Visceral sensitivity as a mediator of outcome in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome

Patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) experience anxiety about visceral sensations, leading to avoidance behaviors and hypervigilance that maintain IBS symptoms. The current study used data from a clinical trial that compared a treatment aimed at reducing anxiety about visceral sensations (interoceptive exposure; IE) to an attention control (AC) and a CBT-based stress-management treatment (SM) to examine whether changes in visceral sensitivity mediated IBS symptom and quality of life outcomes. Data from participants who completed one of the three treatments (N = 76) were subjected to mediation analyses. Visceral sensitivity mediated treatment outcomes across all outcome measures and across all treatment groups, with no differences between IE and the other treatment groups. This finding suggests that psychosocial treatments for IBS may work by decreasing visceral sensitivity, and the degree to which visceral sensitivity is decreased is related to outcome, suggesting IE may be the preferable treatment option.     

Does Christian Faith Rule out Human Autonomy?

Beginning with Kant, modernity has developed the secular dogma that human autonomy is incompatible with obedience to religious law. Can philosophy critique a faulty understanding of both autonomy and obedience? Can theology work out a healthy interaction between the two? In other words, can Christian faith integrate both a redefined autonomy and a redefined obedience?     

Motivation,personal beliefs,and limited resources all contribute to self-control

What effects do motivation and beliefs have on self-control? We tested this question using a limited resource paradigm, which generally has found that people show poor self-control after prior exertions of self-control. Recent findings have suggested that motivation and even belief in unlimited willpower can render persons immune to ego depletion. We replicated those findings, but also showed they are limited to cases of mild depletion. When depletion is extensive, the effects of motivation and subjective belief vanished and in one case reversed. After performing only one self-control task, the typical pattern of self-regulation impairment was ameliorated among people who were encouraged to regard willpower as unlimited (Experiment 1) or motivated by task importance (Experiment 2). Those manipulations failed to improve performance among severely depleted persons who had done multiple self-control tasks. These findings integrate ideas of limited resources, motivation, and beliefs in understanding the nature of self-control over time.     

Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control

How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control to resist their desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual framework integrating desire strength, conflict, resistance (use of self-control), and behavior enactment. A sample of 205 adults wore beepers for a week. They furnished 7,827 reports of desire episodes and completed personality measures of behavioral inhibition system/behavior activation system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity, trait self-control, perfectionism, and narcissistic entitlement. Results suggest that desires are frequent, variable in intensity, and largely unproblematic. Those urges that do conflict with other goals tend to elicit resistance, with uneven success. Desire strength, conflict, resistance, and self-regulatory success were moderated in multiple ways by personality variables as well as by situational and interpersonal factors such as alcohol consumption, the mere presence of others, and the presence of others who already had enacted the desire in question. Whereas personality generally had a stronger impact on the dimensions of desire that emerged early in its course (desire strength and conflict), situational factors showed relatively more influence on components later in the process (resistance and behavior enactment). In total, these findings offer a novel and detailed perspective on the nature of everyday desires and associated self-regulatory successes and failures.     

Emotion Dysregulation as a Mechanism Linking Stress Exposure to Adolescent Aggressive Behavior

Exposure to stress is associated with a wide range of internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescents, including aggressive behavior. Extant research examining mechanisms underlying the associations between stress and youth aggression has consistently identified social information processing pathways that are disrupted by exposure to violence and increase risk of aggressive behavior. In the current study, we use longitudinal data to examine emotion dysregulation as a potential mechanism linking a broader range of stressful experiences to aggressive behavior in a diverse sample of early adolescents (N?=?1065). Specifically, we examined the longitudinal associations of peer victimization and stressful life events with emotion dysregulation and aggressive behavior. Structural equation modeling was used to create latent constructs of emotion dysregulation and aggression. Both stressful life events and peer victimization predicted subsequent increases in emotion dysregulation over a 4-month period. These increases in emotion dysregulation, in turn, were associated with increases in aggression over the subsequent 3?months. Longitudinal mediation models showed that emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship of both peer victimization (z?=?2.35, p?=?0.019) and stressful life events (z?=?2.32, p?=?0.020) with aggressive behavior. Increasing the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies is an important target for interventions aimed at preventing the onset of adolescent aggressive behavior.