The Underlying Role of Negative Affect in the Association between PTSD,Major Depressive Disorder,and Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Clinicians and researchers have found differential diagnosis to be difficult, particularly for conceptually similar disorders. One category of particular interest has been distress or internalizing disorders, theorized to be related via an underlying construct of generalized distress or negative affect. The present study attempted to address the comorbidity of three distress disorders - posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder (MDD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) - using latent analyses by controlling for the variance attributable to negative affect. The sample consisted of 265 trauma-exposed individuals who completed self-report measures of PTSD, MDD, GAD, and negative affect. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test initial model fit. Next, the model was re-computed, controlling for negative affect by regressing negative affectivity at the item-level. Results indicated that a significant amount of variance within and between these diagnostic categories is attributable to negative affect at both the item- and factor-level. The hypothesis that MDD’s non-somatic/affective factor and the GAD factor would have the highest attenuations in factor loadings after controlling for negative affect was supported. Therefore, negative affect significantly influences the co-occurrence of PTSD, MDD, and GAD clinically, emphasizing the need for transdiagnostic interventions for trauma victims.     

Association between Sexual Victimization History,Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms,and Women’s Decision Making in Risky Social Situations: the Moderating Effect of Ethnicity

This study evaluated the association between sexual victimization history, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and women’s decision making in social situations, and whether ethnicity moderated these associations. Participants were 334 undergraduate women between ages 18 and 24. The sample was diverse ethnically (Non-Hispanic white, n = 177; Hispanic, n = 157) and composed primarily of freshman, single women. Stimuli were written vignettes describing social situations that varied in their degree of victimization risk. Participants completed tasks that assessed their ability to generate and select responses to the situations, as well as their perceived efficacy in executing responses. They then completed the Sexual Experiences Survey to quantify the severity of victimization experiences and the PTSD Checklist – Civilian Version to measure symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Structural equation modeling (SEM) of women’s decision making revealed that more severe victimization history and greater posttraumatic stress symptoms were associated with less effective response generation, and greater posttraumatic stress symptoms was associated with reduced perceived efficacy in executing effective responses. Ethnicity also moderated the effect of victimization history on perceived efficacy. For Non-Hispanic White women, more severe victimization history was related to less effective response generation and perceived efficacy when considering responses, while for Hispanic women, victimization history was unrelated to both decision making processes. This study emphasizes the importance of decision making as it relates to women’s victimization risk. These processes, as well as the influence of ethnicity on women’s decision making, appear relevant to consider when developing preventative interventions for college women.     

Materialism,Spending, and Affect: An Event-Sampling Study of Marketplace Behavior and Its Affective Costs

Research on materialism has burgeoned in the last two decades, yet little is known about how people higher versus lower in this consumer values orientation differ in their day-to-day spending habits and in their emotional reactions to spending on purchases. The present study used an event-sampling method over a 3-week period to address these questions in a community adult sample. Results showed that over the course of the sampling period, high materialists made more discretionary purchases and spent more money on necessity purchases than did those lower in materialism, even though their incomes did not differ. Despite higher levels of spending, high materialists experienced a “letdown” after spending, as they reported more post-purchase unpleasant affect than did low materialists. This result was not moderated by level of dispositional unpleasant affect, purchase type, or purchase amounts.     

Quantitative Empirical Studies on Women’s Issues in Islamic Cultures: Introduction to Special Issue

The special issue aimed to focus on quantitative research articles covering gender and women’s issues in Islamic cultures which have not received sufficient attention. The present issue of gender and women’s issues in these cultures adds important information about topics such as the roles of honor, religiosity, and sexism as they interact with gender. In the special issue there are six quantitative research articles focusing on various topics relevant to honor, sexism, economic, and health issues. A study from Turkey examines the associations among benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, religiosity, and the endorsement of honor beliefs in Turkey. Another explores the effects of religious affiliation, patriarchy, and gender on the perception of honor-related crimes in Morocco, Cameroon, and Italy. Views about family issues are explored in a paper from North Cyprus that explores the associations among hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, religiosity, and attitudes toward childlessness. In another paper, researchers from Turkey investigate job-relevant gender issues such as work engagement, job insecurity, and turnover intentions. Finally, women’s health in Muslim cultures is the focus of papers on health screening behaviors in Turkey and on factors relevant to menopausal symptoms of women in Pakistan. In the introduction, the main purposes of the special issue articles are introduced. Then, the importance of studying honor, sexism, religiosity, the economic situation of women, and women’s health issues in Islamic cultures are covered. Some suggestions for future studies and implication and applications of the research findings also are discussed. Finally, limitations of the special issue are presented.     

A Latent Transition Analysis Model for Latent-State-Dependent Nonignorable Missingness

Psychologists often use latent transition analysis (LTA) to investigate state-to-state change in discrete latent constructs involving delinquent or risky behaviors. In this setting, latent-state-dependent nonignorable missingness is a potential concern. For some longitudinal models (e.g., growth models), a large literature has addressed extensions to accommodate nonignorable missingness. In contrast, little research has addressed how to extend the LTA to accommodate nonignorable missingness. Here we present a shared parameter LTA that can reduce bias due to latent-state-dependent nonignorable missingness: a parallel-process missing-not-at-random (MNAR-PP) LTA. The MNAR-PP LTA allows outcome process parameters to be interpreted as in the conventional LTA, which facilitates sensitivity analyses assessing changes in estimates between LTA and MNAR-PP LTA. In a sensitivity analysis for our empirical example, previous and current membership in high-delinquency states predicted adolescents’ membership in missingness states that had high nonresponse probabilities for some or all items. A conventional LTA overestimated the proportion of adolescents ending up in a low-delinquency state, compared to an MNAR-PP LTA.     

From Spontaneous to Planned Urban Development and Quality of Life: the Case of Ho Chi Minh City

This paper studies the quality of life (QOL) that residents perceive in typical urban patterns in Ho Chi Minh City. Its major focus is to examine the improvement in the QOL through public intervention into the urban development process. There are four findings. First, moderate government intervention to correct market failures in areas where spontaneous urban development has occurred generates similar levels of satisfaction to areas with planned development. Second, urban planning is important as housing values and subjective satisfactions in planned areas are higher than those in spontaneous development areas. Third, redevelopment negatively affects the QOL in areas undergoing redevelopment. Finally, the contrast between the housing value and the subjective life satisfaction in spontaneous development areas undergoing redevelopment shows the problem of relying on the revealed preference assumption in traditional economics and the need for having alternative approaches.     

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

In our everyday social interactions we often need to deal with others’ unpredictable behaviors. Integrating unexpected information in a consistent representation of another agent is a cognitively demanding process. Several neuroimaging studies point to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a critical structure in mediating social evaluations. Our aim here was to shed light on the possible causal role of the mPFC in the dynamic process of forming and updating social impressions about others. We addressed this issue by suppressing activity in the mPFC by means of 1 Hz offline transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) prior to a task requiring participants to evaluate other agents’ trustworthiness after reading about their social behavior. In two different experiments, we found that inhibiting activity in the mPFC increased perceived trustworthiness when inconsistent information about one agent’s behavior was provided. In turn, when only negative or positive behaviors of a person were described, TMS over the mPFC did not affect judgments. Our results indicate that the mPFC is causally involved in mediating social impressions updating—at least in cases in which judgment is uncertain due to conflicting information to be processed.     

Intolerance of uncertainty and insula activation during uncertain reward

Individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty (IU) have been shown to exhibit abnormal threat responding, which may be mediated by hyperactive anterior insula (aINS) response to uncertainty. Research has indicated that individuals with high IU also exhibit abnormal positive valence responding, suggesting that IU may impact responding to uncertainty regardless of the valence of the potential outcome. To date, no study has investigated the neural processes associated with IU and response to uncertain positive stimuli, such as rewards. Therefore, this study was designed to examine the association between individual differences in IU and neural activation during uncertain reward using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Thirty-seven adults completed a self-report measure of IU and a reward task during fMRI. Consistent with the threat literature, greater IU was associated with increased aINS activation during uncertain reward. This association was more robust for the prospective IU subscale, a dimension characterized by worry about future events. Together with prior studies, these findings provide evidence that IU is related to abnormal threat and reward responding, and that these deficits may be similarly linked to hyperactive aINS response to uncertainty.     

Incremental learning of perceptual and conceptual representations and the puzzle of neural repetition suppression

Incremental learning models of long-term perceptual and conceptual knowledge hold that neural representations are gradually acquired over many individual experiences via Hebbian-like activity-dependent synaptic plasticity across cortical connections of the brain. In such models, variation in task relevance of information, anatomic constraints, and the statistics of sensory inputs and motor outputs lead to qualitative alterations in the nature of representations that are acquired. Here, the proposal that behavioral repetition priming and neural repetition suppression effects are empirical markers of incremental learning in the cortex is discussed, and research results that both support and challenge this position are reviewed. Discussion is focused on a recent fMRI-adaptation study from our laboratory that shows decoupling of experience-dependent changes in neural tuning, priming, and repetition suppression, with representational changes that appear to work counter to the explicit task demands. Finally, critical experiments that may help to clarify and resolve current challenges are outlined.