Correction: An Artificial Therapist (Manage Your Life Online) to Support the Mental Health of Youth: Co-Design and Case Series.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/46849.].

How can virtual reality help to understand consciousness? A thematic analysis of students' experiences in a novel virtual environment.

Research on consciousness typically presents stimuli and records the responses that follow, to infer the intervening processes. Yet, VR allows ecological validity by giving the user freedom to continuously control their sensory input across three spatial dimensions via head and eye movement. We designed a virtual world in which the angle of view relates to the information complexity of the sensory input.

Intolerance of Uncertainty as a Central Influence on Social Media Use: A School-Based Program for Adolescents.

This study evaluated a classroom program to address Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) in secondary school students in Australia. IU is a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor for a range of psychological difficulties. A universal classroom program aimed to increase student understanding of feelings of uncertainty and explored socioemotional factors that could influence behaviors when facing uncertainty.

The belief that being high is a natural part of your personality predicts an increase in manic symptoms over time in bipolar disorder.

Background: Several psychological models of bipolar disorder propose that certain types of appraisals can lead to increases in manic symptoms.

Aims: We tested whether the belief that being 'high' is a natural part of one's personality and correlates with manic symptoms 4 months later when controlling for manic symptoms at baseline.

Method: This was a prospective 4-month follow-up design using self-report measures.

'It opens up a whole new world for everybody': how carers of people with dementia view the online empowered conversations communication course.

Objectives: This paper explores (1) experiences of participating in Empowered Conversations, an online communication course for carers of people with dementia and (2) how participants felt the course had changed their experience of caring.

Method: Fifteen semi-structured interviews were completed with carers who had attended Empowered Conversations as part of a larger feasibility trial conducted in Greater Manchester, UK (ISRCTN15261686). Data were analysed using applied thematic analysis.

The impact of audience dynamics on public speaking anxiety in virtual scenarios: An online survey.

Background: Public speaking is one of the most commonly feared situations reported in both community and university samples. Despite extensive theoretical models and empirical studies aimed at delineating the underlying factors of Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA), the specific variables contributing to its onset remain incompletely characterised.

Methods: The research involved 297 participants from an AmazonTurk survey, engaging with virtual public speaking scenarios differentiated by audience size, engagement levels, and room spatial dimensions.

Protocol of a feasibility randomised controlled trial of Empowered Conversations: training family carers to enhance their relationships and communication with people living with dementia.

Background: Communication difficulties can cause frustration, low mood, and stress for people living with dementia and their carer. Carers should be offered training on adapting their communication skills. However, it is not common for skills-based education to examine emotional aspects of care and the effect of dementia on relationships.

An Artificial Therapist (Manage Your Life Online) to Support the Mental Health of Youth: Co-Design and Case Series.

Background: The prevalence of child and adolescent mental health issues is increasing faster than the number of services available, leading to a shortfall. Mental health chatbots are a highly scalable method to address this gap. Manage Your Life Online (MYLO) is an artificially intelligent chatbot that emulates the method of levels therapy.

A brief transdiagnostic group (the take control course) compared to individual low-intensity CBT for depression and anxiety: a randomized non-inferiority trial.

Few studies have examined brief transdiagnostic groups. The Take Control Course (TCC) was developed for patients with mild to moderate common mental health problems. We examined whether TCC is non-inferior to individual low-intensity cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in a single-blind individually randomised parallel non-inferiority trial.

An integrative control theory perspective on consciousness.

An integrative account of consciousness should have a number of properties. It should build upon a framework of nonconscious behavior in order to explain how and why consciousness contributes to, and addresses the limitations of, nonconscious processes. It should also encompass the primary (phenomenal), secondary (access), and tertiary (self-awareness) aspects of consciousness.

A Thematic Analysis of Multiple Pathways Between Nature Engagement Activities and Well-Being.

Research studies have identified various different mechanisms in the effects of nature engagement on well-being and mental health. However, rarely are multiple pathways examined in the same study and little use has been made of first-hand, experiential accounts through interviews. Therefore, a semi-structured interview was conducted with seven female students who identified the role of nature engagement in their well-being and mental health.

The perceptual control model of psychopathology.

Perceptual control theory states that behaviour controls perception; we act against disturbances in the environment to align hierarchically organised perceived aspects of the self and the world with neurally specified reference values. The diverse symptoms of psychopathology are each examples of loss of control, which are maintained by conflicting control systems, and effective interventions shift and sustain awareness to the source of the conflict to allow trial-and-error changes (reorganisation) in the parameters of the superordinate system to the conflict, until control is restored. Experimental, phenomenological, therapeutic and computational research has examined its mechanisms, and its mode of delivery has extended it from a client-led psychotherapy (method of levels) to brief training, group interventions and computerised modalities.

The 4Ds of Dealing With Distress - Distract, Dilute, Develop, and Discover: An Ultra-Brief Intervention for Occupational and Academic Stress.

The Covid-19 crisis has clarified the demand for an ultra-brief single-session, online, theory-led, empirically supported, psychological intervention for managing stress and improving well-being, especially for people within organizational settings. We designed and delivered "4Ds for Dealing with Distress" during the crisis to address this need. 4Ds unifies a spectrum of familiar emotion regulation strategies, resilience exercises, and problem-solving approaches using perceptual control theory and distils them into a simple four-component rubric (Distract-Dilute-Develop-Discover).

Sensorimotor delays in tracking may be compensated by negative feedback control of motion-extrapolated position.

Sensorimotor delays dictate that humans act on outdated perceptual information. As a result, continuous manual tracking of an unpredictable target incurs significant response delays. However, no such delays are observed for repeating targets such as the sinusoids.

Why Do We Need Computational Models of Psychological Change and Recovery, and How Should They Be Designed and Tested?

Traditional research methodologies typically assume that humans operate on the basis of an "open loop" stimulus-process-response rather than the "closed loop" control of internal state. They also average behavioral data across repeated measures rather than assess it continuously, and they draw inferences about the working of an individual from statistical group effects. As such, we propose that they are limited in their capacity to accurately identify and test for the mechanisms of change within psychological therapies.

Behavioral anatomy of a hunt : Using dynamic real-world paradigm and computer vision to compare human user-generated strategies with prey movement varying in predictability.

It is commonly thought that the mind constructs predictive models of the environment to plan an appropriate behavioral response. Therefore a more predictable environment should entail better performance, and prey should move in an unpredictable (random) manner to evade capture, known as protean motion. To test this, we created a novel experimental design and analysis in which human participants took the role of predator or prey.

Agents of change: Understanding the therapeutic processes associated with the helpfulness of therapy for mental health problems with relational agent MYLO.

Objective: To understand the therapeutic processes associated with the helpfulness of an online relational agent intervention, Manage Your Life Online (MYLO).

Methods: Fifteen participants experiencing a mental health related problem used Manage Your Life Online for 2 weeks. At follow-up, the participants each identified two helpful and two unhelpful questions posed by Manage Your Life Online within a single intervention session.

The development of a theoretically derived measure exploring extreme appraisals of sleep in bipolar disorder: a Delphi study with professionals.

Background: Sleep and mood are known to be linked and this is particularly evident in people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (BD). It has been proposed that psychological interventions improving sleep can be a pathway for improving mood. In order for a psychological sleep intervention to be appropriate, the common cognitive processes maintaining the range of sleep disturbances need to be investigated.

A systematic evaluation of the evidence for perceptual control theory in tracking studies.

Perceptual control theory (PCT) proposes that perceptual inputs are controlled to intentional 'reference' states by hierarchical negative feedback control, evidence for which comes from manual tracking experiments in humans. We reviewed these experiments to determine whether tracking is a process of perceptual control, and to assess the state-of-the-evidence for PCT. A systematic literature search was conducted of peer-review journal and book chapters in which tracking data were simulated with a PCT model (13 studies, 53 participants).

A guide to behavioural experiments in bipolar disorder.

Behavioural experiments are an important component of cognitive-behavioural therapy. However, there exists little up-to-date guidance on how to conduct these in people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This paper provides recommendations on how to conduct behavioural experiments in this population.

What is the relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder, extreme appraisals of internal state and symptoms in bipolar disorder?

Background: It is important to understand the factors associated with more severe mood symptoms in bipolar disorder. The integrative cognitive model of bipolar disorder proposes that extreme appraisals of changes to internal states maintain and exacerbate mood symptoms.

Aims: The current study aimed to investigate if post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is related to current depressive and manic bipolar symptoms, and whether this relationship is mediated by appraisals of internal state.