The impact of parents' expectations on parenting behaviour: an experimental investigation

Over-involved parenting is commonly hypothesized to be it risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders in childhood. This parenting style may result from parental attempts to prevent child distress based on expectations that the child will be unable to cope in a challenging situation. Naturalistic studies are limited in their ability to disentangle the overlapping contribution of child and parent factors in driving parental behaviours. To overcome this difficulty, an experimental study was conducted in which parental expectations of child distress were manipulated and the effects on parent behaviour and child mood were assessed. Fifty-two children (aged 7 - 11 years) and their primary caregiver participated. Parents were allocated to either a "positive" or a "negative" expectation group. Observations were made of the children and their parents interacting whilst completing a difficult anagram task. Parents given negative expectations of their child's response displayed higher levels of involvement. No differences were found on indices of child mood and behaviour and possible explanations for this are considered. The findings are consistent with suggestions that increased parental involvement may be a "natural" reaction to enhanced perceptions of child vulnerability and an attempt to avoid child distress

The age of anxiety? It depends where you look: changes in STAI trait anxiety, 1970–2010

Purpose Population-level surveys suggest that anxiety has been increasing in several nations, including the USA and UK. We sought to verify the apparent anxiety increases by looking for systematic changes in mean anxiety questionnaire scores from research publications. Methods We analyzed all available mean State–Trait Anxiety Inventory scores published between 1970 and 2010. We collected 1703 samples, representing more than 205,000 participants from 57 nations. Results Results showed a significant anxiety increase worldwide, but the pattern was less clear in many individual nations. Our analyses suggest that any increase in anxiety in the USA and Canada may be limited to students, anxiety has decreased in the UK, and has remained stable in Australia. Conclusions Although anxiety may have increased worldwide, it might not be increasing as dramatically as previously thought, except in specific populations, such as North American students. Our results seem to contradict survey results from the USA and UK in particular. We do not claim that our results are more reliable than those of large population surveys. However, we do suggest that mental health surveys and other governmental sources of disorder prevalence data may be partially biased by changing attitudes toward mental health: if respondents are more aware and less ashamed of their anxiety, they are more likely to report it to survey takers. Analyses such as ours provide a useful means of double-checking apparent trends in large population surveys

P3 amplitude reductions are associated with shared variance between internalizing and externalizing psychopathology

P3 amplitude reductions, commonly elicited in oddball paradigms, have been associated with both internalizing (e.g., depression and anxiety) and externalizing problems (e.g., substance use, aggression, and impulsivity). Recent factor analytic models have focused on the shared variance between internalizing and externalizing problems as a potentially important separable psychopathology construct (a general psychopathology factor, or p‐factor). To assess neurophysiological markers of this shared variance, we examined P3 amplitude to target and novel stimuli in an undergraduate sample with a range of internalizing and externalizing problems. Participants (N = 125) completed a rotated heads visual oddball paradigm, with IAPS pictures serving as infrequent novel stimuli. Results replicated P3 amplitude reduction relative to both target and novel stimuli separately for internalizing and externalizing problems, and found that the shared variance across internalizing and externalizing was significantly related to lower P3 amplitude to novels, targets, and a factor score of target and novel P3 measures. The present results are consistent with the interpretation that a general or shared problem behavior factor accounts for much of the associations between reduced P3 amplitude and internalizing and externalizing problems.There is a need for biological measures that can index emerging models of the shared variance between internalizing and externalizing problems (cf. general psychopathology factor, or p‐factor), to provide approaches for assessing the biological systems underlying these models. The current study found support for the idea that a general or shared problem behavior factor contributes to P3 amplitude reductions observed separately for internalizing and externalizing behaviors. This supports an inference that some biological systems are sensitive to processes associated with a shared problem behavior factor.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155993/1/psyp13618_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155993/2/psyp13618.pd

Altered hippocampal function in major depression despite intact structure and resting perfusion

Background: Hippocampal volume reductions in major depression have been frequently reported. However, evidence for functional abnormalities in the same region in depression has been less clear. We investigated hippocampal function in depression using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neuropsychological tasks tapping spatial memory function, with complementing measures of hippocampal volume and resting blood flow to aid interpretation. Method: A total of 20 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and a matched group of 20 healthy individuals participated. Participants underwent multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): fMRI during a spatial memory task, and structural MRI and resting blood flow measurements of the hippocampal region using arterial spin labelling. An offline battery of neuropsychological tests, including several measures of spatial memory, was also completed. Results: The fMRI analysis showed significant group differences in bilateral anterior regions of the hippocampus. While control participants showed task-dependent differences in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal, depressed patients did not. No group differences were detected with regard to hippocampal volume or resting blood flow. Patients showed reduced performance in several offline neuropsychological measures. All group differences were independent of differences in hippocampal volume and hippocampal blood flow. Conclusions: Functional abnormalities of the hippocampus can be observed in patients with MDD even when the volume and resting perfusion in the same region appear normal. This suggests that changes in hippocampal function can be observed independently of structural abnormalities of the hippocampus in depression

Do state and trait measures measure states and traits? The case of community-dwelling caregivers of older adults

Spielberger’s state and trait anxiety and anger scales are widely used and documented, but there is little or no direct evidence that they actually measure their respective state and trait aspects as was intended. We conducted latent state-trait analyses on data collected from 310 community-dwelling caregivers of older adult care recipients and found that (a) both state and trait scales reflected a mixture of state and trait aspects of their latent constructs, (b) state scales reflected more state-like variance than did corresponding trait scales, but (c) both state and trait scales were dominated by stable trait-like variance. Follow-up bivariate latent state-trait analyses indicated that correlations between trait components of anger and anxiety correlated more strongly with trait components of caregiver–care recipient mutually communal behavior and care recipient problem behavior than did state–state component correlations. Implications for the measurement of state and trait components of psychological constructs are discussed

Evidence that brief self-affirming implementation intentions can reduce work-related anxiety in downsize survivors.

Background and Objectives: Workers were recruited from a UK further education college during a period of organisational downsizing. The study assessed the effects of a brief health psychology intervention on work-related stress in downsize survivors. Design and Methods: Sixty-six employees were randomly allocated to one of two conditions: one in which they were asked to create a work-related self-affirming implementation intention (WS-AII), or a control. Feelings of anxiety and depression were measured before and after the intervention or control task, and three weeks later. Job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and self-esteem were also measured. Results: There were statistically significant differences between the WS-AII condition and the control. Workers who created work-related self-affirming implementation intentions reported an immediate reduction in anxiety. This reduction was also observed in their appraisal of job-related anxiety three weeks later. There were no significant effects of WS-AII's on depression, job satisfaction or self-esteem. There was, however a significant effect on self-efficacy with workers in the WS-AII condition reporting greater self-efficacy. Conclusions: The present findings suggest that the integration of brief health psychology interventions, such as the WS-AII, into existing organisational practice may be of benefit to the well-being of employees

Cultural variations in the relationship between anger coping styles, depression and life satisfaction

Hypotheses are tested that ways of handling anger and their consequences will differ in student samples drawn from dignity cultures (UK and Finland), honor cultures (Turkey and Pakistan) and face cultures (Hong Kong and China). In line with our hypotheses, holding anger in and controlling anger correlate positively in face cultures but not in other samples, whereas holding anger in and letting anger out correlate positively in honor cultures but not in other samples. Furthermore, holding anger in and letting anger out are more strongly predictive of high depression and low life satisfaction in honor cultures than in other samples. The results provide support for the cross-cultural validity of Spielberger's (1999) anger expression inventory and for the proposition that differences in ways of handling anger can be understood in terms of contrasting cultural contexts

The Relationships among Trait Anxiety, State Anxiety and the Goal Performance of Penalty Shoot-Out by University Soccer Players

The present study examined how the level of trait anxiety, which is a personality characteristic, influences state anxiety and penalty shoot-out performance under pressure by instruction. The high and low trait anxiety groups were selected by using Spielberger's Trait Anxiety Scale, with trait anxiety scores, and control and pressure conditions manipulated by instructions. The participants were two groups of eight university male soccer players. They individually performed 20 shots from the penalty shoot-out point, aiming at the top right and top left corner areas in the soccer goal. Each condition had 10 trials in a within-subject design. The dependent measures comprised the number of successful goals and the state anxiety scores under each instructional condition. The result showed a significant main effect of instruction. State anxiety scores increased more and the number of successful goals decreased more in high trait anxiety groups than in low trait anxiety groups under pressure instructional condition. These findings suggest that players with higher trait anxiety scores tend to experience increased state anxiety under a pressure-laden condition, and higher state anxiety interferes with goal performance

The role of emotion in the learning of trustworthiness from eye-gaze : Evidence from facial electromyography.

When perception of gaze direction is congruent with the location of a target, attention is facilitated and responses are faster compared to when incongruent. Faces that consistently gaze congruently are also judged trustworthier than faces that consistently gaze incongruently. However, it’s unclear how gaze-cues elicit changes in trust. We measured facial electromyography (EMG) during an identity-contingent gaze-cueing task to examine whether embodied emotional reactions to gaze-cues mediate trust learning. Gaze-cueing effects were found to be equivalent regardless of whether participants showed learning of trust in the expected direction or did not. In contrast, we found distinctly different patterns of EMG activity in these two populations. In a further experiment we showed the learning effects were specific to viewing faces, as no changes in liking were detected when viewing arrows that evoked similar attentional orienting responses. These findings implicate embodied emotion in learning trust from identity-contingent gaze-cueing, possibly due to the social value of shared attention or deception rather than domain-general attentional orienting