Investigating the role of mental imagery use in the assessment of anhedonia.

Anhedonia, or a deficit in the liking, wanting, and seeking of rewards, is typically assessed via self-reported "in-the-moment" emotional and motivational responses to reward stimuli and activities. Given that mental imagery is known to evoke emotion and motivational responses, we conducted two studies to investigate the relationship between mental imagery use and self-reported anhedonia. Using a novel Reward Response Scale (adapted from the Dimensional Anhedonia Rating Scale, DARS; Rizvi et al.

Cognitive flexibility and resilience measured through a residual approach.

Background And Objectives: Resilience refers to the process through which individuals show better outcomes than what would be expected based on the adversity they experienced. Several theories have proposed that variation in resilience is underpinned by cognitive flexibility, however, no study has investigated this using an outcome-based measure of resilience.

Design: We used a residual-based approach to index resilience, which regresses a measure of mental health difficulties onto a measure of adversity experienced.

Contamination fear and attention bias variability early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a dramatic increase in the salience and importance of information relating to both the risk of infection, and factors that could mitigate against such risk. This is likely to have contributed to elevated contamination fear concerns in the general population. Biased attention for contamination-related information has been proposed as a potential mechanism underlying contamination fear, though evidence regarding the presence of such biased attention has been inconsistent.

A preliminary investigation of the causal role of social media use in eating disorder symptoms.

Background And Objectives: Research has consistently shown that greater social media use is associated with elevated eating disorder (ED) symptoms. Importantly, however, the investigation of this relationship has largely relied upon the use of self-report measures of social media use in the context of correlational designs. Given that correlational studies do not permit inferences regarding causation, and recent findings questioning the validity of self-report social media use, it is critical to corroborate past findings using experimental designs and objective measures.

Assessing the daily association of sleep hygiene behaviours with sleep: A between and within persons approach.

Sleep hygiene behaviours are recommendations given to both clinical and non-clinical populations with a focus on modifying behaviours to maximise sleep outcomes. However, methodological issues present in sleep hygiene research make it difficult to conclusively determine the impact of each behaviour. This study aimed to address these issues by adopting a two-week, repeated measures design which incorporated objective sleep measures and used linear mixed effect modelling to assess the daily association of a wide range of sleep hygiene behaviours on sleep in a non-clinical, university sample.

Re-considering the Role of Sleep Hygiene Behaviours in Sleep: Associations Between Sleep Hygiene, Perceptions and Sleep.

Background: Sleep hygiene behaviours are a suggested set of behaviours people can engage in to improve sleep. However, there are numerous issues relating to the measurement of sleep hygiene, primarily, the lack of consensus as to which behaviours impact sleep and should therefore be included in scales.

Method: Cross-sectional correlational methods were used to assess the association between sleep quality, a highly inclusive range of sleep hygiene behaviours, and individual perceptions of those behaviours in a non-clinical sample of 300 participants.

The effects of left prefrontal stimulation on selective attention and emotional reactivity for positive and negative information.

Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity. However, little research to date has examined how such stimulation may affect attention towards and emotional reactivity to positive emotional content. The aim of this study was to examine whether anodal tDCS targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would affect attentional bias towards either or both negative and positive content, and similarly, how it would impact emotional reactivity to negative and positive emotional content among healthy individuals.

The effect of positive and negative evaluation on state anxiety and repetitive negative thinking in social evaluative situations: An experimental study.

The Bivalent Fear of Evaluation (BFOE) Model suggests that fears of negative and positive evaluation are core cognitive vulnerability and maintenance factors for social anxiety disorder The aim of this study was to experimentally assess cognitive and emotional effects of positive and negative feedback in social anxiety. False positive or negative feedback (vs no feedback) was provided following a speech task to high and low socially anxious individuals to investigate impacts on state anxiety and repetitive negative thinking (N = 152, M = 22.13, 69 % female).

What Are You Worried About? Content and Extent of Worry in Autistic Adults.

Autistic adults commonly experience anxiety and worry, although knowledge on how worry presents and the content, extent, and experiences among autistic adults is limited. A convergent parallel mixed-methods approach was used to explore the presentation and experiences of worry in autistic and non-autistic adults. Quantitative surveys were used to compare the content and extent of worry in autistic adults to non-autistic adults, with semi-structured interviews also conducted with autistic adults to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences, impacts and content of worry in autistic adults.

Assessing the effects of acute reductions in mobile device social media use on anxiety and sleep.

Background And Objectives: Research has consistently suggested social media exerts negative effects on sleep and anxiety. Researchers have however, relied heavily on self-report measures of social media use and correlational designs. The present study employed an experimental manipulation to examine the effects of an acute reduction of social media use over a one-week period to assess the potential causal role of social media use in anxiety and sleep quality.

Attentional bias variability and its association with psychological and health symptoms: A meta-analysis.

The present meta-analysis sought to assess the association between an emerging neurocognitive marker of psychopathology in attentional bias variability (ABV) and key psychological and health outcomes. A comprehensive literature review yielded 53 studies in 43 manuscripts (N = 5428). Overall, clinical and sub-clinical samples exhibited greater ABV than control samples (g = 0.

For there is nothing either good or bad: a study of the mediating effect of interpretation bias on the association between mindfulness and reduced post-traumatic stress vulnerability.

Background: Despite increasing interest in the association between mindfulness and reduced trauma vulnerability, and the use of mindfulness in the latest interventions for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), few studies have examined the mechanisms through which mindfulness may influence post-trauma psychopathology. The present study aimed to determine whether negative interpretation bias, the tendency to interpret ambiguous information as negative or threatening rather than positive or safe, mediates the association between higher levels of trait mindfulness and lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Negative interpretation bias was examined due to prior evidence indicating it is associated with being less mindful and post trauma psychopathology.

Assessing anxiety-linked impairment in attentional control without eye-tracking: The masked-target antisaccade task.

Contemporary cognitive theories of anxiety and attention processing propose that heightened levels of anxiety vulnerability are associated with a decreasing ability to inhibit the allocation of attention towards task-irrelevant information. Existing performance-based research has most often used eye-movement assessment variants of the antisaccade paradigm to demonstrate such effects. Critically, however, eye-movement assessment methods are limited by expense, the need for expert training in administration, and limited mobility and scalability.

Attention control moderates the relationship between social media use and psychological distress.

Background: Research has suggested a potential link between social media use and psychological distress, though findings have been somewhat inconsistent. Importantly, relatively few studies have examined potential moderators of this relationship, and the majority have relied upon self-report social media use. The present study examined the potential moderating role of attention control, in the relationship between social media use and anxiety and employed an objective measure of social media use via smartphone data.

Lessons unlearned: A conceptual review and meta-analysis of the relationship between the Attention Control Scale and Objective Attention Control.

Attention control is central to many models of emotion. Among the most common measures of attention, control is the Attention Control Scale (ACS), which has exerted considerable influence in terms of the volume and breadth of research findings, with its use in cognitive-experimental research continuing to increase in recent years. However, there are growing concerns about whether the ACS genuinely indexes attention control.

The effects of left DLPFC tDCS on emotion regulation, biased attention, and emotional reactivity to negative content.

The potentiation of neural activity in lateral prefrontal regions via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can reduce patterns of biased attention for threat and may facilitate intentional emotion regulation. The current study sought to determine whether left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex tDCS, in combination with intentional down-regulation of emotional responses would reduce negative appraisals of aversive content during emotional regulation (assessed during online tDCS), reduce patterns of biased attention and attention bias variability (assessed offline), and attenuate spontaneous (uninstructed) emotional reactivity to negative content (assessed offline) above tDCS or intentional down-regulation of emotions in isolation. Healthy participants (n = 116) were allocated to one of four experimental conditions involving either active or sham tDCS, combined with an either a down-regulate or maintain emotion regulation task.

Effects of cognitive load during interpretation bias modification on interpretation bias and stress reactivity.

Background And Objectives: Interpretation bias modification can affect stress reactivity, yet results have not been consistent. This inconsistency may be partly due to variability in the degree to which training procedures alter interpretation at a more automatic, rather than strategic, level of processing, and a mismatch in available resources between the training and the stress situation. We tested this possibility by investigating whether imposing a secondary cognitive load during interpretation bias modification would strengthen training-induced effects on both interpretation bias and emotional reactivity.

tDCS increases anxiety reactivity to intentional worry.

While considerable experimental research has examined the impact of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on a range of cognitive processes associated with emotional pathology, the impact of tDCS on worry has been comparatively neglected. Given that anxiety pathology is characterised by motivated engagement in worry, and that frontal tDCS has the capacity to enhance goal-oriented cognition, it is important to examine whether tDCS would increase or ameliorate the cognitive and emotional effects of worry. In the current study we examined how tDCS influenced the anxiety response to worry, and the frequency of negative intrusive thoughts.

The relationships between perfectionism, anxiety and depression across time in paediatric eating disorders.

Objective: The aim was to examine in children and adolescents with eating disorders the relationship between perfectionism, anxiety, and depression at intake assessment and whether intake perfectionism was significantly associated with anxiety and depression at 6 months and 12 months post-intake review.

Method: Participants were 167 females aged 10-17 years (M = 14.6, SD = 1.