Emotional awareness for self and others and empathic abilities in clinical depression during acute illness and recovery.

Background: The present longitudinal investigation had two major goals. First, we intended to clarify whether depressed patients are characterized by impairments of emotional awareness for the self and the other during acute illness and whether these impairments diminish in the course of an inpatient psychiatric treatment program. Previous research based on the performance measure Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) provided inconsistent findings concerning emotional self-awareness in clinical depression.

Implicit and explicit self-concept of neuroticism in borderline personality disorder.

Purpose: In the past, research on personality in borderline personality disorder (BPD) used primarily questionnaires suggesting heightened neuroticism in BPD. Self-report instruments inform about the conscious or explicit self-concept. BPD patients are known to show negative distortion with exaggeration of negative affect in the self-report.

Alexithymia Components Are Differentially Related to Explicit Negative Affect But Not Associated with Explicit Positive Affect or Implicit Affectivity.

Alexithymia represents a multifaceted personality construct defined by difficulties in recognizing and verbalizing emotions and externally oriented thinking. According to clinical observations, experience of negative affects is exacerbated and experience of positive affects is decreased in alexithymia. Findings from research based on self-report indicate that all alexithymia facets are negatively associated with the experience of positive affects, whereas difficulties identifying and describing feelings are related to heightened negative affect.

Implicit affectivity in patients with borderline personality disorder.

Aims: It has been argued that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is related to an enhanced affective reactivity. According to findings from research based on self-report, individuals with BPD develop and feel more negative and less positive affect than healthy individuals. Implicit affectivity, which can be measured using indirect assessment methods, relates to processes of the impulsive, intuitive system.

Alexithymia and automatic processing of emotional stimuli: a systematic review.

Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in recognizing and verbalizing emotions and the utilization of a cognitive style that is oriented toward external events, rather than intrapsychic experiences. Alexithymia is considered a vulnerability factor influencing onset and course of many psychiatric disorders. Even though emotions are, in general, elicited involuntarily and emerge without conscious effort, it is surprising that little attention in etiological considerations concerning alexithymia has been given to deficits in automatic emotion processing and their neurobiological bases.

Borderline Personality Disorder and Automatic Processing of Valence and Self-Other Relevance Information.

Background: Enhanced sensitivity to emotion stimuli and poor differentiation between self and others have been proposed to be important features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Automatic processing of affective stimuli provides information about valence (positive vs. negative) and relevance of valence (self vs.

Adult attachment orientation and automatic processing of emotional information on a semantic level: A masked affective priming study.

Early adverse social experiences leading to attachment insecurity could cause heightened sensitivity to emotional information. Automatic processing of emotional stimuli conveys information about positive-negative differentiation and the so-called possessor vs. other-relevance of valence.

Automatic processing of facial affects in patients with borderline personality disorder: associations with symptomatology and comorbid disorders.

Background: Instability of affects and interpersonal relations are important features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Interpersonal problems of individuals suffering from BPD might develop based on abnormalities in the processing of facial affects and high sensitivity to negative affective expressions. The aims of the present study were to examine automatic evaluative shifts and latencies as a function of masked facial affects in patients with BPD compared to healthy individuals.

Are you gonna leave me? Separation anxiety is associated with increased amygdala responsiveness and volume.

The core feature of separation anxiety is excessive distress when faced with actual or perceived separation from people to whom the individual has a strong emotional attachment. So far little is known about the neurobiological underpinnings of separation anxiety. Therefore, we investigated functional (amygdala responsiveness and functional connectivity during threat-related emotion processing) and structural (grey matter volume) imaging markers associated with separation anxiety as measured with the Relationship Scale Questionnaire in a large sample of healthy adults from the Münster Neuroimaging Cohort (N = 320).

Assessing alexithymia and emotional awareness: relations between measures in a German non-clinical sample.

The aim of this study was to evaluate psychometric properties and relations between two different methods of measuring alexithymia and one measure of emotional awareness in a German non-clinical sample. The 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA), and the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), which is a performance-based measure of emotional awareness, were administered to 84 university students. Both internal reliability and inter-rater reliability for the TSIA were acceptable.

Women's greater ability to perceive happy facial emotion automatically: gender differences in affective priming.

There is evidence that women are better in recognizing their own and others' emotions. The female advantage in emotion recognition becomes even more apparent under conditions of rapid stimulus presentation. Affective priming paradigms have been developed to examine empirically whether facial emotion stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness color our impressions.

Adult attachment anxiety is associated with enhanced automatic neural response to positive facial expression.

According to social psychology models of adult attachment, a fundamental dimension of attachment is anxiety. Individuals who are high in attachment anxiety are motivated to achieve intimacy in relationships, but are mistrustful of others and their availability. Behavioral research has shown that anxiously attached persons are vigilant for emotional facial expression, but the neural substrates underlying this perceptual sensitivity remain largely unknown.

High responsivity to threat during the initial stage of perception in repression: a 3 T fMRI study.

Repression designates coping strategies such as avoidance, or denial that aim to shield the organism from threatening stimuli. Derakshan et al. have proposed the vigilance-avoidance theory of repressive coping.

Subliminal affective priming in clinical depression and comorbid anxiety: a longitudinal investigation.

In the present study, the sequential affective priming paradigm developed by Fazio et al. [Fazio, R.H.

Unimpaired automatic processing of verbal information in the course of clinical depression.

In this study automatic processing of verbal information was investigated in 22 clinically depressed inpatients and 22 healthy controls in a longitudinal design. A semantic priming task with word pronunciation was administered twice, about 7 weeks apart. Following brief presentations of prime words, subjects had to read target words aloud as quickly as possible.

Masked facial affect priming is associated with therapy response in clinical depression.

In the present study, automatic processing of facial affect in clinical depression was investigated in the course of an inpatient treatment program. Patients suffering from clinical depression (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 21) completed the facial affective priming task developed by Murphy and Zajonc (1993) twice, about 7 weeks apart. Subjects were instructed to evaluate neutral Chinese ideographs primed by masked displays of sad, happy, and neutral facial affect, including a no-prime condition.

Reduced awareness of others' emotions in unipolar depressed patients.

The present study was conducted to examine depressed patients' awareness of their own and other persons' emotions in the course of an inpatient psychotherapeutic treatment program. To this aim, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) was administered twice, approximately 7 weeks apart, to 22 patients with a unipolar depression and 22 normal controls. From test 1 to test 2, severity of patients' depressive symptoms as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory improved significantly.

Spatial processing of facial emotion in patients with unipolar depression: a longitudinal study.

Background: In this study, a face-in-the-crowd task was applied to examine the spatial detection of facial emotion as a function of depression and comorbid anxiety in the course of a psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment.

Methods: Patients with unipolar depression (n=22) and normal controls (n=22) were tested twice, about 7 weeks apart, on a face-in-the-crowd task using displays of schematic faces. Half the patients were suffering from a comorbid anxiety disorder.

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in anorexia nervosa: correlations with cognition.

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive impairment and cerebral metabolites in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). N-acetylaspartate (NAA), creatine/phosphocreatine (Cr), choline-containing compounds, glutamate/glutamine (Glx) and myoinositol were measured by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS) of the left prefrontal cortex. Compared with healthy controls, AN patients displayed a significantly poorer performance in verbal learning and in attentional and executive tasks.