Cognitive vulnerabilities and depressed mood in acquired brain injury.

Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), an important cause of long-term disability, is associated with increased rates of depression in addition to common cognitive and physical consequences. Past research has linked post-ABI depression to injury severity (e.g.

Mood, Activity Participation, and Leisure Engagement Satisfaction (MAPLES): results from a randomised controlled pilot feasibility trial for low mood in acquired brain injury.

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) is linked to increased depression risk. Existing therapies for depression in ABI (e.g.

Developing behavioural activation for people with acquired brain injury: a qualitative interpretive description study of barriers and facilitators to activity engagement.

Background: Acquired brain injuries (ABI) from stroke, head injury, or resected brain tumours are associated with poor emotional wellbeing and heightened risk of mood disorder. Common sequalae of ABI, such as poor attention and memory, can create barriers to the efficacy of cognitively demanding mood interventions, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Behavioural Activation (BA), where individuals plan and engage in reinforcing activities, is a promising alternative due to lower cognitive demands.

Measuring Intolerance of Uncertainty After Acquired Brain Injury: Factor Structure, Reliability, and Validity of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale-12.

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is a risk factor for poor mental health. Acquired brain injury (ABI; for example, stroke, traumatic brain injury) often brings considerable uncertainty and increased mood disorder vulnerability. The Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale-Short Form (IUS-12) is a brief, well-validated IU measure in non-ABI samples, comprising two subscales, namely, Prospective Anxiety and Inhibitory Anxiety.

A randomized control trial of the effects of home-based online attention training and working memory training on cognition and everyday function in a community stroke sample.

Cognitive difficulties are common following stroke and can have widespread impacts on everyday functioning. Technological advances offer the possibility of individualized cognitive training for patients at home, potentially providing a low-cost, low-intensity adjunct to rehabilitation services. Using this approach, we have previously demonstrated post-training improvements in attention and everyday functioning in fronto-parietal stroke patients.

Emotional mental imagery generation during spontaneous future thinking: relationship with optimism and negative mood.

Optimism is known to buffer against negative mood. Thus, understanding the factors that contribute to individual variation in optimism may inform interventions for mood disorders. Preliminary evidence suggests that the generation of mental imagery-based representations of positive relative to negative future scenarios is related to optimism.

Mood, Activity Participation, and Leisure Engagement Satisfaction (MAPLES): a randomised controlled pilot feasibility trial for low mood in acquired brain injury.

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) affects approximately 79.3 million individuals annually and is linked with elevated rates of depression and low mood. Existing methods for treating depression in ABI have shown mixed efficacy.

Mental imagery as a "motivational amplifier" to promote activities.

Facilitating engagement in rewarding activities is a key treatment target in depression. Mental imagery can increase engagement in planned behaviours, potentially due to its special role in representing emotionally salient experiences. The present study tested the hypothesis that mental imagery promotes motivation and engagement when planning pleasant and rewarding activities.

Dissociable effects of attention vs working memory training on cognitive performance and everyday functioning following fronto-parietal strokes.

Difficulties with attention are common following stroke, particularly in patients with frontal and parietal damage, and are associated with poor outcome. Home-based online cognitive training may have the potential to provide an efficient and effective way to improve attentional functions in such patients. Little work has been carried out to assess the efficacy of this approach in stroke patients, and the lack of studies with active control conditions and rigorous evaluations of cognitive functioning pre and post-training means understanding is limited as to whether and how such interventions may be effective.

Anticipated and imagined futures: prospective cognition and depressed mood following brain injury.

Objectives: Depression, which is common following acquired brain injury (ABI), has been shown to predict cognitive impairment, rehabilitation outcome, and quality of life. Whilst many studies have examined links between depression and cognitive-affective processing in the non-ABI population, their applicability to this important clinical group, where cognitive difficulties can be marked, remains unknown. Here, we investigated biases in prospective cognition, which is known to be disrupted in (non-ABI) depression yet important for well-being.

Spontaneous cognition in dysphoria: reduced positive bias in imagining the future.

Anomalies in future-oriented cognition are implicated in the maintenance of emotional disturbance within cognitive models of depression. Thinking about the future can involve mental imagery or verbal-linguistic mental representations. Research suggests that future thinking involving imagery representations may disproportionately impact on-going emotional experience in daily life relative to future thinking not involving imagery (verbal-linguistic representation only).

Rehabilitation of executive function and social cognition impairments after brain injury.

Purpose Of Review: Brain injury is a major cause of long-term disability. Executive and social cognition sequelae are associated with poor outcome. This review examines recent evidence on the efficacy of rehabilitation in these areas.

Emotion and personality factors influence the neural response to emotional stimuli.

Lindquist et al. assess the neural evidence for locationist versus psychological construction accounts of human emotion. A wealth of experimental and clinical investigations show that individual differences in emotion and personality influence emotion processing.

Disgust enhances the recollection of negative emotional images.

Memory is typically better for emotional relative to neutral images, an effect generally considered to be mediated by arousal. However, this explanation cannot explain the full pattern of findings in the literature. Two experiments are reported that investigate the differential effects of categorical affective states upon emotional memory and the contributions of stimulus dimensions other than pleasantness and arousal to any memory advantage.

Exploring the basis and boundary conditions of SenseCam-facilitated recollection.

SenseCam review has been shown to promote and sustain subsequent access to memories that might otherwise remain inaccessible. While SenseCam review facilitates recollection for personally experienced events, we know little about the boundary conditions under which this operates and about how underlying processing mechanisms can be optimally recruited to offset memory impairments of the sort that occur in dementia. This paper considers some of these issues with a view to targeting future research that not only clarifies our evolving body of theory about how memory works, but also informs about how memory-assistive technologies for patients might be employed to maximal effect.

SenseCam, imagery and bias in memory for wellbeing.

Identifying and modifying the negative interpretation bias that characterises depression is central to successful treatment. While accumulating evidence indicates that mental imagery is particularly effective in the modification of emotional bias, this research typically incorporates static and unrelated ambiguous stimuli. SenseCam technology, and the resulting video-like footage, offers an opportunity to produce training stimuli that are dynamic and self-relevant.

Recognition memory for pictorial material in subclinical depression.

Depression has been associated with impaired recollection of episodic details in tests of recognition memory that use verbal material. In two experiments, the remember/know procedure was employed to investigate the effects of dysphoric mood on recognition memory for pictorial materials that may not be subject to the same processing limitations found for verbal materials in depression. In Experiment 1, where the recognition test took place two weeks after encoding, subclinically depressed participants reported fewer know judgements which were likely to be at least partly due to a remember-to-know shift.

Assessing the automaticity of moral processing: efficient coding of moral information during narrative comprehension.

A long-standing theoretical debate concerns the involvement of principled reasoning versus relatively automatic intuitive-emotional processing in moral cognition. To address this, we investigated whether the mental models formed during story comprehension contain a moral dimension and whether this process is affected by cognitive load. A total of 72 participants read stories about fictional characters in a range of moral situations, such as a husband being tempted to commit adultery.

Functional neuroanatomy of emotions: a meta-analysis.

The application of functional neuroimaging to the study of human emotion has yielded valuable data; however, the conclusions that may be drawn from any one study are limited. We applied novel statistical techniques to the meta-analysis of 106 PET and fMRI studies of human emotion and tested predictions made by key neuroscientific models. The results demonstrated partial support for asymmetry accounts.