Familiality of mood repair responses among youth with and without histories of depression

Affect regulation skills develop in the context of the family environment, wherein youths are influenced by their parents', and possibly their siblings', regulatory responses and styles. Regulatory responses to sadness (mood repair) that exacerbate or prolong dysphoria (maladaptive mood repair) may represent one way in which depression is transmitted within families. We examined self-reported adaptive and maladaptive mood repair responses across cognitive, social and behavioural domains in Hungarian 11- to 19-year-old youth and their parents. Offspring included 214 probands with a history of childhood-onset depressive disorder, 200 never depressed siblings and 161 control peers. Probands reported the most problematic mood repair responses, with siblings reporting more modest differences from controls. Mood repair responses of parents and their offspring, as well as within sib-pairs, were related, although results differed as a function of the regulatory response domain. Results demonstrate familiality of maladaptive and adaptive mood repair responses in multiple samples. These familial associations suggest that relationships with parents and siblings within families may impact the development of affect regulation in youth.     

Reappraisal Buffers the Association Between Stress and Negative Mood Measured Over 14 Days: Implications for Understanding Psychological Resilience

Reappraisal is thought to be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, and research suggests that individuals who habitually reappraise report more positive patterns of affect overall. However, some experimental studies indicate that a greater tendency to reappraise can exacerbate stress response, and it is unclear whether reappraisal confers resilience or exacerbates response to naturally occurring stressors. In order to address this, the present study investigated whether reappraisal prospectively moderated the association between daily stressors and daily negative mood measured over 14 days. Participants (n = 236) completed a measure of reappraisal at baseline, before completing daily online entries of stress and positive and negative mood. Data were analysed using multilevel modelling. Results suggested that reappraisal moderated the association between stress and negative mood, such that higher levels of reappraisal were associated with lower levels of negative mood in response to stress. Moreover, higher reappraisal was also independently associated with lower levels of daily negative mood and higher levels of positive mood. These results suggest that higher reappraisal may confer resilience to stress. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Emotion regulation mediates the relationship between personality and sleep quality

Objective: Despite a long history of interest in personality as well as in the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between personality and sleep is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to explore how personality affects sleep.

Design: The present cross-sectional study, based on a sample of 1291 participants with a mean age of 31.16 years (SD = 12.77), investigates the impact of personality styles, assessed by the Personality Adjectives Checklist (PACL), on subjective sleep quality, as well as the possible mediation of this relationship by dispositional emotion regulation (ER) styles.

Results: The dispositional use of suppression was a quite consistent predictor of poor subjective sleep quality for individuals scoring high on Confident, Cooperative or Introversive personality traits, but low on Respectful personality traits. Although a positive relationship between reappraisal and subjective sleep quality was found, there was only little evidence for a relationship between the assessed personality styles and the use of cognitive reappraisal.

Conclusion: The present results indicate that in the evaluation of subjective sleep, the impact of personality and ER processes, such as emotion suppression, should be taken into account.     

An examination of the roles of trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder on emotion regulation strategies of Operation Iraqi Freedom,Operation Enduring Freedom,and Operation New Dawn veterans

Theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) implicate emotional processes, including difficulties utilizing adaptive emotion regulation strategies, as critical to the etiology and maintenance of PTSD. Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation New Dawn (OIF/OEF/OND) veterans report high levels of combat exposure and PTSD. We aimed to extend findings suggesting that emotion regulation difficulties are a function of PTSD, rather than combat trauma exposure or common comorbidities, to OIF/OEF/OND veterans, in order to inform models of PTSD risk and recovery that can be applied to returning veterans. We tested differences in emotion regulation, measured with the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, among trauma-exposed veterans with (n = 24) or without PTSD (n = 22) and healthy civilian comparison participants (n = 27) using multivariate analyses of covariance, adjusting for major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and demographic variables (age, sex, and ethnicity). Veterans with PTSD reported more use of expressive suppression and more difficulties with emotion regulation than veterans without PTSD and healthy comparison participants. Groups did not differ on cognitive reappraisal. Findings suggest the key role of PTSD above and beyond trauma exposure, depression, and anxiety in specific aspects of emotion dysregulation among OIF/OEF/OND veterans. Interventions that help veterans expand and diversify their emotion regulation skills may serve as helpful adjunctive treatments for PTSD among OIF/OEF/OND veterans.     

Higher body mass index is associated with episodic memory deficits in young adults

Obesity has become an international health crisis. There is accumulating evidence that excess bodyweight is associated with changes to the structure and function of the brain and with a number of cognitive deficits. In particular, research suggests that obesity is associated with hippocampal and frontal lobe dysfunction, which would be predicted to impact memory. However, evidence for such memory impairment is currently limited. We hypothesised that higher body mass index (BMI) would be associated with reduced performance on a test of episodic memory that assesses not only content, but also context and feature integration. A total of 50 participants aged 18–35 years, with BMIs ranging from 18 to 51, were tested on a novel what–where–when style episodic memory test: the “Treasure-Hunt Task”. This test requires recollection of object, location, and temporal order information within the same paradigm, as well as testing the ability to integrate these features into a single event recollection. Higher BMI was associated with significantly lower performance on the what–where–when (WWW) memory task and all individual elements: object identification, location memory, and temporal order memory. After controlling for age, sex, and years in education, the effect of BMI on the individual what, where, and when tasks remained, while the WWW dropped below significance. This finding of episodic memory deficits in obesity is of concern given the emerging evidence for a role for episodic cognition in appetite regulation.     

Predicting Cognitive and Social Consequences of Emotional Episodes: The Contribution of Emotional Intensity, the Five Factor Model, and Alexithymia

Emotional events are followed by recurrent thoughts (rumination) and talking about the event (social sharing of emotion). Factors that can account for variations in these consequences were examined (emotional intensity, the Five Factor Model, and two factors of alexithymia). In two samples, participants reported the most negative emotional event of recent months and in one sample also reported the most positive one. Results indicated that emotional intensity predicted social sharing and rumination, while neuroticism was positively related to intrusive thoughts about negative events and extraversion to rumination and social sharing about positive events. Difficulty describing feelings was negatively related to social sharing for negative events and reduced fantasy to rumination for positive events.     

情绪调节理论：心理健康角度的考察

以情绪调节与心理健康的关系为切入口,对情绪调节理论进行了阐述：早期精神分析理论,把情绪调节看作被动防御机制,情绪调节困难导致心理问题;情境观把情绪调节看作为应对情绪情境即时的心理反应,策略使用情况与心理健康相关;过程观认为情绪调节在情绪发生过程中展开,不同阶段所采用的调节策略与心理健康相关,后又把调节过程扩展到情绪恢复到正常状态所持续时间,时间与心理健康相关;结构观认为情绪调节结构的差异影响心理健康     

Proactive and reactive aggression in early adolescence as precursors to anti- and prosocial behavior in young adults

Three groups of adolescents who were 14 years old in 1974 were formed on the basis of peer nominations and teacher ratings in an ongoing longitudinal study: 1) reactively aggressive (REA) individuals who displayed reactive, that is, self-defensive aggression but not proactive aggression (43 boys, 35 girls); 2) proactively aggressive (PROA) individuals who attacked another person without a reason (56 boys, 35 girls); and 3) nonaggressive (NONA) individuals who were low in proactive and reactive aggression (48 boys, 45 girls). The groups were compared at ages 8, 14, and 27 in variables representing the constructs of a two-dimensional model of emotional and behavioral regulation. The REA Ss were characterized by higher self-control, especially constructiveness, at each age and better adult adjustment than the PROA Ss. The PROA males were prone to externalizing problems and criminality in adulthood, whereas the PROA females were prone to internalizing problems and neuroticism in adulthood. Both exhibited conduct problems in adolescence, and became heavy users of alcohol in adulthood. The PROA Ss had more children at age 27 than the other Ss. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Emotion Regulation Strategies in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Panic Disorder

Emotion regulation (ER) has been incorporated into many models of psychopathology, but it has not been examined directly in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for panic disorder with agoraphobia (PD/A). In this study, a preliminary model of ER in CBT for PD/A is proposed based on existing theories, and several propositions of the model are tested. We hypothesized that increases in cognitive reappraisal would precede decreases in biased cognitions, decreases in expressive suppression would follow decreases in biased cognitions, and a reduction in symptom severity would follow decreases in expressive suppression. Twenty-nine patients who received CBT for PD/A completed weekly self-report measures of symptom severity, anxiety sensitivity, reappraisal and expressive suppression. In addition, patients were compared to a matched normal sample. Cross-lagged analyses partially supported the hypotheses. Reappraisal did not change until late stages of therapy and was generally not associated with treatment outcome. Suppression decreased significantly and exhibited a reciprocal relationship with biased cognitions. Symptom reduction followed decreases in suppression as hypothesized. However, patients did not differ in ER from matched controls at either pre- or posttreatment. Results suggest the important distinction between reappraisal and appraisal, and stress the role of session-by-session decreases in suppression as a predictor of symptom reduction.