Clinical Life in the Context of the Pandemic.

In this article, six analysts describe theory and practice in the time of COVID-19, examining the quality of après-coup in the way that the pandemic and its attendant crises trigger early memory and early experiences of helplessness. In the clinical events we see that the age of the patient, the circumstances and approach of the analyst, the novelty of the frame are all crucial determinants of clinical outcomes.

Acceptance, Psychiatric Symptoms, and Migraine Disability: An Observational Study in a Headache Center.

Objective: To evaluate relationships between psychiatric symptoms, acceptance, and migraine-related disability in a sample of people with migraine presenting at a tertiary care headache center.

Background: Migraine is a chronic disease that can be severely disabling. Despite a strong theoretical basis and evidence in other pain conditions, little is known about relationships between acceptance, psychiatric symptoms, and migraine-related disability.

Brain structural anomalies in borderline and avoidant personality disorder patients and their associations with disorder-specific symptoms.

Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) and avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) are characterized by hyper-reactivity to negatively-perceived interpersonal cues, yet they differ in degree of affective instability. Recent work has begun to elucidate the neural (structural and functional) and cognitive-behavioral underpinnings of BPD, although some initial studies of brain structure have reached divergent conclusions. AvPD, however, has been almost unexamined in the cognitive neuroscience literature.

Elevated amygdala activity during reappraisal anticipation predicts anxiety in avoidant personality disorder.

Background: Avoidant personality disorder is characterized by pervasive anxiety, fear of criticism, disapproval, and rejection, particularly in anticipation of exposure to social situations. An important but underexplored question concerns whether anxiety in avoidant patients is associated with an impaired ability to engage emotion regulatory strategies in anticipation of and during appraisal of negative social stimuli.

Methods: We examined the use of an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, cognitive reappraisal, in avoidant patients.

The neural correlates of anomalous habituation to negative emotional pictures in borderline and avoidant personality disorder patients.

Objective: Extreme emotional reactivity is a defining feature of borderline personality disorder, yet the neural-behavioral mechanisms underlying this affective instability are poorly understood. One possible contributor is diminished ability to engage the mechanism of emotional habituation. The authors tested this hypothesis by examining behavioral and neural correlates of habituation in borderline patients, healthy comparison subjects, and a psychopathological comparison group of patients with avoidant personality disorder.

Insula-amygdala functional connectivity is correlated with habituation to repeated negative images.

Behavioral habituation during repeated exposure to aversive stimuli is an adaptive process. However, the way in which changes in self-reported emotional experience are related to the neural mechanisms supporting habituation remains unclear. We probed these mechanisms by repeatedly presenting negative images to healthy adult participants and recording behavioral and neural responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging.