Effect of affect on social cost bias in social anxiety disorder

Abstract

The cognitive model of social anxiety disorder (SAD) assumes that cognitive biases are important maintaining factors of the disorder. Research and theory have highlighted the impact of cognitive self-regulatory processes on affect, but have not sufficiently focused on the influence of affect on self-regulatory cognitions. The present study examined the influence of affect on cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms in SAD by focusing on one critical cognitive bias, estimated social cost. Individuals with SAD (N=48) and non-anxious controls (N=48) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental, affect induction conditions (negative, positive, or neutral) before giving a 10-minute impromptu, videotaped speech. As expected, the affect manipulation resulted in changes in estimated social cost. However, this effect was not specific to individuals with SAD. Participants in the positive affect condition in both groups had the highest social cost estimates post-speech challenge. These results suggest that social cost bias is dependent on the affective state in both individuals with SAD and controls.     

Analogical Reasoning in Handling Emerging Technologies: The Case of Umbilical Cord Blood Biobanking

How are we individually and as a society to handle new and emerging technologies? This challenging question underlies much of the bioethical debates of modern times. To address this question we need suitable conceptions of the new technology and ways of identifying its proper management and regulation. To establish conceptions and to find ways to handle emerging technologies we tend to use analogies extensively. The aim of this article is to investigate the role that analogies play or may play in the processes of understanding and managing new technology. More precisely we aim to unveil the role of analogies as analytical devices in exploring the “being” of the new technology as well the normative function of analogies in conceptualizing the characteristics and applications of new technology. Umbilical cord blood biobanking will be used as a case to investigate these roles and functions.     

Ethical Challenges with Welfare Technology: A Review of the Literature

Demographical changes in high income counties will increase the need of health care services but reduce the number of people to provide them. Welfare technology is launched as an important measure to meet this challenge. As with all types of technologies we must explore its ethical challenges. A literature review reveals that welfare technology is a generic term for a heterogeneous group of technologies and there are few studies documenting their efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency. Many kinds of welfare technology break with the traditional organization of health care. It introduces technology in new areas, such as in private homes, and it provides new functions, e.g. offering social stimuli and entertainment. At the same time welfare technology is developed for groups that traditionally have not been extensive technology users. This raises a series of ethical questions with regard to the development and use of welfare technologies, which are presented in this review. The main challenges identified are: (1) Alienation when advanced technology is used at home, (2) conflicting goals, as welfare technologies have many stakeholders with several ends, (3) respecting confidentiality and privacy when third-party actors are involved, (4) guaranteeing equal access and just distribution, and (5) handling conflicts between instrumental rationality and care in terms of respecting dignity and vulnerability. Addressing these issues is important for developing and implementing welfare technologies in a morally acceptable manner.     

A Comparison of Expert Ratings and Self-Assessments of Situation Awareness During a Combat Fatigue Course

The current study compared expert-observer ratings of situation awareness (SA) with subjective self-ratings of SA in Norwegian military academy cadets during a summer combat survival course. The cadets (N?=?30) completed an 8-day combat survival course characterized by sleep and food deprivation, continuous operations, and altered circadian entrainment cues. Results indicated that self-ratings of SA did not correlate consistently with expert-observer SA ratings, and self-ratings were consistently higher than expert-observer ratings. The results are congruent with expected effects of these extreme conditions on cognition and self-awareness, demonstrate a pronounced self-enhancement bias and suggest that subjective measures of SA are not likely to provide valid estimates of SA under extreme conditions.     

Bridging the Theory-Practice Gap by Getting Even Bolder With the Boulder Model

Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment for virtually all psychiatric disorders. However, very few patients have access to it and few therapists are trained in the theory and practice of cognitive behavioral therapy. Based on the existing evidence and the articles of this series, the following recommendations are made: (a) all mental health care providers (including Psy.D. and social workers) need to be trained in the practice and theories of empirically supported treatments, specifically cognitive behavioral therapy; (b) clinical practice also needs to be based on theory, not just treatment manuals; and (c) psychological treatments have to move beyond the DSM boundaries.     

Semantic feature activation takes time: longer SOA elicits earlier priming effects during reading

Cognitive Processing - While most previous studies of “semantic” priming confound associative and semantic relations, here we use a simple co-occurrence-based approach to examine...     

On the Role of Mental Health Activities for Teachers’ Work and Life

Everyday behavior is getting increasingly attention, both in the prevention of mental impairment and the promotion of mental health – within and beyond the work context. The present study aimed to identify the importance of mental health activities for well-being and positive functioning of teachers, while taking affectivity into account. Teachers are confronted with various stressors, and identifying predictors of teachers’ well-being and positive functioning is important, not only for teachers’ personal health, but also for their students’ well-being and achievement. Based on the Broaden and Build (B&B) theory and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we assumed that (1) the practice of mental health activities is associated with well-being (i.e., positive mental health) and positive functioning (i.e., healthy and unhealthy work-related behavior and experiences), and that (2) mental health activities mediate the association between affectivity and the respective outcomes. These assumptions were tested in a sample of 326 German teachers (75% female, age: M = 44, SD = 11.85). The practice of mental health activities was associated with more positive mental health, more healthy work-related behavior and experiences, and less unhealthy work-related behavior and experiences. Moreover, mental health activities partly explained the relationship between affectivity and the respective outcomes. The present findings indicate the potential of mental health activities for mental health promotion in teachers but future studies are recommended in order to establish causal effects.

     

Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder

This study examined the affective dysregulation component of borderline personality disorder (BPD) from an emotional granularity perspective, which refers to the specificity in which one represents emotions. Forty-six female participants meeting criteria for BPD and 51 female control participants without BPD and Axis I pathology completed tasks that assessed the degree to which participants incorporated information about valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (calm-activated) in their semantic/conceptual representations of emotions and in using labels to represent emotional reactions. As hypothesized, participants with BPD emphasized valence more and arousal less than control participants did when using emotion terms to label their emotional reactions. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Effects of emotion regulation strategies on smoking craving, attentional bias, and task persistence

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of different strategies for regulating emotions associated with smoking on subjective, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of smoking. Emotion regulation was manipulated by instructing participants to reappraise (n = 32), accept (n = 31), or suppress (n = 31) their emotions associated with smoking. The dependent measures included subjective reports of craving, negative affect, and attentional biases, as measured by a modified dot-probe task, and persistence during a task to measure distress tolerance. Individuals who were encouraged to reappraise the consequences of smoking showed diminished craving, lower negative affect, had reduced attentional biases for smoking-related cues, and exhibited greater task persistence than those who were instructed to accept and suppress their urge to smoke. These findings suggest that reappraisal techniques are more effective than acceptance or suppression strategies for targeting smoking-related problems.     

Subjective well-being and adaptation to life events: a meta-analysis

Previous research has shown that major life events can have short- and long-term effects on subjective well-being (SWB). The present meta-analysis examines (a) whether life events have different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and (b) how the rate of adaptation varies across different life events. Longitudinal data from 188 publications (313 samples, N = 65,911) were integrated to describe the reaction and adaptation to 4 family events (marriage, divorce, bereavement, childbirth) and 4 work events (unemployment, reemployment, retirement, relocation/migration). The findings show that life events have very different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and that for most events the effects of life events on cognitive well-being are stronger and more consistent across samples. Different life events differ in their effects on SWB, but these effects are not a function of the alleged desirability of events. The results are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications, and recommendations for future studies on adaptation are given.