Predicting decisional conflict: Anxiety and depression in shared decision making.

Objectives: Emotional distress can be a potential barrier to shared decision making (SDM), yet affect is typically not systematically assessed in medical consultation. We examined whether urological patients report anxiety or depression prior to a consultation and if emotional distress predicts decisional conflict thereafter.

Methods: We recruited a large sample of urological outpatients (N = 397) with a range of different diagnoses (42 % oncological).

Nightmares do result in psychophysiological arousal: A multimeasure ambulatory assessment study.

Individuals who frequently experience nightmares report compromised sleep quality, poor daytime mood, and functioning. Previous research has aimed at linking these impairments with altered sleep architecture, but results were inconclusive. One plausible explanation is that only a few studies recorded markers of autonomic nervous system activity.

Threat vs. Threat: Attention to Fear-Related Animals and Threatening Faces.

It is generally thought to be adaptive that fear relevant stimuli in the environment can capture and hold our attention; and in psychopathology attentional allocation is thought to be cue-specific. Such hypervigilance toward threatening cues or difficulty to disengage attention from threat has been demonstrated for a variety of stimuli, for example, toward evolutionary prepared animals or toward socially relevant facial expressions. Usually, specific stimuli have been examined in individuals with particular fears (e.

A comprehensive look at phobic fear in inhibition of return: Phobia-related spiders as cues and targets.

Background And Objectives: The so called inhibition of return (IOR) effect refers to a bias against returning attention to a location which was previously investigated. Because emotionally salient material has the capacity to capture and hold attention it has been suggested that this material may disrupt this otherwise impressively stable phenomenon.

Methods: 40 students participated in the experiment.

Representation of Patients' Hand Modulates Fear Reactions of Patients with Spider Phobia in Virtual Reality.

Embodiment (i.e., the involvement of a bodily representation) is thought to be relevant in emotional experiences.

Nightmares affect the experience of sleep quality but not sleep architecture: an ambulatory polysomnographic study.

Background: Nightmares and bad dreams are common in people with emotional disturbances. For example, nightmares are a core symptom in posttraumatic stress disorder and about 50% of borderline personality disorder patients suffer from frequent nightmares. Independent of mental disorders, nightmares are often associated with sleep problems such as prolonged sleep latencies, poorer sleep quality, and daytime sleepiness.

The impact of perception and presence on emotional reactions: a review of research in virtual reality.

Virtual reality (VR) has made its way into mainstream psychological research in the last two decades. This technology, with its unique ability to simulate complex, real situations and contexts, offers researchers unprecedented opportunities to investigate human behavior in well controlled designs in the laboratory. One important application of VR is the investigation of pathological processes in mental disorders, especially anxiety disorders.

Avoidant decision making in social anxiety: the interaction of angry faces and emotional responses.

Recent research indicates that angry facial expressions are preferentially processed and may facilitate automatic avoidance response, especially in socially anxious individuals. However, few studies have examined whether this bias also expresses itself in more complex cognitive processes and behavior such as decision making. We recently introduced a variation of the Iowa Gambling Task which allowed us to document the influence of task-irrelevant emotional cues on rational decision making.

Inhibition of return in fear of spiders: discrepant eye movement and reaction time data.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a bias against returning the attention to a previously attended location. As a foraging facilitator it is thought to facilitate systematic visual search. With respect to neutral stimuli, this is generally thought to be adaptive, but when threatening stimuli appear in our environment, such a bias may be maladaptive.

The persistence of socially instructed threat: two threat-of-shock studies.

Learning to anticipate threat is crucial in guiding protective behavior. In classical conditioning, single trial learning can result in long-lasting fear associations. To examine whether threat learned through social communication is equally stable, an instructed fear paradigm was used with two repeated sessions on 1 day (Study 1; N = 43) and with separate sessions on 3 consecutive days (Study 2; N = 30).

The cost of fear: avoidant decision making in a spider gambling task.

Individuals with anxiety disorders typically avoid fear-relevant stimuli even if they miss potential rewards. However, few studies have accounted for such costs of fear-related avoidance in doing so. In this study, 51 spider fearful and 49 non-fearful participants completed the Spider Gambling Task, our modification of the Iowa Gambling Task, to investigate whether fear-relevant stimuli trigger avoidant decisions in the presence of potential rewards.

Timing matters: change depends on the stage of treatment in cognitive behavioral therapy for panic disorder with agoraphobia.

Objective: The mechanisms of action underlying treatment are inadequately understood. This study examined 5 variables implicated in the treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia (PD/AG): catastrophic agoraphobic cognitions, anxiety about bodily sensations, agoraphobic avoidance, anxiety sensitivity, and psychological flexibility. The relative importance of these process variables was examined across treatment phases: (a) psychoeducation/interoceptive exposure, (b) in situ exposure, and (c) generalization/follow-up.