Effect of childhood emotional abuse on depression and anxiety in adulthood is partially mediated by neuroticism: Evidence from a large online sample.

Childhood trauma is widely recognized as a potential risk factor for psychiatric illness in adulthood, yet the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship remain incompletely understood. One proposed mechanism involves the impact of childhood trauma on personality development, particularly in relation to neuroticism, which may subsequently heighten susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. In this study, we aimed to investigate this hypothesis through an online survey involving 1116 participants (232 male, 21 %).

The Fake IQ Test: a novel measure of self-reflection in major depressive disorder.

Background: Excessive negative self-referential processing plays an important role in the development and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD). Current measures of self-reflection are limited to self-report questionnaires and invoking imagined states, which may not be suitable for all populations.

Aims: The current study aimed to pilot a new measure of self-reflection, the Fake IQ Test (FIQT).

Objective measures of reward sensitivity and motivation in people with high low anhedonia.

Background: Anhedonia - a diminished interest or pleasure in activities - is a core self-reported symptom of depression which is poorly understood and often resistant to conventional antidepressants. This symptom may occur due to dysfunction in one or more sub-components of reward processing: motivation, consummatory experience and/or learning. However, the precise impairments remain elusive.

Relationship of a big five personality questionnaire to the symptoms of affective disorders.

Online assessments allow cost-effective, large-scale screening for psychiatric vulnerability (e.g., university undergraduates or military recruits).

Differentiating anxiety from fear: an experimental-pharmacological approach.

Gray's theory of personality postulates that fear and anxiety are distinct emotional systems with only the latter being sensitive to anxiolytic drugs. His work was mainly based on animal research, and translational studies validating his theory are scarce. Previous work in humans showed an influence of the benzodiazepine lorazepam on both systems, however, dependent on dosage (1 and 2 mg) and personality differences in negative emotionality.

Towards a neuroscience-based theory of personality: within-subjects dissociation of human brain activity during pursuit and goal conflict.

As demonstrated by neuroimaging data, the human brain contains systems that control responses to threat. The revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of personality predicts that individual differences in the reactivity of these brain systems produce anxiety and fear-related personality traits. Here we discuss some of the challenges in testing this theory and, as an example, present a pilot study that aimed to dissociate brain activity during pursuit by threat and goal conflict.

Threat-sensitivity in affective disorders: A case-control study.

Background: Anxiety disorders are highly comorbid with major depression but differ in their symptom profiles and pharmacological responses. Threat-sensitivity may explain such differences, yet research on its relationship to specific disorders is lacking.

Methods: One-hundred patients (71 women) and 35 healthy controls (23 women) were recruited.

Brain activation during human defensive behaviour: A systematic review and preliminary meta-analysis.

The neural underpinnings of defensive behaviour have implications for both basic research and clinical translation. This review systematically collates published research on neural response during simple avoidance of threat and approach-avoidance behaviour during goal-conflicting situations and presents an exploratory meta-analysis of available whole-brain data. Scopus, PsychInfo and Web of Science databases were searched for the period up to March 2018.

Meta-analyses of the neural mechanisms and predictors of response to psychotherapy in depression and anxiety.

Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying psychological therapy could aid understanding of recovery processes and help target treatments. The dual-process model hypothesises that psychological therapy is associated with increased emotional-regulation in prefrontal brain regions and decreased implicit emotional-reactivity in limbic regions; however, research has yielded inconsistent findings. Meta-analyses of brain activity changes accompanying psychological therapy (22 studies, n = 352) and neural predictors of symptomatic improvement (11 studies, n = 293) in depression and anxiety were conducted using seed-based d mapping.

Prescreening clinical trial volunteers using an online personality questionnaire.

Background: The cost of a clinical trial is affected by the efficiency of participant recruitment. It would be desirable to create a prescreening method that identifies appropriate candidates for full screening, in order to prevent inconvenience for both trial and volunteers. This study presents an online prescreening tool for this purpose.

Effects of lorazepam on saccadic eye movements: the role of sex, task characteristics and baseline traits.

Background: Saccadic eye movements are controlled by a network of parietal, frontal, striatal, cerebellar and brainstem regions. The saccadic peak velocity is an established biomarker of benzodiazepine effects, with benzodiazepines reliably reducing the peak velocity.

Aims: In this study, we aimed to replicate the effects of benzodiazepines on peak velocity and we investigated effects on previously less studied measures of saccades.

Thinking too much: self-generated thought as the engine of neuroticism.

Neuroticism is a dimension of personality that captures trait individual differences in the tendency to experience negative thoughts and feelings. Established theories explain neuroticism in terms of threat sensitivity, but have limited heuristic value since they cannot account for features of neuroticism that are unrelated to threat, such as creativity and negative psychological states experienced in benign, threat-free environments. We address this issue by proposing that neuroticism stems from trait individual differences in activity in brain circuits that govern the nature of self-generated thought (SGT).

A dose of ruthlessness: interpersonal moral judgment is hardened by the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam.

Neuroimaging data suggest that emotional brain systems are more strongly engaged by moral dilemmas in which innocent people are directly harmed than by dilemmas in which harm is remotely inflicted. In order to test the possibility that this emotional engagement involves anxiety, we investigated the effects of 1 mg and 2 mg of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam on the response choices of 40 healthy volunteers (20 male) in moral-personal, moral-impersonal, and nonmoral dilemmas. We found that lorazepam caused a dose-dependent increase in participants' willingness to endorse responses that directly harm other humans in moral-personal dilemmas but did not significantly affect response choices in moral-impersonal dilemmas or nonmoral dilemmas.

A facial expression for anxiety.

Anxiety and fear are often confounded in discussions of human emotions. However, studies of rodent defensive reactions under naturalistic conditions suggest anxiety is functionally distinct from fear. Unambiguous threats, such as predators, elicit flight from rodents (if an escape-route is available), whereas ambiguous threats (e.

Personality and defensive reactions: fear, trait anxiety, and threat magnification.

The revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (rRST) of personality (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) maintains that trait individual differences in the operation of defensive systems relate to facets of human personality, most notably anxiety and fear. We investigated this theory in 2 separate studies (total N=270) using a threat scenario research strategy (Blanchard, Hynd, Minke, Minemoto, & Blanchard, 2001). Consistent with rRST, results showed that individuals with high fear questionnaire scores tended to select defensive responses entailing orientation away from threat (e.

Effects of Lorazepam and citalopram on human defensive reactions: ethopharmacological differentiation of fear and anxiety.

Drugs that are clinically effective against generalized anxiety disorder preferentially alter rodent risk assessment behavior, whereas drugs that are clinically effective against panic disorder preferentially alter rodent flight behavior. The theoretical principle of "defensive direction" explains the pattern of associations between emotion and defensive behavior in terms of the differing functional demands arising from cautious approach to threat (anxiety) versus departure from threat (fear), offering the prospect that clinically important emotions may be explained using a single rubric of defense. We used a within-subjects, placebo-controlled, design to test this theory, measuring the effects of citalopram and lorazepam on the defensive behavior of 30 healthy adult male humans.

Fear and anxiety as separable emotions: an investigation of the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory of personality.

The Gray and McNaughton (2000) theory draws on a wide range of animal data to hypothesize that the emotions of fear and anxiety are separable. The authors tested their hypothesis in two studies. The first study examined associations between scores on questionnaire measures of fear, anxiety, and neuroticism; correlational analysis revealed that fear and anxiety are not interchangeable constructs.

The role of theory in the psychophysiology of personality: from Ivan Pavlov to Jeffrey Gray.

Psychophysiological approaches to personality have made significant progress in recent years, partly as a spin-off of technological innovation (e.g., functional neuroimaging) and partly as a result of an emerging theoretical consensus regarding the structure and biology of basic processes.

Reactions to threat and personality: psychometric differentiation of intensity and direction dimensions of human defensive behaviour.

Gray and McNaughton [Gray JA, McNaughton N. The neuropsychology of anxiety. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2000] predict that fear is associated with orientation away from threat whereas anxiety is associated with orientation towards threat; this first dimension of 'defensive direction' is independent of a second dimension of 'defensive intensity'.