Gender minorities experience unique minority stressors that increase risk for psychiatric disorders. Notably, gender minorities are four and six times more likely than their cisgender female and male peers, respectively, to be treated for or diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Despite higher rates of OCD, more psychiatric comorbidities, and minority stressors, little is known about the clinical presentation and treatment outcomes of gender minorities with OCD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research suggests caregivers of individuals with eating disorders (EDs) may attempt to reduce family strain by engaging in accommodation and enabling behaviors to avoid conflict or alleviate stress of the affected individual. Moreover, families often reorganize life around the ED, reinforcing ED behaviors and exacerbating family dysfunction and caregiver distress. However, limited research has examined how accommodation relates to caregivers' distress, family functioning, and treatment outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThough cognitive behavioral techniques are generally effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders, some people fail to benefit from exposure therapy or experience a return of fear after terminating exposure therapy. The burgeoning field of non-invasive brain stimulation provides a potential method of augmenting exposure therapy so that it is more effective. Successful exposure therapy is hypothesized to occur due to inhibition, and research suggests that brain stimulation can alter inhibitory learning and related processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStroke-induced alterations in cerebral blood flow (perfusion) may contribute to functional language impairments and recovery in chronic aphasia. Using MRI, we examined perfusion in the right and left hemispheres of 35 aphasic and 16 healthy control participants. Across 76 regions (38 per hemisphere), no significant between-subjects differences were found in the left, whereas blood flow in the right was increased in the aphasic compared to the control participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRetrieval inhibition of negative associations is important for exposure therapy for anxiety, but the relationship between memory inhibition and anxiety is not well understood-anxiety could either be associated with enhanced or deficient inhibition. The present study tested these two competing hypotheses by measuring retrieval inhibition of negative stimuli by related neutral stimuli. Non-clinically anxious undergraduates completed measures of trait and state anxiety and completed a retrieval induced forgetting task.
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