Publications by authors named "Elzinga B"

The disruption of the parent-child attachment bond due to parental death (PD) may lead to lingering feelings of unsafety or insecurity that might potentially transfer to adult intimate relationships. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether experiencing childhood parental death (CPD) was associated with adult romantic relationship formation and stability, attachment style, and relationship satisfaction, and whether this is dependent on (in)secure parental bonding. In this cross-sectional study, relationship indicators were assessed using self-report questionnaires in adults (25-45 years old) who experienced PD during childhood (n = 236), in adulthood (n = 301), and who did not experience PD (n = 278).

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Parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information about strangers may induce fears of these strangers in adolescents. In this multi-method experimental study, utilizing a within-subject design, parents provided standardized verbal threat or safety information to their offspring (N = 77, M = 11.

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Children can acquire fears of novel stimuli as a result of listening to parental verbal threat information about these stimuli (i.e., instructional learning).

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigated how adolescents with clinical depression and their parents perceive the causes of the depression, focusing on the overlaps and differences in their beliefs.
  • - 34 adolescents with depression and their parents were interviewed separately to gather insights about personal, social, and school-related factors influencing the adolescents' feelings.
  • - Results showed that parents generally have a good grasp of their child's beliefs but often underestimate their insights, particularly regarding the cumulative effects of stress; understanding these differences could be beneficial in therapy.
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Adolescents with depression tend to perceive behavior of parents as less positive than adolescents without depression, but conclusions are based on retrospective reports assessed once or over long time intervals, with the risk of memory biases affecting the recall. The current study used ecological momentary assessments to examine the link between adolescent affect and the amount of warmth and criticism expressed by both mothers and fathers in families with adolescents with depression versus adolescents without psychopathology in daily life. It also explored the possible bias by assessing parenting on the momentary, daily (EMA), and retrospective level.

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Social interactions, spending time together, and relationships are important for individuals' well-being, with people feeling happier when they spend more time with others. So far, most information about the frequency and duration of spending time together is based on self-report questionnaires. Although recent technological innovations have stimulated the development of objective approaches for measuring physical proximity in humans in everyday life, these methods still have substantial limitations.

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Background: In this study we compare results obtained when applying the monozygotic twin difference cross-lagged panel model (MZD-CLPM) and a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to the same data. Each of these models is designed to strengthen researchers' ability to draw causal inference from cross-lagged associations. We explore differences and similarities in how each model does this, and in the results each model produces.

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Background: Understanding how child maltreatment is passed down from one generation to the next is crucial for the development of intervention and prevention strategies that may break the cycle of child maltreatment. Changes in emotion recognition due to childhood maltreatment have repeatedly been found, and may underly the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.

Objective: In this study we, therefore, examined whether the ability to recognize emotions plays a role in the intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect.

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Eye contact improves mood, facilitates connectedness, and is assumed to strengthen the parent-child bond. Adolescent depression is linked to difficulties in social interactions, the parent-child bond included. Our goal was to elucidate adolescents' affective and neural responses to prolonged eye contact with one's parent in nondepressed adolescents (HC) and how these responses are affected in depressed adolescents.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study explored the emotional dynamics within family triads (adolescents and their parents) by examining how their feelings of happiness, sadness, relaxation, and irritation interact in daily life.
  • Researchers analyzed data from 60 families over 14 days, using advanced modeling techniques to understand how emotions were related both in real-time and over time between parents and adolescents.
  • The findings not only highlighted the bidirectional influence of affect states within families but also provided insights for improving future research on family emotional interactions, including considerations for missing data and study design.
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Previous studies have shown that parents with a history of childhood abuse are at increased risk of perpetrating child abuse. To break the cycle of childhood abuse we need to better understand the mechanisms that play a role. In a cross-sectional extended family design including three generations ( = 250, 59% female), we examined the possible mediating role of parental psychopathology and emotion regulation in the association between a history of childhood abuse and perpetrating child abuse.

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One of the most prevalent nonverbal, social phenomena known to automatically elicit self- and other-referential processes is eye contact. By its negative effects on the perception of social safety and views about the self and others, childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) may fundamentally affect these processes. To investigate whether the socioaffective consequences of CEM may become visible in response to (prolonged) eye gaze, 79 adult participants (mean [M] = 49.

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Experiencing parental death during childhood is an adverse, potentially traumatic experience that may have substantial long-term effects on mental and physical well-being. The current study was based on data of the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety to investigate mental health (i.e.

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Background: Childhood trauma (CT) may increase vulnerability to psychopathology through affective dysregulation (greater variability, autocorrelation, and instability of emotional symptoms). However, CT associations with dynamic affect fluctuations while considering differences in mean affect levels across CT status have been understudied.

Methods: 346 adults (age = 49.

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Background: Adolescents with depression exhibit negative biases in autobiographical memory with detrimental consequences for their self-concept and well-being. Investigating how adolescents relive positive autobiographical memories and activate the underlying neural networks could reveal mechanisms that drive such biases. This study investigated neural networks when reliving positive and neutral memories, and how neural activity is modulated by valence and vividness in adolescents with and without depression.

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The current study aimed to evaluate how adolescents' and parents' perceptions of daily parenting-and their discrepancies-relate to daily parent and adolescent affect. Daily parental warmth and affect were assessed using electronic diaries in 150 American adolescent-parent dyads (61.3% females, M  = 14.

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Background: Parent-adolescent interactions, particularly parental criticism and praise, have previously been identified as factors relevant to self-concept development and, when negative, to adolescent depression. Yet, whether adolescents with depression show aberrant emotional and neural to parental criticism and praise is understudied.

Methods: Adolescents with depression ( = 20) and healthy controls ( = 59) received feedback supposedly provided by their mother or father in the form of negative ('untrustworthy'), neutral ('chaotic'), and positive ('respectful') personality evaluations while in an MRI-scanner.

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Infants can acquire fears vicariously by observing parents' fearful reactions to novel stimuli in everyday situations (i.e., modeling).

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Background: Childhood trauma (CT) is associated with severe sequelae, including stress-related mental health disorders that can perpetuate long into adulthood. A key mechanism in this relationship seems to be emotion regulation. We aimed to investigate (1) whether childhood trauma is associated with anger in adulthood, and, if so, (2) to explore which types of childhood trauma predominate in the prediction of anger in a cohort that included participants with and without current affective disorders.

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Article Synopsis
  • Social acceptance and rejection impact self-esteem, influencing how open individuals are to social experiences and learning from them.
  • A study manipulated social feedback and found that positive evaluations boosted self-esteem, leading to greater learning from social information while reducing learning from personal experiences.
  • Conversely, negative evaluations lowered self-esteem, which also decreased the ability to learn from individual experiences, suggesting that self-esteem changes can shape learning preferences between social and non-social information.
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Background: It is unclear to what extent mental health and negative life events (NLEs) contribute to weight change in patients with overweight. This study aimed to evaluate the association of anxiety, depression, NLEs and quality of life (QoL) with weight change over ten years in middle-aged individuals with overweight.

Methods: Population-based cohort study of 2889 middle-aged men and women with a body mass index ≥27 kg/m.

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Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental disorders in adolescence carrying a serious risk of adverse development later in life. Extant treatments are limited in effectiveness and have high drop-out and relapse rates. A body of literature has been published on the association between distressing/ traumatic experiences and development and maintenance of MDD, but the effectiveness of a trauma-focused treatment approach for MDD has hardly been studied.

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Purpose: Siblings of probands with depressive and anxiety disorders are at increased risk for psychopathology, but little is known about how risk factors operate within families to increase psychopathology for siblings. We examined the additional impact of psychosocial risk factors in probands-on top of or in combination with those in siblings-on depressive/anxious psychopathology in siblings.

Methods: The sample included 636 participants (M = 49.

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Introduction: Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that the effect of parental verbal threat information on the offspring's fear acquisition of novel stimuli may be causal. The current study investigated this verbal fear acquisition pathway from parents to children in the unique context of Covid-19 as a novel environmental threat for parents and children.

Methods: Using an online cross-sectional survey, we collected data about fear of Covid-19, parent-child communication, parental anxiety, and child temperament, in the period between June 11th 2020 and May 28th 2021.

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Background: This study aimed to investigate whether people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) can benefit from reliving positive autobiographical memories in terms of mood and state self-esteem and elucidate the neural processes supporting optimal memory reliving. Particularly the role of vividness and brain areas involved in autonoetic consciousness were studied, as key factors involved in improving mood and state self-esteem by positive memory reliving.

Methods: Women with BPD (N = 25), Healthy Controls (HC, N = 33) and controls with Low Self-Esteem (LSE, N = 22) relived four neutral and four positive autobiographical memories in an MRI scanner.

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