Emotion Regulation and the Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Review

The construct of emotion regulation has been increasingly investigated in the last decade, and this work has important implications for advancing anxiety disorder theory. This paper reviews research demonstrating that: 1) emotion (i.e., fear and anxiety) and emotion regulation are distinct, non-redundant, constructs that can be differentiated at the conceptual, behavioral, and neural levels of analysis; 2) emotion regulation can augment or diminish fear, depending on the emotion regulation strategy employed; and 3) measures of emotion regulation explain incremental variance in anxiety disorder symptoms above and beyond the variance explained by measures of emotional reactivity. The authors propose a model by which emotion regulation may function in the etiology of anxiety disorders. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.     

Educational Hegemony,Traumatic Stress,and African American and Latino American Students

The authors use traumatic stress theory to develop an ecosystemic understanding of hegemony and systemic barriers to educational success for culturally diverse students. Scholarship on trauma and systemic oppression are applied to students' academic experiences, and recommendations for improving educational outcomes include assessing for and ameliorating trauma in educational settings. Los autores emplean teorías del estrés traumático para desarrollar un entendimiento ecosistemático de la hegemonía y las barreras sistémicas para el éxito académico de estudiantes culturalmente diversos. Se aplica el conjunto de las investigaciones sobre trauma y opresión sistémica a las experiencias académicas de los estudiantes, y las recomendaciones para mejorar el rendimiento educativo incluyen la evaluación y alivio de los niveles de trauma en entornos educativos.     

Fear and disgust processing during repeated exposure to threat-relevant stimuli in spider phobia

Although disgust plays a significant role in the etiology of spider phobia, there remains a paucity of research examining the role of disgust in the treatment of spider phobia. Spider fearful participants (N = 46) were randomly assigned to a disgust (view vomit images) or neutral activation (view inanimate objects) condition. They were then repeatedly exposed to a videotaped tarantula, during which time their fear, disgust, and physiological levels were assessed repeatedly. Growth curve analyses indicated that repeated exposure led to significant declines in fear and disgust with no statistically significant differences between the two conditions. However, there was marginal evidence for decreased physiological arousal during repeated exposure among spider fearful participants in the disgust activation condition compared to those in the neutral condition. Reduction in disgust during exposure in the disgust activation condition remained significant after controlling for change in fear, whereas change in fear was no longer significant after controlling for change in disgust. However, the opposite pattern of relations between change in fear and disgust was observed in the neutral activation condition. Higher fear and disgust activation during exposure was also associated with higher fear and disgust responding on a subsequent behavioral task and higher spider fear and disgust at 3-month follow-up. Baseline trait disgust propensity also predicted fear and disgust parameters during repeated exposure. The implications of these findings for the role of disgust in the treatment of spider phobia are discussed.     

Applying Critical Consciousness: Culturally Competent Disaster Response Outcomes

The authors explored the use of critical consciousness as a training tool to provide effective, culturally competent disaster response counseling services to disaster‐affected communities. The results are presented of a qualitative study evaluating the outcomes for participants in a disaster response outreach project serving residents of post‐Katrina New Orleans. Participants demonstrated increased personal and cultural awareness and also constructed new knowledge related to counseling outreach competencies.     

Disgust Sensitivity and Psychopathological Symptoms: Distinctions from Harm Avoidance

The present study examined the relationship between disgust sensitivity and symptoms of somatization, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, anger/hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism in a community sample. Participants (n = 121) completed the Disgust Scale-2, the Symptom Checklist-90, and the harm avoidance subscale of the Temperament and Character Inventory. Disgust sensitivity was found to be correlated with a broad range of psychopathological symptoms. However, results also indicated that these correlations were partially mediated by harm avoidance. That is, when controlling for levels of harm avoidance, the association between disgust sensitivity and psychopathological symptoms was either substantially reduced or became nonsignificant. These findings suggest that the tendency towards behavioral inhibition to avoid punishment and non-reward may partially account for the association between disgust sensitivity and a broad range of psychopathological symptoms.

The structure of disgust: domain specificity in relation to contamination ideation and excessive washing

The primary goal of the present study was to employ confirmatory factor analysis to compare two theoretical models regarding the factor structure of disgust (N=307). The two-factor model of Animal Reminder and Core disgust proposed by Rozin et al. (2000) demonstrated superior model fit over a one-factor model that has been implicated in prior research. However, contrary to theoretical predictions, categorizing Hygiene disgust as Core disgust rather than Animal Reminder disgust provided an overall better fit for the two-factor model. The second aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between the empirically derived two-factor model and contamination ideation and excessive washing using structural equation modeling. Findings indicated that the Contamination Ideation and Excessive Washing latent factor was specifically related to Core disgust (domain specific) and negatively related to Animal Reminder disgust. The relevance of these findings in the context of future research investigating the role of disgust in specific anxiety disorders is discussed.     

La refresentation mathematique des observables

Sans résumé     

Who am I to judge? Self-disgust predicts less punishment of severe transgressions

Although recent research has shown that experimentally induced disgust and the personality trait of disgust sensitivity is associated with more severe moral decisions, no study to date has examined how disgust, experienced specifically toward the self, influences morally relevant decisions. Participants (n = 109) in the present study completed a measure of self-disgust, disgust sensitivity, and depressive symptoms and then evaluated nonoffenses, moderate offenses, and severe offenses with regard to level of disgust and punishment deserved. The results showed that self-disgust significantly predicted more disgust and punishment ratings of nonoffenses when controlling for individual differences in both depressive symptoms and disgust sensitivity. In contrast, self-disgust significantly predicted less disgust and punishment ratings of severe offenses when controlling for individual differences in depressive symptoms and disgust sensitivity. The implications of these findings for further conceptualizing how the heterogeneous construct of disgust operates in the moral domain are discussed.     

Components of attentional biases in contamination fear: Evidence for difficulty in disengagement

Attentional bias for threat has been implicated in the contamination fear (CF) subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the components of the bias (facilitated attention versus difficulty in disengagement) and the stage of processing during which the bias occurs (early versus late stage of processing) remains unclear. Further, it is unclear whether attentional biases in CF are towards fear or disgust-related stimuli. The present study examined attentional biases in a group of individuals selected to have elevated CF (n = 23) and a control group (n = 28) using the spatial cueing task. Stimuli were neutral, disgusting, or frightening pictures presented for either 100 or 500 ms. Results revealed evidence for delayed disengagement from both fear and disgust stimuli in the CF group, but not in the control group. The effect appeared to be greater at 500 ms stimulus presentation, but did not appear to differ between fear and disgust stimuli. The CF group was associated with delayed disengagement from threat even when controlling for generic response slowing. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Core,animal reminder,and contamination disgust: Three kinds of disgust with distinct personality,behavioral, physiological,and clinical correlates

We examined the relationships between sensitivity to three kinds of disgust (core, animal-reminder, and contamination) and personality traits, behavioral avoidance, physiological responding, and anxiety disorder symptoms. Study 1 revealed that these disgusts are particularly associated with neuroticism and behavioral inhibition. Moreover, the three disgusts showed a theoretically consistent pattern of relations on four disgust-relevant behavioral avoidance tasks in Study 2. Similar results were found in Study 3 such that core disgust was significantly related to increased physiological responding during exposure to vomit, while animal-reminder disgust was specifically related to physiological responding during exposure to blood. Lastly, Study 4 revealed that each of the three disgusts showed a different pattern of relations with fear of contamination, fear of animals, and fear of blood–injury relevant stimuli. These findings provide support for the convergent and divergent validity of core, animal-reminder, and contamination disgust. These findings also highlight the possibility that the three kinds of disgust may manifest as a function of different psychological mechanisms (i.e., oral incorporation, mortality defense, disease avoidance) that may give rise to different clinical conditions. However, empirical examination of the mechanisms that underlie the three disgusts will require further refinement of the psychometric properties of the disgust scale.