Using natural language processing to identify patterns associated with depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Combining data-driven natural language processing techniques with traditional methods using predefined word lists may offer greater insights into the connections between language patterns and depression and anxiety symptoms, particularly within specific stressful contexts.

Methods: Between 2020 and 2021, 1106 participants wrote narrative responses describing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS). We investigated language patterns associated with DASS symptoms using established categories from Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and sentiment analysis, as well as exploratory natural language processing techniques.

Overestimating the intensity of negative feelings in autobiographical memory: evidence from the 9/11 attack and COVID-19 pandemic.

When recalling autobiographical events, people not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e.

Human threat learning is associated with gut microbiota composition.

The ability to learn about threat and safety is critical for survival. Studies in rodent models have shown that the gut microbiota can modulate such behaviors. In humans, evidence showing an association with threat or extinction learning is lacking.

Implicit but not explicit extinction to threat-conditioned stimulus prevents spontaneous recovery of threat-potentiated startle responses in humans.

Introduction: It has long been posited that threat learning operates and forms under an affective and a cognitive learning system that is supported by different brain circuits. A primary drawback in exposure-based therapies is the high rate of relapse that occurs when higher order areas fail to inhibit responses driven by the defensive circuit. It has been shown that implicit exposure of fearful stimuli leads to a long-lasting reduction in avoidance behavior in patients with phobia.

Targeted Memory Reactivation during Sleep Adaptively Promotes the Strengthening or Weakening of Overlapping Memories.

System memory consolidation is conceptualized as an active process whereby newly encoded memory representations are strengthened through selective memory reactivation during sleep. However, our learning experience is highly overlapping in content (i.e.

Motivated encoding selectively promotes memory for future inconsequential semantically-related events.

Neurobiological models of long-term memory explain how memory for inconsequential events fades, unless these happen before or after other relevant (i.e., rewarding or aversive) or novel events.

Updating fearful memories with extinction training during reconsolidation: a human study using auditory aversive stimuli.

Learning to fear danger in the environment is essential to survival, but dysregulation of the fear system is at the core of many anxiety disorders. As a consequence, a great interest has emerged in developing strategies for suppressing fear memories in maladaptive cases. Recent research has focused in the process of reconsolidation where memories become labile after being retrieved.

Female degus (Octodon degus) monitor their environment while foraging socially.

Vigilance or scanning involves interruptions in foraging behavior when individuals lift their heads and conduct visual monitoring of the environment. Theoretical considerations assume that foraging with the "head down", and scanning ("head up") are mutually exclusive activities, such that foraging precludes vigilance. We tested this generalization in a socially foraging, small mammal model, the diurnal Chilean degu (Octodon degus).