Publications by authors named "Emily E Bernstein"

Article Synopsis
  • Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a serious problem that isn't treated enough, and using online therapy could help people get better access to treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
  • In a study with 77 adults using a 12-week guided smartphone program for BDD, they sent a lot of messages to their coaches to get support.
  • The researchers found three main ways people interacted with their coaches and discovered that younger users tended to communicate less while older users communicated more, and this affected how well they followed the treatment.
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Background: Major depressive disorder affects approximately 1 in 5 adults during their lifetime and is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Yet, a minority receive adequate treatment due to person-level (eg, geographical distance to providers) and systems-level (eg, shortage of trained providers) barriers. Digital tools could improve this treatment gap by reducing the time and frequency of therapy sessions needed for effective treatment through the provision of flexible, automated support.

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Background: Physical activity has well-known and broad health benefits, including antidepressive and anxiolytic effects. However, only approximately half of Americans meet even the minimum exercise recommendations. Individuals with anxiety, depression, or related conditions are even less likely to do so.

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: This manuscript describes an evidence-based, student-led, single-session group intervention to support emotional wellbeing among graduate students. The present objective is to provide a roadmap for other universities. : Key participants include clinical psychology graduate students (leader and workshop facilitators), faculty supervisor, representatives from receiving departments or schools, and institutional advocates.

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Background: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is severe, undertreated, and relatively common. Although gold-standard cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for BDD has strong empirical support, a significant number of patients do not respond. More work is needed to understand BDD's etiology and modifiable barriers to treatment response.

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Brief, transdiagnostic interventions are an efficient form of mental health care for resource-limited settings like universities. Little research, however, has examined for whom these treatments are most effective. One important factor may be psychotherapy treatment history.

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Background: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a severe and undertreated condition. Although cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the first-line psychosocial treatment for this common disorder, how the intervention works is insufficiently understood. Specific pathways have been hypothesized, but only one small study has examined the precise nature of treatment effects of CBT, and no prior study has examined the effects of supportive psychotherapy (SPT).

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Background: Few patients receive cognitive behavioral therapy, the gold-standard for body dysmorphic disorder (CBT-BDD). Smartphones can make evidence-based interventions, like CBT-BDD, more accessible and scalable. A key question is: how do patients view it? Low credibility and expectancy would likely translate to low uptake and engagement outside of research settings, diminishing the impact.

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Objective: Graduate students frequently experience anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Counseling centers struggle to meet this need. Brief, skills-based treatments to mitigate burgeoning or mild mental health problems could alleviate this problem.

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Introduction: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is severe, chronic, and undertreated. Apps could substantially improve treatment access.

Objective: We provide an initial test of the usability and efficacy of coach-supported app-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for BDD.

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Background: Smartphone app-based therapies offer clear promise for reducing the gap in available mental health care for people at risk for or people with mental illness. To this end, as smartphone ownership has become widespread, app-based therapies have become increasingly common. However, the research on app-based therapies is lagging behind.

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The practice of therapeutic skills outside of sessions in which they are learned is one presumed key component of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Yet, our understanding of how skills practice relates to clinical outcomes remains limited. Here, we explored patients' emotional responses to CBT skills practice in a pilot study pairing smartphone-app-delivered skills reminders and guided practice (ecological momentary intervention [EMI]) using ecological momentary assessment (EMA).

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Background: Serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are first-line pharmacotherapy for the treatment of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a common and severe disorder. However, prior research has not focused on or identified definitive predictors of SRI treatment outcomes. Leveraging precision medicine techniques such as machine learning can facilitate the prediction of treatment outcomes.

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Anxiety and depressive disorders are common psychiatric conditions with high rates of co-occurrence. Although traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) protocols targeting individual anxiety and depressive disorder diagnoses have been shown to be effective, such "single-diagnosis" approaches pose challenges for providers who treat patients with multiple comorbidities and for large-scale dissemination of and training in evidence-based psychological treatments. To help meet this need, newer "transdiagnostic" CBT interventions targeting shared underlying features across anxiety, depressive, and related disorders have been developed in recent years.

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The Clark and Wells (1995) model of social anxiety disorder postulates that three types of maladaptive social self-beliefs (high standard, conditional, and unconditional beliefs) play a crucial role in the development of fear and avoidance of social-evaluative situations-i.e., the hallmark symptoms of social anxiety disorder.

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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by overgeneralized emotional reactivity following a trauma. Similarities between current, safe contexts and past, threatening events trigger recurrent, distressing responses and can contribute to a host of symptoms, including reexperiencing and hypervigilance. Mnemonic discrimination, a component process of episodic memory, could promote overgeneralization when impaired.

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Individuals with bipolar disorder are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease and are less likely to adhere to lifestyle interventions than the general population. To decrease cardiovascular risk and improve adherence to lifestyle interventions, we developed the Nutrition Exercise and Wellness Treatment (NEW Tx). NEW Tx is an 18-session, 20-week cognitive behavioral therapy-based treatment comprising 3 modules: Nutrition, Exercise, and Wellness.

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Background: Cognitive vulnerability theories of depression outline multiple, distinct inferential biases constitutive of cognitive vulnerability to depression. These include attributing negative events to internal, stable, and global factors, assuming that negative events will lead to further negative consequences, and inferring that negative events reflect negative characteristics about the self. Extant research has insufficiently examined these biases as distinct, limiting our understanding of how the individual cognitive vulnerability components interrelate and confer risk for depression symptoms.

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Aerobic exercise has broad cognitive benefits. One target of interest is enhanced memory. The present study explored pattern separation as a specific memory process that could be sensitive to acute and regular exercise and clinically significant for disorders (e.

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Background: Individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) are more likely than the general population to develop risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in this clinical population. To address this disproportionate medical burden, we developed Nutrition Exercise and Wellness Treatment (NEW Tx), a lifestyle intervention for individuals with BD.

Methods: In this study, participants were randomized to NEW Tx (n = 19) or a treatment as usual waitlist (n = 19).

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Background And Objectives: Efficacious interventions soon after trauma exposure to prevent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are scarce. Evidence suggests that post-trauma, reminder cues to reactivate trauma memory followed by a cognitive visuospatial task, such as Tetris, reduce later intrusive images. Furthermore, studies indicate that aerobic exercise may reduce PTSD symptoms.

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Background And Objectives: Rumination is strongly associated with risk, maintenance, and worsening of depressive and related symptoms, and it predicts poor treatment response and relapse. More work is needed to clarify the nature and malleability of rumination. We propose reexamining trait rumination as a system of interacting components ("nodes").

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Pattern separation is a facet of memory encoding that facilitates the adaptive integration of old and new experiences. At the computational level, this process reduces overlap between how two entities are represented. Behaviorally, this allows for greater memory resolution while avoiding memory interference; similar entities are perceived as distinct.

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