The Negativity Bias Predicts Response Rate To Behavioral Activation For Depression

Background and Objectives: This treatment study investigated the extent to which asymmetric dimensions of affective responding, specifically the positivity offset and the negativity bias, at pretreatment altered the rate of response to Behavioral Activation treatment for depression. Method: Forty-one depressed participants were enrolled into 16 weekly sessions of BA. An additional 36 lifetime healthy participants were evaluated prospectively for 16 weeks to compare affective responding between healthy and remitted patients at post-treatment. All participants were assessed at Weeks 0, 8 and 16 using repeated measures, involving a structured clinical interview for DSM-IV Axis I disorders, questionnaires, and a computerized task designed to measure affective responses to unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant images. Results: The negativity bias at pre-treatment predicted the rate of response to BA, while the positivity offset did not. Limitations: Only one treatment condition was used in this study and untreated depressed participants were not enrolled, limiting our ability to compare the effect of BA. Conclusions: Baseline negativity bias may serve as a signal for patients to engage in and benefit from the goal-directed BA strategies, thereby accelerating rate of response

Impact of chronic somatoform and osteoarthritis pain on conscious and preconscious cognitive processing

The study investigates the impact of chronic pain (CP) on conscious and preconscious cognitive processes and on guessing behavior, and examines the mediating effect of a depressive state. Twenty-eight patients with CP due to hip osteoarthritis, 32 patients with a somatoform disorder including pain symptoms, and 31 participants who did not have CP were examined within the framework of a modified Process-Dissociation-Procedure. Neutral, health threatening and general threatening stimuli were presented acoustically in a lexical decision task. Parameters of conscious processing, preconscious processing, and of chance were estimated by a multinomial modelling procedure. CP-patients with osteoarthritis showed the lowest level of conscious processing and the highest level of guessing behavior. Patients with somatoform pain tended to react preconsciously to health threatening stimuli but overall showed a profile similar to that of controls who did not have CP. The impact of the threatening quality of stimuli on different levels of cognitive processing was weak. Depression did not mediate between the experience of pain and estimates of conscious and preconscious processing. Perspective: The impact of CP on preconscious and conscious cognitive processing depends on types and causes of pain. The experience of CP caused by inflammation or physical damage tends to reduce the probability of conscious processing and to provoke memory biases. CP in the context of a somatoform disorder seems to have less impact on cognitive functions

The emotional recall task : juxtaposing recall and recognition-based affect scales

Existing affect scales typically involve recognition of emotions from a predetermined emotion checklist. However, a recognition-based checklist may fail to capture sufficient breadth and specificity of an individual’s recalled emotional experiences and may therefore miss emotions that frequently come to mind. More generally, how do recalled emotions differ from recognized emotions? To address these issues, we present and evaluate an affect scale based on recalled emotions. Participants are asked to produce 10 words that best described their emotions over the past month and then to rate each emotion for how often it was experienced. We show that average weighted valence of the words produced in this task, the Emotional Recall Task (ERT), is strongly correlated with scales related to general affect, such as the PANAS, Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-being, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales, and a few other related scales. We further show that the Emotional Recall Task captures a breadth and specificity of emotions not available in other scales but that are nonetheless commonly reported as experienced emotions. We test a general version of the ERT (the ERT general) that is language neutral and can be used across cultures. Finally, we show that the ERT is valid in a test-retest paradigm. In sum, the ERT measures affect based on emotion terms relevant to an individual’s idiosyncratic experience. It is consistent with recognition-based scales, but also offers a new direction towards enriching our understanding of individual differences in recalled and recognized emotions

Effects of mindfulness meditation on conscious and non-conscious components of the mind

The aim of the present review is to investigate previous studies concerning the effects of meditation and dispositional mindfulness on conscious and implicit or non-conscious attitudes. First we present a brief perspective on conscious and non-conscious states of mind. Then we introducethefundamentalbasesofmindfulnessmeditation. Third we review studies on dispositional mindfulness and meditation that employed either direct or indirect measures to assess explicit and implicit attitudes. Finally, we briefly present how meditation has been associated with the psychotherapeutic practice of psychoanalysis and, hence, as a therapeutic technique to access the unconscious. Until now, few studies have investigated the impact of meditation on non-conscious states of mind and personality; nevertheless, both scientific studies involving implicit measures and reflections from psychotherapy have underlined the importance of meditation in promoting psychological well-being, leading to de-automatization of automatic patterns of responding and to higher levels of self-awareness

The Effects of Discrete Emotions on Risky Decision Making

Contrary to the dominant view that generally equates feelings with poor thinking, converging evidence indicates that decisions – including those involving risk – are influenced by affective experiences. Research, however, is limited to studies on undifferentiated, global positive versus negative mood states; less is known about the influence of discrete emotions. The purpose of this research was to extend the affect-cognition literature by (a) examining the effects of discrete emotions varying along the dimensions of valence and arousal, and (b) identifying the systematic ways that discrete emotions underlie risky decision making. We used a set of emotion-laden IAPS images to elicit and compare the impact of incidental emotions on risky decision making. One hundred and twenty-two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of the four affective conditions: excitement, contentment, fear, and sadness. Following the emotion induction procedure, participants completed the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (CDQ) to assess their risk-taking propensity. Results indicated an interaction effect between valence and arousal for positive emotions, such that excited participants were significantly more risky in their decision making compared to contented participants. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical health implications of these findings. We recommend that future research capitalize on the insights gained from emotion research and use it favorably to improve decision making under risk

Monitoring and detection of agitation in dementia: towards real-time and big-data solutions

The changing demographic profile of the population has potentially challenging social, geopolitical, and financial consequences for individuals, families, the wider society, and governments globally. The demographic change will result in a rapidly growing elderly population with healthcare implications which importantly include Alzheimer type conditions (a leading cause of dementia). Dementia requires long term care to manage the negative behavioral symptoms which are primarily exhibited in terms of agitation and aggression as the condition develops. This paper considers the nature of dementia along with the issues and challenges implicit in its management. The Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) are introduced with factors (precursors) to the onset of agitation and aggression. Independent living is considered, health monitoring and implementation in context-aware decision-support systems is discussed with consideration of data analytics. Implicit in health monitoring are technical and ethical constraints, we briefly consider these constraints with the ability to generalize to a range of medical conditions. We postulate that health monitoring offers exciting potential opportunities however the challenges lie in the effective realization of independent assisted living while meeting the ethical challenges, achieving this remains an open research question remains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Narrative Language as an Expression of Individual and Group Identity

Scientific Narrative Psychology integrates quantitative methodologies into the study of identity. Its methodology, Narrative Categorical Analysis, and its toolkit, NarrCat, were both originally developed by the Hungarian Narrative Psychology Group. NarrCat is for machine-made transformation of sentences in self-narratives into psychologically relevant, statistically processable narrative categories. The main body of this flexible and comprehensive system is formed by Psycho-Thematic modules, such as Agency, Evaluation, Emotion, Cognition, Spatiality, and Temporality. The Relational Modules include Social References, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), and Negation. Certain elements can be combined into Hypermodules, such as Psychological Perspective and Spatio-Temporal Perspective, which allow for even more complex, higher level exploration of composite psychological processes. Using up-to-date developments of corpus linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), a unique feature of NarrCat is its capacity of SRL. The structure of NarrCat, as well as the empirical results in group identity research, is discussed

Autobiographical Memory Specificity and Emotional Disorder

The authors review research showing that when recalling autobiographical events, many emotionally disturbed patients summarize categories of events rather than retrieving a single episode. The mechanisms underlying such overgeneral memory are examined, with a focus on M. A. Conway and C. W. Pleydell-Pearce's (2000) hierarchical search model of personal event retrieval. An elaboration of this model is proposed to account for overgeneral memory, focusing on how memory search can be affected by (a) capture and rumination processes, when mnemonic information used in retrieval activates ruminative thinking; (b) functional avoidance, when episodic material threatens to cause affective disturbance; and (c) impairment in executive capacity and control that limits an individual's ability to remain focused on retrieval in the face of distraction