Remitted Depression Moderates Self-Injurious Behavior In Personality-Disordered Research Volunteers

The moderating effects of depression on self-injurious behavior among personality-disordered individuals (N=40) were examined. Self-injurious behavior (SIB) was assessed using a well-validated laboratory measure. Remitted depression was associated with greater sensitivity to self-aggressive cues, indicating that remitted depression may be a risk factor for SIB. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Perceptual bias of patients with schizophrenia in morphed facial expression

Limited research has specifically examined the nature of the dysfunction in emotion categorization representation in schizophrenia. The current study aimed to investigate the perception bias of morphed facial expression in subjects with schizophrenia and healthy controls in the emotion continua. Twenty-eight patients with schizophrenia and thirty-one healthy controls took part in this study. They were administered a standardized set of morphed photographs of facial expressions with varying emotional intensities between 0% and 100% of the emotion, in 10% increments to provide a range of intensities from pleasant to unpleasant and approach to withdraw. Shift points, indicating the time point that the subjects' emotion identification begins to change, and response slopes, indicating how rapidly these changes have happened at the shift points in the emotion continuum, were measured. Patients exhibited a significantly greater response slope (i.e., patients' perception changed more rapidly) and greater shift point (i.e., patients still perceived mild expressions of anger as happy faces) with increasing emotion signal compared with healthy controls when the facial expression morphed from happy to angry. Furthermore, patients with schizophrenia still perceived mild expressions of fear as angry faces(a greater shift point) and were less discriminative from angry to fearful emotion(a flatter response slope). They were sensitive to sadness (a smaller shift point) and the perception changed rapidly (a sharper response slope) as compared with healthy controls in the emotion continuum of happy to sad. In conclusion, patients with schizophrenia demonstrated impaired categorical perception of facial expressions, with generally 'rapid' but 'late' discrimination towards social threat-related stimuli such as angry facial expression. Compared with healthy controls, these patients have a sharper discrimination perception pattern in the emotion continua from positive valence to negative valence. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Deficits in sustaining reward responses in subsyndromal and syndromal major depression

Preliminary findings suggest a reduction in capacity to sustain reward responses in major depression. However, relatively little is known about the stability of reward learning over time and the effect of stress on reward responses in depressed individuals. This study aimed to evaluate sustained behaviour to maximize reward in the context of known reinforcement contingencies and to evaluate the extent to which stress influences such behaviour in clinically depressed patients (n = 43), subsyndromally depressed individuals (n = 43), and healthy controls (n = 44). A probabilistic reward learning task with contingencies known to participants was used to evaluate the change of reward response over time in both 'stress' and 'non-stress' conditions. Stress was induced by salient negative feedback during the task performance. Questionnaires capturing subjective affect were also administered to all participants after completion of the task. Response bias to the stimulus signaling greater reward decreased significantly over time in both subsyndromally and clinically depressed participants, but not in healthy controls. Healthy controls demonstrated a trend of dysfunctional reward processing under the stress condition. Moreover, in the stress condition, the deficit in sustaining behaviour to maximize reward was associated with subjective rating of pleasure in participants with either subsyndromal depression or major depression. These findings suggest that individuals with depression have difficulty sustaining behaviour during a known reinforcement schedule. Participants with anhedonic symptoms are even less likely to sustain behaviour to maximize reward under stress. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

A component analysis of cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression

The purpose of this study was to provide an experimental test of the theory of change put forth by A. T. Beck, A. J. Rush, B. F. Shaw, and G. Emery (1979) to explain the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CT) for depression. The comparison involved randomly assigning 150 outpatients with major depression to a treatment focused exclusively on the behavioral activation (BA) component of CT, a treatment that included both BA and the teaching of skills to modify automatic thoughts (AT), but excluding the components of CT focused on core schema, or the full CT treatment. Four experienced cognitive therapists conducted all treatments. Despite excellent adherence to treatment protocols by the therapists, a clear bias favoring CT, and the competent performance of CX there was no evidence that the complete treatment produced better outcomes, at either the termination of acute treatment or the 6-month follow-up, than either component treatment. Furthermore, both BA and AT treatments were just as effective as CT at altering negative thinking as well as dysfunctional attributional styles. Finally, attributional style was highly predictive of both short- and long-term outcomes in the BA condition, but not in the CT condition