Objective: Web-based cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I) can improve interpretation biases and anxiety symptoms but faces high rates of dropout. This study tested the effectiveness of web-based CBM-I relative to an active psychoeducation condition and the addition of low-intensity telecoaching for a subset of CBM-I participants.
Method: 1,234 anxious community adults (Mage = 35.
Proc ACM Interact Mob Wearable Ubiquitous Technol
September 2023
Mobile sensing is a ubiquitous and useful tool to make inferences about individuals' mental health based on physiology and behavior patterns. Along with sensing features directly associated with mental health, it can be valuable to detect different features of social contexts to learn about social interaction patterns over time and across different environments. This can provide insight into diverse communities' academic, work and social lives, and their social networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Improvement in emotion regulation is a proposed transdiagnostic mechanism of change. However, treatment research is limited by disorder-specific investigations that assess a narrow number of emotion regulation strategies. Moreover, most assess pre-to-post-treatment change without examining short-term changes throughout psychotherapy that might influence treatment response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmotion regulation (ER) diversity, defined as the variety, frequency, and evenness of ER strategies used, may predict social anxiety (SA) severity. In a sample of individuals with high (113) or low (=42) SA severity, we tested whether four trait ER diversity metrics predicted group membership. We generalized existing trait ER diversity calculations to repeated-measures data to test if state-level metrics (using two weeks of EMA data) predicted SA severity within the higher severity group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-regulating systems change along different timescales. Within a given week, a depressed person's affect might oscillate around a low equilibrium point. However, when the timeframe is expanded to capture the year during which they onboarded antidepressant medication, their equilibrium and oscillatory patterns might reorganize around a higher affective point.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Biases in social reinforcement learning, or the process of learning to predict and optimize behavior based on rewards and punishments in the social environment, may underlie and maintain some negative cognitive biases that are characteristic of social anxiety. However, little is known about how cognitive and behavioral interventions may change social reinforcement learning in individuals who are anxious.
Objective: This study assessed whether a scalable, web-based cognitive bias modification for interpretations (CBM-I) intervention changed social reinforcement learning biases in participants with high social anxiety symptoms.
Investigations into emotion dysregulation predominantly focus on ineffective strategy selection and implementation. However, little empirical attention has been given to the possibility that failure to engage in emotion regulation (ER) may also indicate emotion dysregulation, especially when the reason for not regulating suggests skill or motivational deficits. We randomly sampled ER strategy use up to six times per day for 5 weeks in 113 adults with elevated social anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objectives: To present development considerations for online sleep diary systems that result in robust, interpretable, and reliable data; furthermore, to describe data management procedures to address common data entry errors that occur despite those considerations.
Methods: The online sleep diary capture component of the Sleep Healthy Using the Internet (SHUTi) intervention has been designed to promote data integrity. Features include diary entry restrictions to limit retrospective bias, reminder prompts and data visualizations to support user engagement, and data validation checks to reduce data entry errors.
Unlabelled: Most research on emotion regulation has focused on understanding individual emotion regulation strategies. Preliminary research, however, suggests that people often use several strategies to regulate their emotions in a given emotional scenario (polyregulation). The present research examined who uses polyregulation, when polyregulation is used, and how effective polyregulation is when it is used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry
September 2023
Background And Objectives: Reinforcement learning biases have been empirically linked to anhedonia in depression and theoretically linked to social anhedonia in social anxiety disorder, but little work has directly assessed how socially anxious individuals learn from social reward and punishment.
Methods: N = 157 individuals high and low in social anxiety symptoms completed a social probabilistic selection task that involved selecting between pairs of neutral faces with varying probabilities of changing to a happy or angry face. Computational modeling was performed to estimate learning rates.
Objectives: Communities of color in the United States systematically experience inequities in physical and mental health care compared to individuals who identify as non-Hispanic White. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated these structural drivers of inequity to disproportionate and devastating effects for persons of color. In addition to managing the direct effects of COVID-19 risk, persons of color were also navigating increased racial prejudice and discrimination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRefugees are at increased risk for developing mental health concerns due to high rates of trauma exposure and postmigration stressors. Moreover, barriers to accessing mental health services result in ongoing suffering within this population. Integrated care-which combines primary healthcare and mental healthcare into one cohesive, collaborative setting-may improve refugees' access to comprehensive physical and mental health services to ultimately better support this uniquely vulnerable population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Stress generation theory suggests that people engage in certain behaviors that causally generate "dependent" stressful life events. Stress generation has primarily been studied in the context of depression with limited consideration of anxiety. People with social anxiety exhibit maladaptive social and regulatory behaviors that may uniquely generate stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a novel method for quantifying transitions within multivariate binary time series data, using a sliding series of transition matrices, to derive metrics of stability and spread. We define stability as the trace of a transition matrix divided by the sum of all observed elements within that matrix. We define spread as the number of all non-zero cells in a transition matrix divided by the number of all possible cells in that matrix.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Health service psychology (HSP) graduate students experienced adverse mental health outcomes during COVID-19. However, little is known about how mental health outcomes changed in this population after the onset of COVID-19.
Methods: N = 496 HSP graduate students reported onset or worsening of mental health outcomes, inability to access mental health care, worry about COVID-19, and stress at two different timepoints during the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak (timepoint 1: May 1 to June 25, 2020; timepoint 2: September 2 to October 17, 2020).
Background: Social anxiety disorder is associated with distinct mobility patterns (e.g., increased time spent at home compared to non-anxious individuals), but we know little about if these patterns change following interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The extent to which a person believes they can change or control their own emotions is associated with trait-level symptoms of mood and anxiety-related psychopathology. Method: The present study examined how this belief relates to momentary and daily self-reports of affect, emotion regulation tendencies, and perceived effectiveness of emotion regulation attempts throughout a five-week experience sampling study conducted in = 113 high socially anxious people (https://osf.io/eprwt/).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Poor emotion regulation (ER) has been implicated in many mental illnesses, including social anxiety disorder. To work towards a scalable, low-cost intervention for improving ER, we developed a novel contextual recommender algorithm for ER strategies.
Design: N = 114 socially anxious participants were prompted via a mobile app up to six times daily for five weeks to report their emotional state, use of 19 different ER strategies (or no strategy), physical location, and social context.
Temporal complexity refers to qualities of a time series that are emergent, erratic, or not easily described by linear processes. Quantifying temporal complexity within a system is key to understanding the time based dynamics of said system. However, many current methods of complexity quantification are not widely used in psychological research because of their technical difficulty, computational intensity, or large number of required data samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDynamical systems analysis and the study of time series data provide a rich source of information for researchers interested in studying psychological phenomena. While many methods exist for quantifying linear behavior from a given time series, considerably fewer methods exist for quantifying complex and nonlinear time series. Of existing methods for quantifying complex and nonlinear time series, most either: a) require a restrictive number of data points, b) are highly sensitive to noise, c) are technically challenging to implement, or d) require researchers to heuristically set many hyper-parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Effective emotion regulation (ER) is important to long-term healthy functioning, but little is known about what constitutes effective ER in the moment or how social anxiety symptoms and different strategies influence short-term effectiveness outcomes.
Methods: Intensive ecological momentary data from N = 124 college students illustrate how different ways of operationalizing ER effectiveness leads to different conclusions about the short-term effectiveness of different strategies in daily life.
Results: When effectiveness is operationalized as the degree to which participants judged that their ER attempts made them feel better, social anxiety severity was negatively associated with effectiveness, and avoidance-oriented strategies were judged to be less effective than engagement-oriented strategies.
Few studies have examined how trait emotion dysregulation relates to momentary affective experiences and the emotion regulation (ER) strategies people use in daily life. In the current study, 112 college students completed a trait measure of emotion dysregulation and completed experience sampling and end-of-day surveys over a two- to three-week period, asking about their emotional experiences and ER strategy use. Participants completed a total of 3798 experience sampling (in-the-moment) and 995 nightly diary surveys.
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