Posttraumatic stress disorder after motor vehicle accidents: 3-year follow-up of a prospective longitudinal study

The paper presents a 3-year follow-up of a prospective longitudinal study of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after motor vehicle accidents (J. Abnormal Psychol., 107 (1998) 508). Participants were 546 patients who had been assessed when attending an emergency clinic shortly after a motor vehicle accident, and at 3 months and 1 year afterwards. The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD at 3 years was 11%. Maintaining psychological factors, i.e. negative interpretation of intrusions, rumination, thought suppression and anger cognitions, were important in predicting the persistence of PTSD at 3 years, as were persistent health and financial problems after the accident. Other predictors were female sex, hospital admission for injuries, perceived threat and dissociation during the accident, and litigation.     

The nature of learned categorical perception effects: a psychophysical approach

Categorical perception is often cited as a striking example of cognitive influences on perception. However, some evidence suggests the term is a misnomer, with effects based on cognitive not perceptual processing. Here, using a psychophysical approach, we provide evidence consistent with a learned categorical perception effect that is dependent on analysis within the visual processing stream. An improvement in participants' discrimination between grating patterns that they had learned to place in different categories was 'tuned' around the orientation of the patterns experienced during category learning. Thus, here, categorical perception may result from attentionally modulated perceptual learning about diagnostic category features, based upon orientation-selective stages of analysis. This argues strongly that category learning can alter our perception of the world.     

Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N?=?301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N?=?125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.     

Revealing negative thinking in recovered major depression: a preliminary investigation

Previous research suggests that formerly dysphoric individuals engage in effortful strategies (e.g., thought suppression) that may mask underlying depressive thinking. The addition of a cognitive load, such as recalling a 6-digit number, which interferes with effortful mental control, reveals depressive thinking in formerly dysphoric individuals. This preliminary study tested whether this effect of cognitive load on revealing negative thinking generalizes to formerly clinically depressed patients. Currently depressed patients, recovered depressed patients and never-depressed patients unscrambled sentences that could form either positive or negative statements, after random allocation to either cognitive load or no cognitive load conditions. The number of negative statements unscrambled was used as an index of negative thinking. Without a load, recovered depressed patients did not differ from never-depressed controls: both groups completed fewer negative statements than currently depressed patients. However, the cognitive load increased negative statements in the recovered depressed group, making them resemble the currently depressed group more than the never-depressed group. These preliminary findings extend previous demonstrations of cognitive load unmasking negative thinking in dysphoric students to a clinical population, suggesting that formerly depressed patients utilize effortful strategies to minimize the report of negative thinking, which is undermined by the addition of a cognitive load.     

Recognizing disguised faces

Across three experiments, we evaluated the effects of “disguises” on observers’ face identification performance using naturalistic images in which individuals posed with a variety of wigs and eyeglasses. Experiment 1 tested recognition memory performance with and without disguises and showed that any changes in these facial attributes hindered performance, replicating previous findings. More interestingly, Experiment 1 revealed that a change in hairstyle or the removal of eyeglasses had more impact on performance than did the addition of eyeglasses. In Experiment 2, disguised and undisguised faces were presented upright or inverted to examine whether the performance decrements seen in Experiment 1 were attributable to disruption of processing strategies for faces. Despite showing an overall effect of disguise on performance, there was no interaction between inversion and disguise. This suggests that disguises are not directly affecting processing strategies, but instead disguises are likely encoded as part of the overall representation. Similarly, in Experiment 3, the composite face paradigm was used to examine whether the impact of disguises is attributable to disruption of holistic processing for faces. Again, we found an overall effect of disguise on performance, but here we also observed that the presence of disguises interacted with participants’ tendency to form holistic face representations.     

Transforming or restraining rumination: The impact of compassionate reappraisal versus emotion suppression on empathy,forgiveness, and affective psychophysiology

We tested the effects of practicing compassionate reappraisal vs. emotional suppression as direct coping responses to victims’ ruminations about a past interpersonal offense. Participants (32 females, 32 males) were randomly assigned to learn one coping strategy which immediately followed three of six offense rumination trials (counterbalanced). For both strategy types, coping (vs. offense ruminating) reduced ratings of negative emotion, decreased the use of negative emotion language, and reduced tension at the brow muscle (corrugator EMG). Only compassionate reappraisal coping (vs. offense rumination) immediately prompted greater empathy and emotional forgiveness toward the offender. Empathy ratings for the first coping trial mediated the relationship between strategy type and empathy ratings for the final rumination trial. Compassionate reappraisal strategy participants increased their empathy toward the offender while ruminating at the end of the study. Compassionate reappraisal participants (vs. emotional suppression) described coping (vs. rumination) with more positive language, and also had calmer cardiac pre-ejection period responses.     

Perceptual learning in face processing: Comparison facilitates face recognition

Theoretical analyses of perceptual learning suggest that comparison between similar stimuli aids subsequent discrimination between them. The current studies examined whether the opportunity to compare a target face to other similar faces during a preexposure phase facilitated performance on a matching task. Performance was better when the target face had been presented in alternation with similar comparator faces than if that target had not been exposed before test. Exposure to the target face without comparators, or exposure alternating with dissimilar faces, improved performance relative to the nonexposed control but performance was not as good as when target exposure was given in alternation to similar comparison faces. The effects were not influenced by image changes between exposure and test. It is suggested that exposure to a face in comparison to similar stimuli focuses the central representation of a face on its unique features. In practical terms these results suggest that reliable identification of an individual from their photograph would be improved by viewing that photograph in comparison with photographs of similar people.     

Anxiety sensitivity-physical concerns as a moderator of the emotional consequences of emotion suppression during biological challenge: an experimental test using individual growth curve analysis

Anxiety-related responding to, and recovery from, a 5-min 10% carbon dioxide-enriched air presentation among 80 participants with no history of psychopathology was examined. Half of participants were instructed to suppress challenge-induced emotional responses, whereas their matched counterparts were instructed to observe such responses. Responding from immediately post-challenge through a 10-min recovery period was analyzed as a function of Anxiety Sensitivity-Physical Concerns and experimental condition using individual growth curve modeling. Anxiety Sensitivity-Physical Concerns moderated the effect of suppression only on emotion valence during recovery. In terms of main effects, suppression resulted in increased heart rate during recovery and Anxiety Sensitivity-Physical Concerns was positively associated with post-challenge self-reported anxiety. Results are discussed in terms of the potential role of inhibition-oriented affect regulation processes in the etiology of panic disorder.     

Childhood Trauma Predicts Positive Expressive Suppression During Social Affiliation in Adults With Anxiety and/or Depression: Implications for Social Functioning

Experiencing childhood trauma (CT) can create barriers for developing relationships and is a risk factor for anxiety and depression. Expressive suppression (ES; i.e., reducing expression associated with experiencing emotions) might explain the link between CT and relationship formation difficulties. We examined the association between (1) CT and ES during a dyadic paradigm intended to facilitate connectedness between unacquainted partners and (2) ES and desire for future interaction (DFI). Individuals with an anxiety or depressive disorder diagnosis (N = 77) interacted with a trained confederate; partners answered a series of increasingly intimate questions about themselves. Participant ES for positive and negative emotions, and participant and confederate DFI were collected during the task. Participants completed global anxiety, depression, and CT measures. CT correlated with positive (r = .35, p = .002), but not negative, ES (r = .13, p = .273). In a multiple linear regression model, CT predicted positive ES beyond symptom variables and gender, β = .318, t = 2.59, p = .012. Positive ES correlated with participant (r = ?.38, p = .001) and confederate DFI (r = ?.40, p<.01); and predicted participant DFI beyond symptom variables and ethnicity, β = ?.358, t = ?3.18, p = .002, and confederate DFI, β = ?.390, t = ?3.51, p = .001, beyond symptom variables. Mediation analyses suggested positive ES accounted for the relationship between greater CT severity and less desire for future interaction from participants, 95%CI [?0.26, ?0.02], and confederates, [?0.38, ?0.01]. Positive ES may be an important factor in the reduced capacity to form new social relationships for individuals with a history of CT, anxiety, and depression.