Web-based interpretation bias training to reduce anxiety: A sequential, multiple-assignment randomized trial.

Objective: Web-based cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I) can improve interpretation biases and anxiety symptoms but faces high rates of dropout. This study tested the effectiveness of web-based CBM-I relative to an active psychoeducation condition and the addition of low-intensity telecoaching for a subset of CBM-I participants.

Method: 1,234 anxious community adults (Mage = 35.

Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Video About Patients' Right to Evidence-Based Mental Health Care.

This study evaluated the impact of a direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing video designed to educate the public about patients' rights to evidence-based mental health care (EBMHC). Participants ( N = 632) were randomly assigned to an active DTC video condition, a control video condition, or a control condition without a video. Participants who watched the DTC video ( vs .

Striking the Balance: The Relative Benefits of Goal- and Youth-Focused Approaches to Youth Mentoring Relationships.

Targeted, goal-focused approaches to mentoring can improve behavioral and mental health outcomes than more recreational, non-specific approaches. However, a focus on goals needs to be balanced with openness to including mentees' preferences. This study builds on prior work by exploring the benefits of goal- and youth-focused approaches to mentoring relationships from the youth mentee's perspective, including their associations with relationship measures (closeness and tension) and mental health outcomes (i.

Implementation of a Technology-Enhanced Peer Mentor Referral System for First-Year University Students.

Unlabelled: COVID-19 forced college administrators to reassess how they provide students with the most effective methods of support. This project examined the first year of a novel digital peer mentoring program with the goal of connecting diverse students to campus resources they needed to navigate the transition to and through their first year of college. MentorHub, a referral and supportive accountability mobile application, was implemented with first-year undergraduates at a large, private university in the northeastern region of the USA.

Implicit and explicit COVID-19 associations and mental health in the United States: a large-scale examination and replication.

Background: Given the sensitive nature of COVID-19 beliefs, evaluating them explicitly and implicitly may provide a fuller picture of how these beliefs vary based on identities and how they relate to mental health.

Objective: Three novel brief implicit association tests (BIATs) were created and evaluated: two that measured COVID-19-as-dangerous (vs. safe) and one that measured COVID-19 precautions-as-necessary (vs.

Providing Human Support for the Use of Digital Mental Health Interventions: Systematic Meta-review.

Background: Digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) have been increasingly deployed to bridge gaps in mental health care, particularly given their promising efficacy. Nevertheless, attrition among DMHI users remains high. In response, human support has been studied as a means of improving retention to and outcomes of DMHIs.

The role of uncertainty, worry, and control in well-being: Evidence from the COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic in U.S. and China.

Uncertainty about the future often leads to worries about what the future will bring, which can have negative consequences for health and well-being. However, if worry can act as a motivator to promote efforts to prevent undesirable future outcomes, those negative consequences of worry may be mitigated. In this article, we apply a novel model of uncertainty, worry, and perceived control to predict psychological and physical well-being among four samples collected in China (Study 1; during the early COVID-19 outbreak in China) and the United States (Studies 2-4, during 4 weeks in May 2020, 4 weeks in November 2020, and cross-sectionally between April and November 2020).

Digital Mental Health Services: Moving From Promise to Results.

The papers in this special issue make a compelling case for the value of digital mental health services (DMHS; including technology-based interventions, assessments, and prevention programs) to help address some of the currently unmet needs in mental health care. At the same time, the papers highlight the work that needs to be accomplished for DMHS to fulfill their promise. We review the papers' contributions in terms of (a) the imperative to increase access to evidence-informed, high-quality care, especially for underserved populations, both in the United States and globally; (b) ways to use DMHS to improve the ways that clinical care is provided to make treatment provision more effective and efficient; and (c) the current state of the research on DMHS for emotional disorders.

Lessons Learned: Providing Supportive Accountability in an Online Anxiety Intervention.

Technology-delivered interventions have the potential to help address the treatment gap in mental health care but are plagued by high attrition. Adding coaching, or minimal contact with a nonspecialist provider, may encourage engagement and decrease dropout, while remaining scalable. Coaching has been studied in interventions for various mental health conditions but has not yet been tested with anxious samples.

Paraprofessional Youth Mentoring: A Framework for Integrating Youth Mentoring with Helping Institutions and Professions.

The demand for child mental health services, including those provided by psychologists, counselors, and social workers, exceeds the supply. This trend is expected to continue or worsen unless there are substantial structural changes in how mental health services are provided. We propose a framework for paraprofessional youth mentors, defined as a subgroup of professionally supervised, non-expert volunteer or paid mentors to whom aspects of professional helping tasks are delegated.

Which variations of a brief cognitive bias modification session for interpretations lead to the strongest effects?

Background: Brief computerized programs that train less threatening interpretations (termed Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretations, or CBM-I) can shift interpretation biases and subsequent anxiety symptoms. However, results have been inconsistent, particularly for studies conducted over the Internet.

Methods: The current exploratory study tests 13 variations of a single brief session of CBM-I, a non-CBM-I cognitive flexibility condition, a neutral condition, and a no task control condition in an analogue sample with moderate to severe anxiety.

Implicit and Explicit Beliefs About the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy vs. Medication: A Large-Scale Examination and Replication.

One exploratory study (N = 10,335) and one preregistered replication and extension study (N = 6648) evaluated implicit and explicit beliefs in the effectiveness of psychotherapy versus medication, and whether these beliefs vary as a function of demographics, mental health difficulties, and treatment experiences. Data were collected from a sample of visitors to a mental health research website who completed the Therapy vs. Medication Effectiveness Implicit Association Test (IAT).

Improving the reach of clinical practice guidelines: An experimental investigation of message framing on user engagement.

Despite strong evidence for the efficacy of PTSD treatments, most affected individuals are not receiving these treatments, in part because they may not know that evidence-based treatments exist. The American Psychological Association published a website to disseminate information about their Clinical Practice Guideline for treating PTSD. In Study 1, Google Optimize was used in a field study to examine whether altering the subheadings to three of the website pages would increase site visitor engagement.

Clinical psychology PhD students' admission experiences: Implications for recruiting racial/ethnic minority and LGBTQ students.

Aim: The purpose of this study was to explore differences in the clinical psychology PhD program admissions experience (i.e., interviewing and decision-making) by race/ethnicity and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identity.

Implicit Cognition and Psychopathology: Looking Back and Looking Forward.

Implicit cognitive processing is theorized to have a central role in many forms of psychopathology. In the current review, we focus on implicit associations, by which we mean evaluative representations in memory that are difficult to control and do not require conscious reflection to influence affect, cognition, or behavior. We consider definitional and measurement challenges before examining recent empirical evidence for these associations in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, posttraumatic stress, depressive, and alcohol use disorders.

Remembering or knowing how we felt: Depression and anxiety symptoms predict retrieval processes during emotional self-report.

Researchers and clinicians routinely rely on patients' retrospective emotional self-reports to guide diagnosis and treatment, despite evidence of impaired autobiographical memory and retrieval of emotional information in depression and anxiety. To clarify the nature and specificity of these impairments, we conducted two large online data collections (Study 1, = 1,983; Study 2, = 900) examining whether depression and/or anxiety symptoms would uniquely predict the use of self-reported episodic (i.e.

Implicit health associations across the adult lifespan.

Objective: Explicit reports of one's health self-concept (e.g. rate your overall health) are commonly used in research and clinical practice.

Moderators of age effects on attention bias toward threat and its association with anxiety.

Objective: The current study used a research domain criteria (RDoC) approach to assess age differences in multiple indicators of attention bias and its ties to anxiety, examining stimulus domain and cognitive control as moderators of older adults' oft-cited positivity effect (bias towards positive and away from negative stimuli, when compared to younger adults).

Method: 38 Younger adults and 38 older adults were administered a battery of cognitive control and trait and state anxiety measures, and completed a dot-probe task to assess attention bias, during which reaction time and fixation duration (using eye-tracking) were recorded for negative and neutral social (a salient threat domain for younger adults) and physical (a salient threat domain for older adults) stimuli.

Results: Mixed-effects models demonstrated that older adults were faster to react to dot-probe trials when the probe appeared in the place of negative (vs.

Towards greater understanding of addiction stigma: Intersectionality with race/ethnicity and gender.

Background: In spite of the significant burden associated with substance use disorders, especially among persons who inject drugs (PWIDs), most affected individuals do not engage with any type of formal or informal treatment. Addiction stigma, which is represented by negative social attitudes toward individuals who use alcohol and/or other drugs, is one of the barriers to care that is poorly understood. The current study: a) assessed implicit (indirect and difficult to consciously control) and explicit (consciously controlled) beliefs about PWIDs among visitors to a public web site; and b) experimentally investigated the effects of ethnicity/race and gender on those implicit and explicit beliefs.

Moderators of implicit and explicit drinking identity in a large US adult sample.

Drinking identity (viewing oneself as a drinker) is a potential risk factor for problematic drinking in US undergraduate samples. Whether that risk extends to a broader, more general US sample is unknown. Additionally, there are critical, unanswered questions with respect to moderators of the drinking identity-problematic drinking relationship; an important issue for designing prevention efforts.

Characterizing implicit mental health associations across clinical domains.

Background And Objectives: Implicit associations are relatively uncontrollable associations between concepts in memory. The current investigation focuses on implicit associations in four mental health domains (alcohol use, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders) and how these implicit associations: a) relate to explicit associations and b) self-reported clinical symptoms within the same domains, and c) vary based on demographic characteristics (age, gender, race, ethnicity, and education).

Methods: Participants (volunteers over age 18 to a research website) completed implicit association (Implicit Association Tests), explicit association (self + psychopathology or attitudes toward food, using semantic differential items), and symptom measures at the Project Implicit Mental Health website tied to: alcohol use (N = 12,387), anxiety (N = 21,304), depression (N = 24,126), or eating disorders (N = 10,115).

Correlates of public support toward federal funding for harm reduction strategies.

Background: Historically, US federal policy has not supported harm reduction interventions, such as safe injection facilities (SIFs) and needle and syringe programs (NSPs), which can reduce the burden associated with injection drug use. Given recent increases in abuse of both legal and illegal opioids, there has been a renewed debate about effective ways to address this problem. The current study (1) assessed participants' support for SIFs and NSPs, and (2) evaluated several demographic factors (e.

Evaluating age differences in coping motives as a mediator of the link between social anxiety symptoms and alcohol problems.

The goal of this study is to evaluate whether coping motives mediate the relationship between self-reported symptoms of social anxiety and alcohol problems across different age groups, building on previous research conducted among emerging adults. This study focuses on adult drinkers, including emerging adults (aged 18-25 years; n = 148), young adults (aged 26-39 years; n = 68), and middle-aged adults (aged 40-65 years; n = 51). All participants completed measures of social anxiety symptoms, alcohol problems, and coping motives, administered via the Web.

Wounds that can't be seen: implicit trauma associations predict posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Background And Objectives: Prominent theories suggest that explicit and implicit cognitive biases are critical in the development and maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, studies evaluating implicit PTSD-related cognitive biases are rare, and findings are mixed. We developed two adaptions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the "traumatized self" IAT (evaluations of the self as traumatized vs.