Emotional inertia: A key to understanding psychotherapy process and outcome

The processes underlying psychotherapeutic change have increasingly been emphasized in both research and clinical practice. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory (NDS) offers a transdisciplinary scientific approach to the study of these processes. This paper introduces the NDS concept of “emotional inertia”, the property of human emotion by which it retains its course so long as it is not acted upon by an external force, as a key to understanding moment-by-moment and also longer-term change processes within psychotherapy. A testable mathematical model of emotional inertia is presented that represents specific impacts of psychotherapeutic processes on emotional dynamics over time. Emotional trajectories in phase space, treatment energy, and the interaction between them are the essential elements of the model, and a detailed explanation is provided. Procedures for testing this model are described, such as by tracking the movement of emotion in phase space within and across therapy sessions, along with clinical implications of the model, which can potentially help to make more clear the complementary roles of therapeutic force, timing, and leverage.     

Good intentions gone awry? Effects of weight-related social control on health and well-being

A negative body image has been associated with a variety of negative health and well-being outcomes. Social pressures from others, in the form of weight-related social control, may serve to exacerbate this effect, especially for college-aged women. Undergraduate students (N = 399) completed a variety of questionnaires assessing weight-related social control, well-being, and diet and exercise behaviors. The results suggest that weight is associated with a variety of negative health and well-being outcomes and particularly for women, weight-related social control is also associated with these negative effects. In addition, men of higher body mass indexes (BMIs) or higher self-perceived weight did not experience negative health and well-being outcomes to the same degree that overweight women did. Parents in particular seem to instigate weight-related social control to change students’ diet and exercise behaviors. These results help clarify the effects of weight-related social control in a college population, where weight may be especially important.     

Emotional regulation,attachment to possessions and hoarding symptoms

This study aimed to test which particular facets of emotion regulation (ER) are most linked to symptoms of hoarding disorder, and whether beliefs about emotional attachment to possessions (EA) mediate this relationship. A non‐clinical sample of 150 participants (108 females) completed questionnaires of emotional tolerance (distress tolerance, anxiety sensitivity, negative urgency – impulsivity when experiencing negative emotions), depressed mood, hoarding, and beliefs about emotional attachment to possessions. While all emotional tolerance measures related to hoarding, when considered together and controlling for depression and age, anxiety sensitivity and urgency were the significant predictors. Anxiety sensitivity was fully mediated, and urgency partially mediated, via beliefs regarding emotional attachment to possessions. These findings provide further support for (1) the importance of anxiety sensitivity and negative urgency for hoarding symptoms, and (2) the view that individuals with HD symptoms may rely on items for emotion regulation, leading to stronger beliefs that items are integral to emotional wellbeing.     

Action orientation overcomes the ego depletion effect

It has been consistently demonstrated that initial exertion of self‐control had negative influence on people's performance on subsequent self‐control tasks. This phenomenon is referred to as the ego depletion effect. Based on action control theory, the current research investigated whether the ego depletion effect could be moderated by individuals' action versus state orientation. Our results showed that only state‐oriented individuals exhibited ego depletion. For individuals with action orientation, however, their performance was not influenced by initial exertion of self‐control. The beneficial effect of action orientation against ego depletion in our experiment results from its facilitation for adapting to the depleting task.     

A depleted mind feels inefficacious: Ego‐depletion reduces self‐efficacy to exert further self‐control

Recent research has found that ego‐depletion undermines self‐control by motivating cognition that justifies conservation of mental resource. One potential cognitive mechanism is reduction of self‐efficacy. Specifically, we propose that ego‐depletion might demotivate self‐control by making people believe that they are inefficacious in exerting self‐control in subsequent tasks. Three experiments support the proposal. First, we demonstrated that (a) ego‐depletion can reduce self‐efficacy to exert further control (Experiments 1 to 3) and (b) the temporary reduction of self‐efficacy mediates the effect of depletion on self‐control performance (Experiment 2). Finally, we found that (c) these effects are only observed among participants who endorse a limited (versus non‐limited) theory of willpower and are, hence, more motivated to conserve mental resources (Experiment 3). Taken together, the present findings show that decrease in self‐efficacy to exert further self‐control is an important cognitive process that explains how ego‐depletion demotivates self‐control. This research also contributes to the recent discussion of the psychological processes underlying ego‐depletion.     

Updating working memory in aircraft noise and speech noise causes different fMRI activations

The present study used fMRI/BOLD neuroimaging to investigate how visual‐verbal working memory is updated when exposed to three different background‐noise conditions: speech noise, aircraft noise and silence. The number‐updating task that was used can distinguish between “substitution processes,” which involve adding new items to the working memory representation and suppressing old items, and “exclusion processes,” which involve rejecting new items and maintaining an intact memory set. The current findings supported the findings of a previous study by showing that substitution activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior medial frontal cortex and the parietal lobes, whereas exclusion activated the anterior medial frontal cortex. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex was activated more by substitution processes when exposed to background speech than when exposed to aircraft noise. These results indicate that (a) the prefrontal cortex plays a special role when task‐irrelevant materials should be denied access to working memory and (b) that, when compensating for different types of noise, either different cognitive mechanisms are involved or those cognitive mechanisms that are involved are involved to different degrees.     

Development of infant leg coordination: Exploiting passive torques

Leg joint coordination systematically changes over the first months of life, yet there is minimal data on the underlying change in muscle torques that might account for this change in coordination. The purpose of this study is to investigate the contribution of torque changes to early changes in leg joint coordination. Kicking actions were analyzed of 10 full-term infants between 6 and 15-weeks of age using three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics. We found 11 of 15 joint angle pairs demonstrated a change from more in-phase intralimb coordination at 6-weeks to less in-phase coordination at 15-weeks. Although the magnitude of joint torques normalized to the mass of the leg remained relatively consistent, we noted more complex patterns of torque component contribution across ages. By focusing on the change in torques associated with hip–knee joint coordination, we found that less in-phase hip–knee joint coordination at 15-weeks was associated with decreased influence of knee muscle torque and increased influence of knee gravitational and motion-dependent torques, supporting that infants coordinate hip muscle torque with passive knee gravitational and motion-dependent torques to generate kicks with reduced active knee muscle torque. We propose that between 6 and 15-weeks of age less in-phase hip–knee coordination emerges as infants exploit passive dynamics in the coordination of hip and knee motions.     

Marital conflict and parental responses to infant negative emotions: Relations with toddler emotional regulation

According to family systems theory, children's emotional development is likely to be influenced by family interactions at multiple levels, including marital, mother–child, and father–child interactions, as well as by interrelations between these levels. The purpose of the present study was to examine parents’ marital conflict and mothers’ and fathers’ distressed responses to their infant's negative emotions, assessed when their child was 8 and 24 months old, in addition to interactions between parents’ marital conflict and their distressed responses, as predictors of their toddler's negative and flat/withdrawn affect at 24 months. Higher marital conflict during infancy and toddlerhood predicted both increased negative and increased flat/withdrawn affect during toddlerhood. In addition, toddlers’ negative (but not flat) affect was related to mothers’ distressed responses, but was only related to father's distressed responses when martial conflict was high. Implications of this study for parent education and family intervention were discussed.     

Re-examining the effects of verbal instructional type on early stage motor learning

The present study investigated the differential effects of analogy and explicit instructions on early stage motor learning and movement in a modified high jump task. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: analogy, explicit light (reduced informational load), or traditional explicit (large informational load). During the two-day learning phase, participants learned a novel high jump technique based on the ‘scissors’ style using the instructions for their respective conditions. For the single-day testing phase, participants completed both a retention test and task-relevant pressure test, the latter of which featured a rising high-jump-bar pressure manipulation. Although analogy learners demonstrated slightly more efficient technique and reported fewer technical rules on average, the differences between the conditions were not statistically significant. There were, however, significant differences in joint variability with respect to instructional type, as variability was lowest for the analogy condition during both the learning and testing phases, and as a function of block, as joint variability decreased for all conditions during the learning phase. Findings suggest that reducing the informational volume of explicit instructions may mitigate the deleterious effects on performance previously associated with explicit learning in the literature.     

Task-specificity of balance training

Despite much research on balance training, it is still unclear whether balance training leads to highly task-specific adaptations or rather non-specific adaptations. Hence, in this study we examined whether balance training increased performance only in the balance task that was trained or also in non-trained tasks. Forty healthy participants (28 m 12 f, 25 ± 4 years, 177 ± 10 cm, 73 ± 14 kg) were assigned to one of two training groups (TGs) or a control group. Both TGs completed six sessions over 2 weeks, only the training device differed. Before and after the training, performance in the trained task as well as in additional untrained tasks was recorded. ANOVAs showed that each TG outperformed the other groups only in the task they had trained (e.g., task trained by TG1: +225% in TG1, only +41% and +30% in TG2 and control, group * time interaction, p < 0.001; Untrained task 1: TG1 +48%, TG2 +48%, and control +30%, no significant interaction, p = 0.72). In summary, 2 weeks of balance training resulted in highly task-specific effects, no transfer even to very similar tasks was observed. Therefore, we recommend identifying and training exactly those tasks that need improvement, and test the efficacy of training programs using specific tests instead of general tests with limited functional relevance.