The Influence of Emotion Regulation and Neural Cognitive Control on Distress Tolerance

Tolerance of negative emotions has been associated with transdiagnostic negative mental health outcomes. Theory and research implicate emotion regulation and cognitive control as factors in tolerance of negative emotions. But their unique contributions to tolerance of negative emotions and interdependency have been unclear due to methodological limitations. This study aimed to explicate cognitive and emotional factors affecting distress tolerance in a non-clinical sample of emerging adults. Undergraduate psychology students completed self-report measures of emotion regulation ability and tolerance of negative emotions. The N2 ERP component elicited by a Go-NoGo task was also used as a neurophysiological marker of cognitive control with larger mean difference amplitudes indicating greater cognitive control. Age correlated significantly with tolerance of negative emotions and cognitive control and was included as a covariate. Individuals with high emotion regulation ability were found to have greater tolerance of negative emotions. Larger mean N2 difference amplitudes predicted greater tolerance of negative emotions before age was added to the model, but was no longer significant when age was included as a covariate. No significant interactive effects were found between emotion regulatory ability and cognitive control predicting tolerance of negative emotions. These findings suggest that emotion regulation training may be the most appropriate target to increase tolerance of negative emotions. Future studies should increase power and assess emotional salience and temporal dynamics of self-regulation to further clarify the mechanism of these relationships

Examining a Neural Measure of Attentional Bias to Emotional Faces in Social Anxiety and Depression

Cognitive theories suggest that attentional biases may contribute to both social anxiety and depression, such that attention may be biased to focus on or away from certain information (e.g., rejecting or sad images; Clark & McManus, 2002; Lemoult & Gotlib, 2019). Although research is mixed, recent studies using a neural measure called the N2pc (an event-related potential) has indicated attentional biases in social anxiety. However, little N2pc research has examined depression or co-occurring depression and social anxiety. The current study used electroencephalography to measure the N2pc during a dot-probe task in which images of faces with emotional or neutral expressions competed for attention. Undergraduates (N = 102) completed the task and self-report measures of social anxiety and depression. Hierarchical linear regressions examined the hypotheses that social anxiety would be associated with attentional biases toward both angry and disgust faces and that depression would be associated with biases away from happy faces and toward sad faces. Social anxiety was associated with a more negative N2pc for (i.e. greater bias toward) happy faces (β = -.32, p \u3c .01) when holding depression constant. Depression was only marginally associated with bias toward sad faces (β = -.20, p = .09), given average social anxiety, and the interaction of depression and social anxiety marginally predicted less bias toward sad faces (β = .21, p = .08). The social anxiety bias toward happy faces supports the fear of positive evaluation theory (Weeks et al., 2008). Individuals with social anxiety may rapidly attend to positive evaluation because it signals being pulled further into an anxious situation. The depression bias toward sad faces was marginal but provides some support for the cognitive perspective that attentional vigilance for depressive content influences negative thoughts and mood. This research informs interventions such as attentional bias modification and cognitive-behavioral therapy.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/gradposters2022_sciences/1006/thumbnail.jp

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least 4 m. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the 6.5 m James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 yr, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit