Correction: Prospective mental imagery as its link with anxiety and depression in prisoners.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Prospective mental imagery and its link with anxiety and depression in prisoners.

Mental imagery is known to play a key role in the development and maintenance of depression and anxiety. Prisoners commonly experience psychological distress, but interventions to address this are currently lacking. We aimed to examine the link between prospective mental imagery and anxiety and depression among prisoners.

A comparison of immersive virtual reality with traditional neuropsychological measures in the assessment of executive functions.

Objective: This study investigated immersive virtual reality (IVR), as a novel technique to test executive function of healthy younger and older adults. We predicted IVR tasks to have greater predictive power than traditional measures when assessing age-related cognitive functioning due to the real-world validity of the tasks.

Methods: Participants (n=40) completed the Stroop colour-word test and the trail-making test (TMT) as traditional and commonly used assessments of executive functioning.

Voluntary and Involuntary Imagery in Social Anxiety.

Background: Negative mental imagery is ubiquitous in cognitive models of social anxiety and in the social anxiety literature. Previous research has shown that it is causal of increased anxiety, lower social performance ratings and lower implicit self-esteem. Despite its prevalence, few studies have investigated this imagery directly.

Undoing the past in order to lie in the present: Counterfactual thinking and deceptive communication.

This paper explores the proposal that there is a close link between counterfactual thinking and lying. Both require the imagination of alternatives to reality and we describe four studies which explore this link. In Study 1 we measured individual differences in both abilities and found that individuals with a tendency to generate counterfactual thoughts were also more likely to generate potential lies.

Negative mental imagery in public speaking anxiety: Forming cognitive resistance by taxing visuospatial working memory.

Background And Objectives: This study sought to reconcile two lines of research. Previous studies have identified a prevalent and causal role of negative imagery in social phobia and public speaking anxiety; others have demonstrated that lateral eye movements during visualisation of imagery reduce its vividness, most likely by loading the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory. It was hypothesised that using eye movements to reduce the intensity of negative imagery associated with public speaking may reduce anxiety resulting from imagining a public speaking scenario compared to an auditory control task.

Assessing vividness of mental imagery: The Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire.

Mental imagery may occur in any sensory modality, although visual imagery has been most studied. A sensitive measure of the vividness of imagery across a range of modalities is needed: the shorter version of Bett's Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (Sheehan, , J. Clin.

Assessing mental imagery in clinical psychology: a review of imagery measures and a guiding framework.

Mental imagery is an under-explored field in clinical psychology research but presents a topic of potential interest and relevance across many clinical disorders, including social phobia, schizophrenia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is currently a lack of a guiding framework from which clinicians may select the domains or associated measures most likely to be of appropriate use in mental imagery research. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach and present a review of studies across experimental psychology and clinical psychology in order to highlight the key domains and measures most likely to be of relevance.

Imagery in the aftermath of viewing a traumatic film: using cognitive tasks to modulate the development of involuntary memory.

Background And Objectives: Involuntary autobiographical memories that spring unbidden into conscious awareness form part of everyday experience. In psychopathology, involuntary memories can be associated with significant distress. However, the cognitive mechanisms associated with the development of involuntary memories require further investigation and understanding.

Mood stability versus mood instability in bipolar disorder: a possible role for emotional mental imagery.

A cognitive model of bipolar disorder suggests that mental imagery acts as an emotional amplifier of mood and may be heightened in bipolar disorder. First, we tested whether patients with bipolar disorder would score higher on mental imagery measures than a matched healthy control group. Second, we examined differences in imagery between patients divided into groups according to their level of mood stability.

Prospective mental imagery in patients with major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders.

Prospective negative cognitions are suggested to play an important role in maintaining anxiety disorders and major depressive disorder (MDD). However, little is known about positive prospective mental imagery. This study investigated differences in prospective mental imagery among 27 patients with anxiety disorders, 24 patients with MDD, and 32 control participants.

Measuring Intrusive Prospective Imagery using the Impact of Future Events Scale (IFES): Psychometric properties and relation to risk for Bipolar Disorder.

We define intrusive prospective imagery as the experience of mental imagery of events that may happen in the future and which come to mind involuntarily. This everyday phenomenon may be exacerbated in psychological disorders such as bipolar disorder (Holmes, Geddes, Colom, & Goodwin, 2008) although specific measures to assess this have been lacking. We recently developed the Impact of Future Events Scale (IFES; Deeprose & Holmes, 2010), which is further examined in the current paper.

Key steps in developing a cognitive vaccine against traumatic flashbacks: visuospatial Tetris versus verbal Pub Quiz.

Background: Flashbacks (intrusive memories of a traumatic event) are the hallmark feature of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, however preventative interventions are lacking. Tetris may offer a 'cognitive vaccine' [1] against flashback development after trauma exposure. We previously reported that playing the computer game Tetris soon after viewing traumatic material reduced flashbacks compared to no-task [1].

An exploration of prospective imagery: the impact of future events scale.

Background: Mental imagery of the future has clear clinical importance, although little is known about intrusive, prospective imagery of personally-relevant events. Currently, no measure is available to assess this.

Aims: The Impact of Future Events Scale (IFES) was created to assess the impact of intrusive, prospective, personally-relevant imagery.

Mental imagery and emotion in treatment across disorders: using the example of depression.

Abnormalities in mental imagery have been implicated in a range of mental health conditions. Imagery has a particularly powerful effect on emotion and as such plays a particularly important role in emotional disorders. In depression, not only is the occurrence of intrusive negative imagery problematic, but also the lack of positive (in particular, future-directed) imagery is important.

Can playing the computer game "Tetris" reduce the build-up of flashbacks for trauma? A proposal from cognitive science.

Background: Flashbacks are the hallmark symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although we have successful treatments for full-blown PTSD, early interventions are lacking. We propose the utility of developing a 'cognitive vaccine' to prevent PTSD flashback development following exposure to trauma.

Unconscious memory formation during anaesthesia.

Do patients form memories of intra-operative events when they are adequately anaesthetized? Studies of memory priming during anaesthesia with depth or awareness monitoring provide some evidence that they do, although only the most basic form of memory function, perceptual priming, persists when patients are unconscious. The probability of memory encoding increases as depth of anaesthesia decreases. There is a theoretical possibility that patients can be adversely affected, through memory priming, by comments made in the operating theatre, and some evidence that positive intra-operative suggestions can benefit patients.

Is priming during anesthesia unconscious?

General anesthesia provides an alternative to typical laboratory paradigms for investigating implicit learning. We assess the evidence that a simple type of learning--priming--can occur without consciousness. Although priming has been shown to be a small but persistent phenomenon in surgical patients (Merikle & Daneman, 1996) there is reason to question whether it occurs implicitly due to problems in detecting awareness using typical clinical signs.