Avoidant coping in panic disorder: a yohimbine biological challenge study

Abstract

Few studies have addressed whether the use of avoidance-oriented coping strategies is related to the development of panic in patients with panic disorder(PD). Self-report, clinician-rated, and physiological data were collected from 42 individuals who participated in a yohimbine biological challenge study, performed under double-blind, placebo-controlled conditions. Participants included 20 healthy controls and 22 currently symptomatic patients who met DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for PD. Consistent with prediction, patients with PD who had higher perceived efficacy of avoidance-oriented strategies in reducing anxiety-related thoughts reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the yohimbine challenge condition as compared to the placebo. Further, patients with PD who had more fear of cognitive dyscontrol, cardiovascular symptoms, and publicly observable anxiety also reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the challenge. Healthy controls who had more fear of cardiovascular symptoms similarly reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the challenge. No effects were found for heart rate response to the challenge agent. These results provide support for the role of avoidance-oriented coping strategies and fear of anxiety-related symptoms as risk and maintenance factors in the development of panic symptoms, particularly within a biological challenge model.     

Complex Trauma Symptoms in Former Ugandan Child Soldiers

Children exposed to repeated interpersonal trauma often develop symptoms that exceed those documented in criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are better described with the emerging concept of developmental trauma disorder (DTD). This study examines complex trauma symptoms in a sample of 330 former Ugandan child soldiers (age 11–17 years, 49% female). Prevalence rates were 33.0% for PTSD, 36.4% for depression, and 78.2% for DTD. Whereas PTSD symptoms were significantly related to traumatic war experiences and depression, DTD symptoms were significantly associated with experiences of domestic violence, community violence, social support, and depression. Assessment tools and tailored interventions for DTD are urgently needed.     

A method for preparing and maintaining rhesus monkeys with chronic venous catheters

A procedure for implanting and maintaining chronic venous catheters in primates is described. Surgical procedures and hardware suitable for maintaining the S in operant behavior equipped cages are presented. All equipment can be assembled with hand tools or obtained from commercial sources at low cost.     

Retrospective reports of parental physical affection and parenting style: a study of Finnish twins

Individual differences in parenting behaviors are due, in part, to genetic factors. In the present study, the authors sought to determine whether the degree of genetic influence varied according to the type of parental behavior under consideration. A population-based sample of 2,334 pairs of Finnish twins provided ratings on the physical affection, control, abusiveness, and indifference shown by their father and mother during childhood. Genetic influences, shared environmental influences, and nonshared environmental influences accounted for a small-to-medium proportion (17%-30%), a small-to-large proportion (22%-44%), and a medium-to-large proportion (37%-55%) of the variance in each parenting measure, respectively. There were no significant differences in effect sizes for mothers and fathers or across the 4 types of parental behavior. The genetic results may reflect characteristic styles with which parents respond to genetically influenced behaviors of individuals (gene-environment correlations) or individual perceptions of this relationship (gene-person correlation processes). The findings have implications for intervention and prevention work with families and for interpretation of evidence for interactions between genes and parenting behaviors.     

Walking a mile in their patients' shoes: empathy and othering in medical students' education

One of the major tasks of medical educators is to help maintain and increase trainee empathy for patients. Yet research suggests that during the course of medical training, empathy in medical students and residents decreases. Various exercises and more comprehensive paradigms have been introduced to promote empathy and other humanistic values, but with inadequate success. This paper argues that the potential for medical education to promote empathy is not easy for two reasons: a) Medical students and residents have complex and mostly unresolved emotional responses to the universal human vulnerability to illness, disability, decay, and ultimately death that they must confront in the process of rendering patient care b) Modernist assumptions about the capacity to protect, control, and restore run deep in institutional cultures of mainstream biomedicine and can create barriers to empathic relationships. In the absence of appropriate discourses about how to emotionally manage distressing aspects of the human condition, it is likely that trainees will resort to coping mechanisms that result in distance and detachment. This paper suggests the need for an epistemological paradigm that helps trainees develop a tolerance for imperfection in self and others; and acceptance of shared emotional vulnerability and suffering while simultaneously honoring the existence of difference. Reducing the sense of anxiety and threat that are now reinforced by the dominant medical discourse in the presence of illness will enable trainees to learn to emotionally contain the suffering of their patients and themselves, thus providing a psychologically sound foundation for the development of true empathy.     

Zooming into daily life: within-person associations between physical activity and affect in young adults

Objective: Negative affect in daily life is linked to poorer mental and physical health. Activity could serve as an effective, low-cost intervention to improve affect. However, few prior studies have assessed physical activity and affect in everyday life, limiting the ecological validity of prior findings. This study investigates whether daily activity is associated with negative and positive evening affect in young adults.

Design: Young adults (N = 189, Mdn = 23.00) participated in an intensive longitudinal study over 10 consecutive days.

Main Outcome Measures: Participants wore accelerometers to objectively assess moderate-to-vigorous physical activity continuously throughout the day and reported their affect in time-stamped online evening diaries before going to sleep.

Results: On days when participants engaged in more activity than usual, they reported not only less depressed and angry evening affect but also more vigour and serenity in the evening.

Conclusion: Young adults showed both less negative and more positive affect on days with more activity. Physical activity is a promising health promotion strategy for physical and mental well-being.     

Visual and acoustic information supporting a happily expressed speech-in-noise advantage

There was an advantage found for recognizing happily expressed audio and audio-visual speech-in-noise relative to speech spoken with neutral or sad expressions. The advantage of happily expressed speech was explored in a set of visual and acoustic manipulations designed to isolate the potential contributions from each signal. For this research, a replication of previous research with the happily expressed speech advantage was completed with a novel inclusion of a learning paradigm. Additional experiments directly investigated the role of the fundamental frequency of the voice for affect, and the affective facial components with the eyes and mouth. We found that the happily expressed speech advantage persisted despite constraints to the amount of frequency modulation and with distortions to the talker's face. These findings seem largely attributable to the influences of affect on low-level acoustical and articulatory information, with only a very subtle role of approach/withdrawal motivation.     

Shielding voices: The modulation of binding processes between voice features and response features by task representations

Vocal events offer not only semantic-linguistic content but also information about the identity and the emotional-motivational state of the speaker. Furthermore, most vocal events have implications for our actions and therefore include action-related features. But the relevance and irrelevance of vocal features varies from task to task. The present study investigates binding processes for perceptual and action-related features of spoken words and their modulation by the task representation of the listener. Participants reacted with two response keys to eight different words spoken by a male or a female voice (Experiment 1) or spoken by an angry or neutral male voice (Experiment 2). There were two instruction conditions: half of participants learned eight stimulus-response mappings by rote (SR), and half of participants applied a binary task rule (TR). In both experiments, SR instructed participants showed clear evidence for binding processes between voice and response features indicated by an interaction between the irrelevant voice feature and the response. By contrast, as indicated by a three-way interaction with instruction, no such binding was found in the TR instructed group. These results are suggestive of binding and shielding as two adaptive mechanisms that ensure successful communication and action in a dynamic social environment.