Publications by authors named "Joanne L Bower"
The development of the Negative Mental Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-N).
Behav Cogn Psychother
October 2024
Background: Mental imagery plays a key role in the onset and maintenance of psychological disorders, and has become the target of psychological interventions for the treatment of several anxiety-related conditions. However, there are currently no transdiagnostic measures designed to assess the varied dimensions of mental imagery relevant to psychopathology.
Aim: To develop and validate a new measure assessing the experiences and appraisals of negative mental imagery.
Article Synopsis
- A systematic review and meta-analysis examined how sleep loss affects emotions, based on 154 studies involving 5,717 participants aged 7 to 79 years.
- Results indicated that all types of sleep loss (total deprivation, partial restriction, and fragmentation) led to decreased positive emotions, increased anxiety symptoms, and reduced emotional reactivity.
- Mixed results were found for negative emotions and depressive symptoms, with variations depending on the amount and type of sleep lost, highlighting the importance of sleep for emotional well-being.
How do the sleep features that characterise depression impact memory?
Emerg Top Life Sci
December 2023
Depression is associated with general sleep disturbance and abnormalities in sleep physiology. For example, compared with control subjects, depressed patients exhibit lower sleep efficiency, longer rapid eye movement (REM) sleep duration, and diminished slow-wave activity during non-REM sleep. A separate literature indicates that depression is also associated with many distinguishing memory characteristics, including emotional memory bias, overgeneral autobiographical memory, and impaired memory suppression.
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- Sleep patterns among youth (ages 8-17) after Hurricane Harvey were studied to understand their impact on mental health, particularly concerning post-traumatic stress symptoms.
- The study involved 68 participants who provided both subjective sleep assessments and objective sleep data through actigraphy 6-9 months post-disaster, while also considering pre-hurricane emotional health.
- Findings revealed that sleep disturbances and a tendency for eveningness were linked to higher levels of post-traumatic stress, with specific symptoms like re-experiencing and negative mood being more pronounced in those with poorer sleep.
Validation of the Mental Health Checklist (MHCL) during COVID-19 lockdown.
J Community Psychol
January 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unprecedented disruption to everyday life, including widespread social distancing and self-quarantining aimed at reducing the virus spread. The Mental Health Checklist (MHCL) is a measure developed to assess psychological health during extended periods of isolation and confinement, and has shown strong psychometric properties in community samples and during Antarctic missions. This study validated the MHCL in a sample of 359 U.
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- The study investigates the objective sleep parameters that affect children's perceptions of their sleep quality, challenging the common focus on sleep duration.
- Findings indicate that total sleep time and efficiency do not significantly relate to child-rated sleep quality, while wake after sleep onset (WASO) and N1% (a stage of sleep) show specific curvilinear relationships linked to higher sleep quality ratings.
- The researchers emphasize the need for more studies to further explore these objective sleep elements and their influence on children's sleep quality assessments.
Sleep restriction alters children's positive emotional responses, but effects are moderated by anxiety.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry
October 2020
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how lack of sleep affects children's emotional health, specifically looking at how it influences emotional processing in children with existing anxiety issues.
- Researchers assessed 53 children aged 7-11 under well-rested conditions and after restricted sleep (7 and 6 hours), monitoring various emotional reactions through lab tests and objective measures.
- Findings revealed that sleep restriction negatively affected children's positive emotions and emotional regulation, with pre-existing anxiety symptoms worsening these effects, suggesting significant implications for their social and emotional development.
Action Boundary Proximity Effects on Perceptual-Motor Judgments.
Aerosp Med Hum Perform
December 2019
Designed as a more ecological measure of reaction times, the Perception-Action Coupling Task (PACT) has shown good reliability and within-subject stability. However, a lengthy testing period was required. Perceptual-motor judgments are known to be affected by proximity of the stimulus to the action boundary.
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- Poor sleep in adolescents is linked to more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions, which might lead to emotional disorders later on.
- The study examined how sleep patterns affect a specific emotion regulation strategy called situation selection, which involves choosing to engage with positive situations or avoid negative ones.
- Results showed that inconsistent sleep schedules and longer times to fall asleep are associated with less avoidance of negative situations and a reduced tendency to select positive emotional experiences, particularly in boys.
A large portion of reproductive-aged women report experiencing distressing premenstrual symptoms. These symptoms can be exacerbated by concurrent mood problems and contribute to long-term depressive risk. However, difficulty sleeping and regulating emotional responses are also associated with the premenstrual phase and represent additional, well-established risk factors for depression.
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- The Perception-Action Coupling Task (PACT) aims to provide a more realistic measure of alertness and reaction times for aerospace researchers by having participants judge whether a virtual ball fits into an aperture.
- A study with 16 subjects assessed the PACT's reliability and bias through repeated testing, revealing that initiation time had the largest systematic bias, necessitating the removal of three cycles for accuracy improvement.
- Overall, the PACT demonstrated acceptable reliability and low variability after a familiarization period, reinforcing its potential as a stable measure in this research context.
Study Objectives: Sleep bruxism (SB) is common in children and is associated with somatic symptoms and sleep disturbance. Etiological theories posit the role of anxiety, suggesting youth with anxiety disorders may be at high risk for SB, but empirical data are lacking. Furthermore, parent report rather than polysomnography (PSG) has been used to examine SB-anxiety relationships in children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep problems in youth reliably forecast the development of anxiety and mood disorders, presumably due to increased emotional difficulties. However, precise emotional mechanisms have yet to be delineated. The current study investigated how sleep problems in adolescence are associated with different emotion regulation strategies, and how sleep and psychiatric risk may be indirectly associated via poor emotion regulation.
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