As difficulties in managing the anticipation of situations is one of the characteristics of emotional problems, the study of regulatory strategies during anticipatory period anticipation is ...important. In the present study, attentional patterns during the anticipation period were studied. The ability of those attentional patterns to regulate mood after the event’s occurrence was analyzed. An experimental paradigm was designed in which participants repeatedly anticipated emotional information. Attentional patterns in response to emotionally expressive faces (happy and sad) were recorded with an eye tracker. The results showed that the valence of the expected outcomes did affect attentional preferences. Specifically, participants spent more time looking at sad faces when they anticipated a negative rather than a positive outcome. The opposite pattern was found for happy faces. With respect to the ability to regulate the emotions of these attention patterns, it was found that emotions experienced after a negatively anticipated event were independent of previous attention patterns, while happiness experienced after a previously anticipated positive event was found to be related to attentional patterns. Specifically, people who spent more time looking at happy faces during the anticipation of a positive outcome reported higher levels of happiness after the event. In conclusion, these results indicate that during the anticipation of emotional outcomes participants implement attentional strategies, although the emotions associated with experiencing those outcomes were independent of those attentional patterns in the negative anticipation, they were found to magnify positive emotions in positive anticipation.
Positive reappraisal strategies have been found to reduce negative affect following the recall of negative personal events. This study examined the restorative effect of two mood-repair instructions ...(self-compassion vs benefit-focused reappraisal) and a control condition with no instructions following a negative Mood Induction Procedure by using the guided recall of a negative autobiographical event. A total of 112 university students participated in the online study (81% women, Mage: 21.0 years). Immediately following the negative memory recall, participants were randomised to each condition (self-compassion:
= 36, benefit-focused:
= 39) or a control condition (
= 37). Repeated measures ANOVAs 3 (Repair condition) × 3 (Time of mood assessment: pre-recall, post-recall, post-regulation) showed that, as expected, negative mood (sadness, shame, and guilt) worsened significantly after the guided recall in all groups (
< .001). After the mood-repair intervention, participants in the self-compassion and benefit-focused conditions showed a significant reduction in negative mood (
< .019), while such improvement was not observed in the control group. Self-compassion and benefit-focused reappraisal functioned similarly as mood repair strategies after experiencing negative affect induced by the recall of negative personal memories. Implications in the context of autobiographical memory biases are discussed.
Abstract
Background
Cognitive biases play an important role in the development and maintenance of emotional disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Novel procedures, known as Cognitive Bias ...Modification (CBM), aim to reduce these dysfunctional information processing modes. This study develops a brief clinically based online intervention programme to modify biased interpretations in depression and anxiety (CBM-I
Clin
), overcoming some methodological issues that have been addressed in previous literature.
Methods
Volunteer participants will be recruited via social media and posters at the university. They will be randomly assigned to an experimental group or a waiting list control group. Both groups will complete two assessment sessions (before and after the intervention) consisting of questionnaires measuring cognitive and emotional variables as well as experimental tasks measuring cognitive biases (i.e. attention, memory, and interpretation). After the first assessment session, only participants in the experimental group will receive a link to follow the four CBM-I
Clin
sessions at home. All participants will receive, via email, follow-up questionnaires 2 weeks and 3 months after the second assessment.
Discussion
This study will test the 'Relearning how to think', an online programme potentially beneficial to modify cognitive biases in emotional disorders. Several limitations of previous CBM procedures are addressed, and the impact of the programme both on objective cognitive bias tasks and clinical symptoms will be explored.
Trial registration
ClinicalTrials.gov
NCT03987477
. Prospectively registered on June 17, 2019
Paranoid ideas are the most common abnormal beliefs in the schizophrenia spectrum, are also prevalent in non-clinical populations, and are highly correlated with other mental health problems such as ...anxiety, depression and low levels of well-being. Two previous studies with the same British population sample used confirmatory factor analysis and network analysis to show that the spectrum of paranoid beliefs is made up of four factors or dimensions (i.e., interpersonal sensitivity, mistrust, ideas of reference and ideas of persecution). The aims of this study are: 1) to explore the distribution and the structure of paranoid beliefs in a Spanish general population by applying the network approach and 2) to use network analysis to explore for the first time whether specific domains of paranoid ideation (i.e., dimensions) are specifically associated with mental health correlates such as depression, anxiety, loneliness, and well-being. We found a continuous distribution of paranoid beliefs among the 1328 individuals constituting the sample (e.g., 29,2 % did not endorse any items, 4.6 % endorsed half of the items, while 0.8 % endorsed all paranoid items). Paranoid ideas form three dimensions; interpersonal sensitivity, mistrust, and ideas of persecution (ideas of reference did not form a separate factor). The network model showed that loneliness has a pivotal role in connecting paranoid ideation with general psychopathology measures (i.e., depression, anxiety, loneliness and well-being). Research and clinical implications derived from our findings are also discussed.
Research on facial emotion processing has offered inconclusive results on whether certain emotional expressions, like happiness, are detected faster over others. A source of discrepancy among studies ...could stem from differences in physically salient features (e.g., teeth visibility), which are often left uncontrolled in this field of research. In Study 1, happy faces from the Karolinska Database Emotional Databse with visible, normal teeth unexpectedly obtained lower scores on intensity and prototypicality than the same faces with covered teeth. In Study 2, an eye-tracking methodology revealed that although faces with normal teeth drew participants' initial attention, participants spent more time looking at the eye region in faces with covered teeth, a region that previous research had found to be more informative of emotion than the mouth region. Overall, these results suggest that advantages often associated with certain emotional faces might be partially due to artifacts that should be systematically controlled for in future studies.
Despite significant advancements in the research of subjective well-being (SWB), little is known about its connection with basic cognitive processes. The present study explores the association ...between selective attention to emotional stimuli (i.e. emotional faces) and both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB (i.e. emotional well-being and satisfaction in life, respectively). Participants (N = 83) were asked to freely watch a series of 84 pairs of emotional (happy, angry, or sad) and neutral faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Eye-tracking methodology measured first fixations, number of fixations, and the time spent looking at emotional faces. Results showed that both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB were related to a general bias to attend to happy faces and avoid sad faces. Yet, bootstrapping analyses showed that positive emotions, rather than life satisfaction, were responsible for the positive information-processing bias. We discuss the potential functionality of these biases and their implications for research on positive emotions.
If the brain is a complex network of functionally specialized areas, it might be expected that mental representations could also behave in a similar way. We propose the concept of 'psychonectome' to ...formalize the idea of psychological constructs forming a dynamic network of mutually dependent elements. As a proof-of-concept of the psychonectome, networks analysis (NA) was used to explore structural changes in the network of constructs resulting from a psychological intervention. NA was applied to explore the effects of an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program in healthy participants (N = 182). Psychological functioning was measured by questionnaires assessing five key domains related to MBSR: mindfulness, compassion, psychological well-being, psychological distress and emotional-cognitive control. A total of 25 variables, covering the five constructs, were considered as nodes in the NA. Participants significantly improved in most of the psychological questionnaires. More interesting from a network perspective, there were also significant changes in the topological relationships among the elements. Expected influence and strength centrality indexes revealed that mindfulness and well-being measures were the most central nodes in the networks. The nodes with highest topological change after the MBSR were attentional control, compassion measures, depression and thought suppression. Also, cognitive appraisal, an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, was associated to rumination before the MBSR program but became related to mindfulness and well-being measures after the program. Community analysis revealed a strong topological association between mindfulness, compassion, and emotional regulation, which supports the key role of compassion in mindfulness training. These results highlight the importance of exploring psychological changes from a network perspective and support the conceptual advantage of considering the interconnectedness of psychological constructs in terms of a 'psychonectome' as it may reveal ways of functioning that cannot be analyzed through conventional analytic methods.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract This study examines the relationships between explicit and implicit self-esteem and self-referent memory biases in depression. We specifically tested the hypothesis that implicit self-esteem ...would influence depression-related memory biases via its association with explicit self-esteem. Self-esteem was assessed in patients with a current Major Depressive Disorder (MDD; n=38) and in a control group of participants who had never experienced depression (ND; n=40) by using explicit (Rosenberg Self-esteem Questionnaire) and implicit (Go/No-go Association Task) measures. A self-referent processing task of negative and positive adjectives was used to assess memory bias. Our analyses revealed that participants diagnosed with MDD showed lower levels of both explicit and implicit self-esteem in comparison to ND participants. MDD compared to ND participants also recalled a greater number of depressed self-referent adjectives and lower recall of positive self-referent information. Mediation analyses showed an indirect effect of explicit self-esteem on the relationship between implicit self-esteem and depression-related memory biases in the MDD group. These findings suggest an association between implicit and explicit self-esteem in depression that may result in negative cognitive processing, as reflected by self-referent memory biases.
Previous research has found that cognitive biases in attention, interpretation, and memory play an important role in depression. However, there is little knowledge of the interplay between these ...biases in clinical depression. The present study was aimed to model different pathways of relation among attention, interpretation and autobiographical memory biases, and to examine their contribution to account for depression status outcomes. Cognitive biases were evaluated in a sample comprising 22 currently-depressed and 36 never-depressed individuals representing a broad range of depression severity levels. Cognitive biases were assessed by three separate tasks using different types of stimuli. Our main finding was a significant indirect effect model in which attention bias to negative faces was linked to greater negative memory bias via its association with negative interpretation bias. Within this model, the specific pathway between attention bias to negative faces and negative interpretation bias accounted both for significant variance in depression severity as well as for depression diagnostic status. These findings increase our understanding of the complex interplay between cognitive mechanisms involved in clinical depression and highlight hypothetical pathways relevant for future interventions.
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