Sane
Limited Time Perspective Increases the Value of Calm
Da Jiang et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous findings indirectly suggest that the more people perceive their time in life as limited, the more they value calm. No study, however, has directly tested this hypothesis. To this end, using a combination of survey, experience sampling, and experimental methods, we examined the relationship between future time perspective and the affective states that people ideally want to feel (i.e., their “ideal affect”). In Study 1, the more people reported a limited time perspective, the more they wanted to feel calm and experience other low-arousal positive states. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to a limited time or an expanded time condition. Participants in the limited time condition reported valuing calm and other low arousal positive states more than those in the expanded time condition. We discuss the implications of these findings for broadening our understanding of the factors that shape how people ideally want to feel, and their consequences for decision making.
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Charles Marmar et al.
JAMA Psychiatry, forthcoming
Objective: To determine the prevalence, course, and comorbidities of war-zone posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across a 25-year interval.
Design, Setting, and Participants: The NVVLS survey consisted of a self-report health questionnaire (n = 1409), a computer-assisted telephone survey health interview (n = 1279), and a telephone clinical interview (n = 400) in a representative national sample of veterans who served in the Vietnam theater of operations (theater veterans) from July 3, 2012, through May 17, 2013. Of 2348 NVVRS participants, 1920 were alive at the outset of the NVVLS, and 81 died during recruitment; 1450 of the remaining 1839 (78.8%) participated in at least 1 NVVLS study phase. Data analysis was performed from May 18, 2013, through January 9, 2015, with further analyses continued through April 13, 2015.
Results: Among male theater veterans, we estimated a prevalence (95% CI) of 4.5% (1.7%-7.3%) based on CAPS-5 criteria for a current PTSD diagnosis; 10.8% (6.5%-15.1%) based on CAPS-5 full plus subthreshold PTSD; and 11.2% (8.3%-14.2%) based on PCL-5+ criteria for current war-zone PTSD. Among female veterans, estimates were 6.1% (1.8%-10.3%), 8.7% (3.8%-13.6%), and 6.6% (3.5%-9.6%), respectively. The PCL-5+ prevalence (95% CI) of current non–war-zone PTSD was 4.6% (2.6%-6.6%) in male and 5.1% (2.3%-8.0%) in female theater veterans. Comorbid major depression occurred in 36.7% (95% CI, 6.2%-67.2%) of veterans with current war-zone PTSD. With regard to the course of PTSD, 16.0% of theater veterans reported an increase and 7.6% reported a decrease of greater than 20 points in Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related PTSD symptoms. The prevalence (95% CI) of current PCL-5+–derived PTSD in study respondents was 1.2% (0.0%-3.0%) for male and 3.9% (0.0%-8.1%) for female Vietnam veterans.
Conclusions and Relevance: Approximately 271 000 Vietnam theater veterans have current full PTSD plus subthreshold war-zone PTSD, one-third of whom have current major depressive disorder, 40 or more years after the war. These findings underscore the need for mental health services for many decades for veterans with PTSD symptoms.
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Amy Badura-Brack et al.
American Journal of Psychiatry, forthcoming
Objective: Attention allocation to threat is perturbed in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with some studies indicating excess attention to threat and others indicating fluctuations between threat vigilance and threat avoidance. The authors tested the efficacy of two alternative computerized protocols, attention bias modification and attention control training, for rectifying threat attendance patterns and reducing PTSD symptoms.
Method: Two randomized controlled trials compared the efficacy of attention bias modification and attention control training for PTSD: one in Israel Defense Forces veterans and one in U.S. military veterans. Both utilized variants of the dot-probe task, with attention bias modification designed to shift attention away from threat and attention control training balancing attention allocation between threat and neutral stimuli. PTSD symptoms, attention bias, and attention bias variability were measured before and after treatment.
Results: Both studies indicated significant symptom improvement after treatment, favoring attention control training. Additionally, both studies found that attention control training, but not attention bias modification, significantly reduced attention bias variability. Finally, a combined analysis of the two samples suggested that reductions in attention bias variability partially mediated improvement in PTSD symptoms.
Conclusions: Attention control training may address aberrant fluctuations in attention allocation in PTSD, thereby reducing PTSD symptoms. Further study of treatment efficacy and its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms is warranted.
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Anna Weinberg et al.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Depressive disorders are associated with significant economic and public health burdens as well as increased morbidity. Yet, perhaps due to the heterogeneous nature of the disease, prevention and intervention efforts are only moderately efficacious. A better understanding of core mechanisms of depressive disorders might aid in the development of more targeted intervention, and perhaps help identify individuals at risk. One mechanism that may be particularly important to depressive phenotypes is reward insensitivity. Examination of neurobiological correlates of reward-processing, which should relate more directly to the neuropathology of depression, may be helpful in identifying liability for the disorder. To that end, we used a family study design to examine whether a neural response to rewards is a familial risk factor for depression in a sample of probands with a wide range of internalizing psychopathology, as well as their biological siblings. Event-related potentials were recorded during a simple forced-choice gambling paradigm, in which participants could either win or lose small amounts of money. Lower levels of positive affect in probands predicted a reduced neural response to rewards in siblings, even over and above the sibling’s own level of positive and negative affect. Additionally, the neural response to rewards was familial (i.e., correlated among siblings). Combined, these analyses suggest that a blunted neural response to rewards may be useful in identifying individuals vulnerable to depressive illnesses.
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Getting Over It: Long-Lasting Effects of Emotion Regulation on Amygdala Response
Bryan Denny et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Little is known about whether emotion regulation can have lasting effects on the ability of a stimulus to continue eliciting affective responses in the future. We addressed this issue in this study. Participants cognitively reappraised negative images once or four times, and then 1 week later, they passively viewed old and new images, so that we could identify lasting effects of prior reappraisal. As in prior work, active reappraisal increased prefrontal responses but decreased amygdala responses and self-reported emotion. At 1 week, amygdala responses remained attenuated for images that had been repeatedly reappraised compared with images that had been reappraised once, new control images, and control images that had been seen as many times as reappraised images but had never been reappraised. Prefrontal activation was not selectively elevated for repeatedly reappraised images and was not related to long-term attenuation of amygdala responses. These results suggest that reappraisal can exert long-lasting “dose-dependent” effects on amygdala response that may cause lasting changes in the neural representation of an unpleasant event’s emotional value.
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Kristin Bernard et al.
Development and Psychopathology, August 2015, Pages 829-841
Abstract:
The hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis is particularly sensitive to conditions of maltreatment. In particular, neglected children have shown a flatter slope with lower wake-up values relative to nonneglected children. An intervention, the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC), was developed to enhance biological and behavioral regulation in young children at risk for neglect. The effectiveness of the intervention was assessed in a randomized clinical trial for children with involvement with Child Protective Services. Following the intervention, children receiving the ABC intervention (n = 49) showed more typical cortisol production, with higher wake-up cortisol values and a steeper diurnal slope, than children receiving the control intervention (n = 51). These results suggest that the ABC intervention is effective in enhancing biological regulation.
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Robert Reinhart et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 July 2015, Pages 9448–9453
Abstract:
Executive control and flexible adjustment of behavior following errors are essential to adaptive functioning. Loss of adaptive control may be a biomarker of a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders, particularly in the schizophrenia spectrum. Here, we provide support for the view that oscillatory activity in the frontal cortex underlies adaptive adjustments in cognitive processing following errors. Compared with healthy subjects, patients with schizophrenia exhibited low frequency oscillations with abnormal temporal structure and an absence of synchrony over medial-frontal and lateral-prefrontal cortex following errors. To demonstrate that these abnormal oscillations were the origin of the impaired adaptive control in patients with schizophrenia, we applied noninvasive dc electrical stimulation over the medial-frontal cortex. This noninvasive stimulation descrambled the phase of the low-frequency neural oscillations that synchronize activity across cortical regions. Following stimulation, the behavioral index of adaptive control was improved such that patients were indistinguishable from healthy control subjects. These results provide unique causal evidence for theories of executive control and cortical dysconnectivity in schizophrenia.
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Jacob Juhl & Clay Routledge
Motivation and Emotion, August 2015, Pages 531-540
Abstract:
Existentialists have proposed that defining the self in terms of social groups — interdependent self-construal — helps maintain adaptive psychological functioning in the face of death awareness. Supporting this idea, research has demonstrated that when the awareness of death is experimentally heightened, individuals display greater investment in their social groups. No research, however, has directly tested the fundamental assertion that the awareness of death aversely effects psychological functioning for those without an interdependent self-construal. To provide an initial test of this claim, we examined the extent to which the awareness of death compromises the subjective sense of energy and aliveness (i.e., vitality) and self-regulatory energy at varying levels of interdependent self-construal. Specifically, in two experiments, we measured interdependent self-construal, experimentally heightened the awareness of death, and subsequently measured subjective vitality (Study 1) and self-regulation (Study 2). Results demonstrated that heightened death awareness reduced subjective vitality and self-regulation, but only for individuals with low, not high, levels of interdependent self-construal.
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Diana Rieger, Leonard Reinecke & Gary Bente
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has demonstrated that the use of hedonically positive interactive media content contributes to the satisfaction of recovery needs and is associated with recovery outcomes such as higher levels of cognitive performance and increased energetic arousal. The recovery effects of noninteractive media stimuli as well as of media content with negative affective valence, however, are less clear. The present investigation addressed this limitation of prior research on media-induced recovery. In an experiment (N = 99), participants were first exposed to a task to impose work strain and then assigned to one of the 3 experimental conditions: (a) a movie clip with positive affective valence, (b) a movie clip with negative affective valence, or (c) the control condition with no media exposure. The results demonstrate that both media conditions resulted in higher levels of recovery experience and cognitive performance than the nonmedia control condition. Furthermore, exposure to the video clip with negative valence resulted in higher levels of involvement and energetic arousal than exposure to the positive media stimulus. The findings extend prior research by providing a direct test of the recovery potential of noninteractive media and by revealing the differential patterns of recovery effects resulting from exposure to positive and negative media content.
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Musical Preferences are Linked to Cognitive Styles
David Greenberg et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2015
Abstract:
Why do we like the music we do? Research has shown that musical preferences and personality are linked, yet little is known about other influences on preferences such as cognitive styles. To address this gap, we investigated how individual differences in musical preferences are explained by the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory. Study 1 examined the links between empathy and musical preferences across four samples. By reporting their preferential reactions to musical stimuli, samples 1 and 2 (Ns = 2,178 and 891) indicated their preferences for music from 26 different genres, and samples 3 and 4 (Ns = 747 and 320) indicated their preferences for music from only a single genre (rock or jazz). Results across samples showed that empathy levels are linked to preferences even within genres and account for significant proportions of variance in preferences over and above personality traits for various music-preference dimensions. Study 2 (N = 353) replicated and extended these findings by investigating how musical preferences are differentiated by E-S cognitive styles (i.e., ‘brain types’). Those who are type E (bias towards empathizing) preferred music on the Mellow dimension (R&B/soul, adult contemporary, soft rock genres) compared to type S (bias towards systemizing) who preferred music on the Intense dimension (punk, heavy metal, and hard rock). Analyses of fine-grained psychological and sonic attributes in the music revealed that type E individuals preferred music that featured low arousal (gentle, warm, and sensual attributes), negative valence (depressing and sad), and emotional depth (poetic, relaxing, and thoughtful), while type S preferred music that featured high arousal (strong, tense, and thrilling), and aspects of positive valence (animated) and cerebral depth (complexity). The application of these findings for clinicians, interventions, and those on the autism spectrum (largely type S or extreme type S) are discussed.