-four participants (27 men and 27 women) with a mean age of 25 years, ranging from 19 to 30, were exposed for 20 min each to a 16-Hz sinuso...

A study of spatial skills was conducted with 27 male and 27 female participants. The aim of the study was to examine the post-exposure effect of a complex low frequency noise (21 Hz) on a mental rotation task. It was hypothesised that reaction time and number of errors would increase after 20 minutes exposure to noise exposure compared to performan...