Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science.

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens' decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy.

Beyond direct reference: Comparing the present to the past promotes abstract processing.

A primary way that people make sense of their experience is by comparing various objects within their immediate environment to each other and to previously encountered objects. The objects involved in a comparison can be stimuli that are present within one's immediate environment, or mental representations of previously encountered stimuli that are now absent from one's immediate environment. In this research, we propose that the comparison process unfolds differently depending on whether an individual is comparing stimuli that are simultaneously present within a given context or is comparing a target stimulus to a stored representation of a previously encountered source stimulus.

Negative Autobiographical Memory in Depression Reflects Elevated Amygdala-Hippocampal Reactivity and Hippocampally Associated Emotion Regulation.

Background: Dysregulated autobiographical recall is observed in major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is unknown whether people with MDD show abnormalities in memory-, emotion-, and control-related brain systems during reactivity to and regulation of negative autobiographical memories.

Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify neural mechanisms underlying MDD-related emotional responses to negative autobiographical memories and the ability to downregulate these responses using a cognitive regulatory strategy known as reappraisal.

Finding Positive Meaning in Negative Experiences Engages Ventral Striatal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Regions Associated with Reward Valuation.

Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by negative stimuli, and positive reappraisal, which instead changes the emotional valence of arousal from negative to positive. Here we show that successful minimizing reappraisal tracked with decreased activity in the amygdala, but successful positive reappraisal tracked with increased activity in regions involved in computing reward value, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC (vmPFC).

Affective lability and difficulties with regulation are differentially associated with amygdala and prefrontal response in women with Borderline Personality Disorder.

The present neuroimaging study investigated two aspects of difficulties with emotion associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): affective lability and difficulty regulating emotion. While these two characteristics have been previously linked to BPD symptomology, it remains unknown whether individual differences in affective lability and emotion regulation difficulties are subserved by distinct neural substrates within a BPD sample. To address this issue, sixty women diagnosed with BPD were scanned while completing a task that assessed baseline emotional reactivity as well as top-down emotion regulation.

Concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response in adolescence and young adulthood.

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine a novel aspect of emotion regulation in adolescent development: whether age predicts differences in both the concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response. In the first, active regulation, phase of the testing session, fMRI data were collected while 56 healthy individuals (age range: 10.50-22.