What role does emotional granularity play in adolescent depression and anxiety? A scoping review

Emotional Granularity (EG) refers to the precision with which we describe and differentiate between our emotion states. Emerging evidence suggests that having poorer EG contributes to the onset and maintenance of psychiatric conditions such as depression. The likely mechanisms of action for this being that poor EG means inferior selection and deployment of relevant emotion regulation strategies to combat negative emotional turbulence. The following reviews research evidence for EG in adolescents (aged 14-24), specifically: (i) how it is measured; (ii) its role in anxiety and depression; (iii) its role as a moderator between emotion regulation and anxiety/depression. In addition, we spoke to adolescent stakeholders with a lived experience of anxiety/depression to gain their insights on EG. A literature review revealed 39 qualitative studies, however there were no studies that examined EG in adolescent populations with clinical diagnoses of anxiety or depression. In typical groups we found: (i) the most common method of measuring EG was with ecological momentary assessment methods; (ii) although there was good evidence that lower EG means greater levels of depressive symptomology, there was less evidence for EGs role in anxiety; (iii) inconclusive evidence of EG as a moderator between emotion regulation and depression/anxiety. Adolescent stakeholders had no difficulty understanding the concept of EG and believed it was one that young people would likely engage with. Importantly, they also felt it was a skill that has the potential to be improved. In sum, although EG shows promise as an active ingredient in adolescent depression, there is insufficient evidence for it playing a role in anxiety and inconclusive evidence of it as a moderator between emotion regulation and mental ill-health. Future studies, should both test EG’s role in depressed and anxious adolescent samples and investigate its potential to be trained

The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Cognition and Mental Health in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials

Background: Mindfulness based interventions (MBIs) are an increasingly popular way of attempting to improve the behavioural, cognitive and mental health outcomes of children and adolescents, though there is a suggestion that enthusiasm has moved ahead of the evidence base. Most evaluations of MBIs are either uncontrolled or nonrandomized trials. This meta-analysis aims to establish the efficacy of MBIs for children and adolescents in studies that have adopted a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) design. Methods: A systematic literature search of RCTs of MBIs was conducted up to October 2017. Thirty-three independent studies including 3,666 children and adolescents were included in random effects meta-analyses with outcome measures categorized into cognitive, behavioural and emotional factors. Separate random effects meta-analyses were completed for the seventeen studies (n = 1,762) that used an RCT design with an active control condition. Results: Across all RCTs we found significant positive effects of MBIs, relative to controls, for the outcome categories of Mindfulness, Executive Functioning, Attention, Depression, Anxiety/Stress and Negative Behaviours, with small effect sizes (Cohen’s d), ranging from .16 to .30. However, when considering only those RCTs with active control groups, significant benefits of an MBI were restricted to the outcomes of Mindfulness (d = .42), Depression (d = .47) and Anxiety/Stress (d = .18) only. Conclusions: This meta-analysis reinforces the efficacy of using MBIs for improving the mental health and wellbeing of youth as assessed using the gold standard RCT methodology. Future RCT evaluations should incorporate scaledup definitive trial designs to further evaluate the robustness of MBIs in youth, with an embedded focus on mechanisms of action. Keywords: Mindfulness; meta-analysis; intervention; adolescence; attention

The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Cognition and Mental Health in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials

Background. Mindfulness based interventions (MBIs) are an increasingly popular way of attempting to improve the behavioural, cognitive and mental health outcomes of children and adolescents, though there is a suggestion that enthusiasm has moved ahead of the evidence base. Most evaluations of MBIs are either uncontrolled or non-randomised trials. This meta-analysis aims to establish the efficacy of MBIs for children and adolescents in studies that have adopted a randomised, controlled trial (RCT) design. Method. A systematic literature search of RCTs of MBIs was conducted up to October 2017. Thirty-three independent studies including 3666 children and adolescents were included in random effects meta-analyses with outcome measures categorised into cognitive, behavioural and emotional factors. Separate random effects meta-analyses were completed for the seventeen studies (n=1762) that used an RCT design with an active control condition. Results. Across all RCTs we found significant positive effects of MBIs, relative to controls, for the outcome categories of Mindfulness, Executive Functioning, Attention, Depression, Anxiety/Stress and Negative Behaviours, with small effect sizes (Cohen’s d), ranging from .16 to .30. However, when considering only those RCTs with active control groups, significant benefits of an MBI were restricted to the outcomes of Mindfulness (d= .42), Depression (d= .47) and Anxiety/Stress (d= .18) only. Conclusions. This meta-analysis reinforces the efficacy of using MBIs for improving the mental health and wellbeing of youth as assessed using the gold standard RCT methodology. Future RCT evaluations should incorporate scaled-up definitive trial designs to further evaluate the robustness of MBIs in youth, with an embedded focus on mechanisms of action

The impact of mindfulness training in adolescence on socio-cognitive-affective processes and on mental health before and after COVID-19: A trial protocol and analysis plan

A Statistical Analysis Plan and protoco

A cross-sectional investigation of the relationship between decentering, and mental health and cognitive processing in adolescence

Over half of psychiatric disorders of behaviour, mood, and emotion begin before the age of 15. Thus, development of emotional regulation skills to cope with psycho-social stressors is imperative to reduce risk of adolescent-onset mental health difficulties. Psychological decentering, a self-reflective capacity through which distressing thoughts, feelings, and memories, are re-perceived from an observer perspective, could be one such skill. However, questions remain about how decentering relates to age, mental health and emotion regulation, and cognitive processes such as executive control and social cognition. Adolescents in Cambridge and London (Mage = 17.4(1.77), N = 904) completed an online battery of mental health and emotional regulation questionnaires and two cognitive tasks: an affective cognitive control task, the Emotional Stop Signal Task (ESST), and a physical perspective-taking task, the Own Body Task (OBT). Multiple linear regression was used to examine associations between a widely used measure of decentering, the Experiences Questionnaire (EQ), and: age and gender, mental health, emotion regulation, affective executive control, and perspective-taking. Higher self-reported decentering was significantly associated with older age. Higher decentering was also associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, better psychological wellbeing, more frequent use of emotion regulation strategies, and fewer difficulties with emotion regulation. Decentering was not associated with affective executive control, but better ability to decenter was significantly associated with fewer commission errors on the OBT. This research bolsters evidence of associations between decentering and broader emotion regulation and psychological wellbeing, and provides an indication that decentering may be driven by social cognitive mechanisms involved in physical perspective taking, rather than executive control processes such as inhibition. Understanding associated cognitive processes may provide direction of how to reinforce decentering, and improve psychological interventions of which decentering is a key component

An Investigation of the Mental Health and Cognitive Correlates of Psychological Decentering in Adolescence

Objective: The ability to notice and reflect on distressing internal experiences from an objective perspective, often called psychological decentering, has been posited to be protective against mental health difficulties. However, little is known about how this skill develops across adolescence, how it relates to mental health symptoms, and how this capacity to reflect may impact on key developmental domains such as affective executive control, and social cognition. Method: This study analysed a pre-existing dataset including a number of mental health measures and cognitive tasks, administered to adolescents in Greater London and Cambridge (mean age 14.4 (1.77), N = 553). A reliable self-report index of decentering based on available questionnaire items in the dataset was developed. Multiple linear regression was used to examine associations between decentering and each of the following: mental health symptoms, affective executive control (measured using an affective Stroop Task, affective Working Memory Task, and an affective Sustained Attention to Response Task), and social cognition. Results: Higher self-rated decentering was significantly associated with lower depression and anxiety scores, and higher psychological wellbeing. However, results did not indicate significant relationships between decentering, affective executive control, and social cognition. Bayesian linear regression provided moderate evidence of an absence of effect in all models. Conclusions: Results suggest that decentering is significantly associated with mental health symptomatology in adolescence. Further research is needed to discover the cognitive mechanisms associated with this self-referential process, which could allow for optimisation of existing psychological therapy and reveal new avenues of intervention to boost it

A cross-sectional investigation of the relationship between decentering, and mental health and cognitive processing in adolescence

A statistical analysis plan for a cross-sectional investigation of the relationship between decentering, and mental health and cognitive processing in adolescenc

Affective control in adolescence: The influence of age and mental health status on working memory

People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively-charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral (‘cool’) and affectively-charged (‘hot’) contexts. Whilst there is some evidence that affective control undergoes significant improvement throughout adolescence, it is not clear if this follows a linear trajectory. Moreover, it is unclear how adolescents deemed at risk of developing depression exercise affective control despite poor affective control being identified as a contributing factor to ongoing mental ill-health in adulthood. The current study therefore investigated affective control in a large (n=425) sample of adolescents (aged 11-18 years). A visuospatial search and written storage Working Memory (WM) capacity task was carried out to examine affective control, using affectively-neutral and affectively-negative social images as the task-irrelevant distractors. Overall, WM capacity increased as a function of age across both affective conditions. Moreover, we report a significant difference between affective conditions, with WM capacity slightly lower during trials with affectively-negative social scenes, relative to neutral. The performance ‘cost’ for completing the task in negative relative to neutral conditions was not modulated by depressive risk. Furthermore, age did not predict performance cost, irrespective of risk group. These findings suggest WM capacity is relatively robust against socio-affective contexts and mood in adolescents