To be aware or not aware: Do intrusions with and without meta-awareness differ?

People sometimes re-experience traumatic events via intrusive memories that spontaneously and unintentionally intrude into consciousness (i.e., intrusions).

Unprepared: Thinking of a trigger warning does not prompt preparation for trauma-related content.

Background And Objectives: Trigger warnings have been described as helpful-enabling people to "emotionally prepare" for upcoming trauma-related material via "coping strategies." However, no research has asked people what they think they would do when they come across a warning-an essential first step in providing evidence that trigger warnings are helpful.

Methods: Here, participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 260) completed one of two future thinking scenarios; we asked half to think about coming across a warning related to their most stressful/traumatic experience; the others thought about actual content (but no warning) related to their most stressful/traumatic experience.

Age Trajectories of Perceptual Speed and Loneliness: Separating Between-Person and Within-Person Associations.

Objectives: We aimed at examining between-person and within-person associations across age trajectories of perceptual speed and loneliness in old age.

Method: We applied multilevel models to 4 waves of data collected over 6 years from 1,491 participants of the Berlin Aging Study II (60-88 years at baseline, 50% women) to disentangle between-person and within-person associations across age trajectories of perceptual speed and both emotional and social loneliness. Sex and education were considered as relevant individual characteristics and included as covariates in the model.

The cost of being absent: Is meta-awareness of mind-wandering related to depression symptom severity, rumination tendencies and trauma intrusions?

Background: Deng, Li and Tang (2014) reported that depression symptom severity is negatively associated with dispositional mindfulness and importantly, positively associated with zone-outs (mind-wandering without meta-awareness). We replicated and extended their study by exploring possible explanations for these relationships, and by also investigating whether mind-wandering is related to (1) trait rumination subtype-brooding, depressive or reflective, and (2) trauma intrusions-a hallmark PTSD symptom, since both rumination and trauma intrusions strongly correlate with depression. We also explored if dispositional mindfulness-the opposing construct of mind-wandering-mediated these relationships.