Depression and emotion regulation strategy use moderate age-related attentional positivity bias.

Effective emotion regulation is critical for maintaining emotional health in the face of adverse events that accumulate over the lifespan. These abilities are thought to be generally maintained in older adults, accompanied by the emergence of attentional biases to positive information. Such age-related positivity biases, however, are not always reported and may be moderated by individual differences in affective vulnerabilities and competencies, such as those related to dispositional negative affect and emotion regulation styles.

Update on "Emotion and autobiographical memory": 14 years of advances in understanding functions, constructions, and consequences.

Holland and Kensinger (2010) reviewed the literature on "Emotion and autobiographical memory." They focused on two broad ways that emotions influence memory: (1) emotion during an event influences how the event is remembered, and (2) emotion and emotional goals during memory retrieval influence how past events are remembered. We begin by providing a brief update on the key points from that review.

Counterfactual thinking induces different neural patterns of memory modification in anxious individuals.

Episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT) is the process of mentally simulating alternate versions of experiences, which confers new phenomenological properties to the original memory and may be a useful therapeutic target for trait anxiety. However, it remains unclear how the neural representations of a memory change during eCFT. We hypothesized that eCFT-induced memory modification is associated with changes to the neural pattern of a memory primarily within the default mode network, moderated by dispositional anxiety levels.

Perceived plausibility modulates hippocampal activity in episodic counterfactual thinking.

Episodic counterfactual thinking (ECT) consists of imagining alternative outcomes to past personal events. Previous research has shown that ECT shares common neural substrates with episodic future thinking (EFT): our ability to imagine possible future events. Both ECT and EFT have been shown to critically depend on the hippocampus, and past research has explored hippocampal engagement as a function of the perceived plausibility of an imagined future event.

Self-Relevance Moderates the Relationship between Depressive Symptoms and Corrugator Activity during the Imagination of Personal Episodic Events.

Accumulating evidence suggests depression is associated with blunted reactivity to positive and negative stimuli, known as emotion context insensitivity (ECI). However, ECI is not consistently observed in the literature, suggesting moderators that influence its presence. We propose self-relevance as one such moderator, with ECI most apparent when self-relevance is low.

The representation of emotional experience from imagined scenarios.

One of the key unresolved issues in affective science is understanding how the subjective experience of emotion is structured. Semantic space theory has shed new light on this debate by applying computational methods to high-dimensional data sets containing self-report ratings of emotional responses to visual and auditory stimuli. We extend this approach here to the emotional experience induced by imagined scenarios.

Neural differences between internal and external episodic counterfactual thoughts.

Episodic counterfactual thoughts (eCFT) consist of imagining alternative outcomes to past experiences. A common sub-class of eCFT- eCFT-involves imagining how past negative experiences could have been , either because one could have done something differently (internal) or because something about the circumstances could have been different (external). Although previous neuroimaging research has shown that the brain's default mode network (DMN) supports upward eCFT, it is unclear how it is differentially recruited during internal versus external upward eCFT.

Mood-congruent memory revisited.

Affective experiences are commonly represented by either transient emotional reactions to discrete events or longer term, sustained mood states that are characterized by a more diffuse and global nature. While both have considerable influence in shaping memory, their interaction can produce mood-congruent memory (MCM), a psychological phenomenon where emotional memory is biased toward content affectively congruent with a past or current mood. The study of MCM has direct implications for understanding how memory biases form in daily life, as well as debilitating negative memory schemas that contribute to mood disorders such as depression.

The moderating effects of nostalgia on mood and optimism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initial waves of the coronavirus pandemic amplified feelings of depression, psychological fatigue and pessimism for the future. Past research suggests that nostalgia helps to repair negative moods by boosting current and future-oriented positive affect, thereby strengthening psychological resilience. Accordingly, the present study investigated whether nostalgia moderated the relationship between pandemic experience and individual differences in mood and optimism.

Age differences in intuitive moral decision-making: Associations with inter-network neural connectivity.

Positions of power involving moral decision-making are often held by older adults (OAs). However, little is known about age differences in moral decision-making and the intrinsic organization of the aging brain. In this study, younger adults (YAs; = 117, = 22.

Psychosocial determinants of anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pandemic health threats can cause considerable anxiety, but not all individuals react similarly. To understand the sources of this variability, we applied a theoretical model developed during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 to quantify relationships among intolerance of uncertainty, stress appraisals, and coping style that predict anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 1579 U.

Proximal threats promote enhanced acquisition and persistence of reactive fear-learning circuits.

Physical proximity to a traumatic event increases the severity of accompanying stress symptoms, an effect that is reminiscent of evolutionarily configured fear responses based on threat imminence. Despite being widely adopted as a model system for stress and anxiety disorders, fear-conditioning research has not yet characterized how threat proximity impacts the mechanisms of fear acquisition and extinction in the human brain. We used three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality technology to manipulate the egocentric distance of conspecific threats while healthy adult participants navigated virtual worlds during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Differential contribution of anterior and posterior midline regions during mental simulation of counterfactual and perspective shifts in autobiographical memories.

Retrieving autobiographical memories induces a natural tendency to mentally simulate alternate versions of past events, either by reconstructing the perceptual details of the originally experienced perspective or the conceptual information of what actually occurred. Here we examined whether the episodic system recruited during imaginative experiences functionally dissociates depending on the nature of this reconstruction. Using fMRI, we evaluated differential patterns of neural activity and hippocampal connectivity when twenty-nine participants naturally recalled past negative events, shifted visual perspective, or imagined better or worse outcomes than what actually occurred.

Bimanual coordination positively predicts episodic memory: A combined behavioral and MRI investigation.

Some people remember events more completely and accurately than other people, but the origins of individual differences in episodic memory are poorly understood. One way to advance understanding is by identifying characteristics of individuals that reliably covary with memory performance. Recent research suggests motor behavior is related to memory performance, with individuals who consistently use a single preferred hand for unimanual actions performing worse than individuals who make greater use of both hands.