This study was conducted to identify the characteristics of attentional bias of individuals with Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT) and how Attention Bias to Threat (ABT) changes when feedback was provided in attention training.

Excessive reassurance-seeking in OCD has been linked to the maintenance of OCD, functioning as a type of checking ritual. Current treatments recommend the imposition of the extinction of seeking and providing reassurance; however, this is not well tolerated. Although it has been suggested that the provision of support may provide a more helpful alternative, there is no empirical evidence for this. In the present study, 36 participants with OCD engaged with two personalised semi-idiographic scenarios in which they imagined seeking and receiving reassurance and seeking and receiving emotional support in counterbalanced order. The primary outcome measure was anticipated urge to seek reassurance, which was found to significantly decrease in the imagined support condition relative to the imagined reassurance condition regardless of order of presentation. Emotional support was perceived as significantly more acceptable when compared to imagining reassurance in terms of higher ratings of perceived helpfulness in managing emotions, feelings of calmness and closeness, and the sense that they were fighting OCD together. These findings provide preliminary evidence for the value of encouraging the seeking and giving of emotional support as an alternative to reassurance. Implications for clinical work and further research are discussed.

Using multiple emotion regulation strategies in response to a single stressor-known as polyregulation-is an understudied but common event. The role of polyregulation in psychological disorders characterized by repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is unexplored, despite well-documented difficulties in emotion regulation and strong urges to avoid and escape one's intrusive thoughts in RNT.

Dissociative detachment experiences (e.g., derealization, absorption) underpin much psychopathology and are often researched in relation to co-occurring affective states such as shame, the latter being known to occur in situations involving actual or perceived negative social evaluation. The association between shame and dissociative detachment may also be moderated by individual differences in people's need to belong. The goal of the present study was to experimentally investigate the effects of social exclusion on shame and dissociative detachment depending on perceivers' need to belong.

Emotion goals (desired affect) have been theorized to play an essential role in a person's emotional experiences, guiding emotion regulation processes toward experiencing desired states. Hence, understanding whether and which emotion goals are associated with reduced negative states is crucial for individuals struggling to regulate these states, such as persons with depression. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we examined the relationship between momentary desired positive affect and subsequent depressive affect in daily life, as well as future depressive symptoms, among individuals with depressive disorders.

The Inhibitory Retrieval Approach to exposure therapy for fears and anxiety emphasizes prediction error as one of several strategies for improving outcomes. Prediction error depends on disconfirmation of expectancies for the feared outcome, and thus exposure strategies that derive from inhibitory retrieval approaches emphasize expectancy violation during exposure. However, research studies examining expectancy violation in exposure therapy have treated expectancy as a stable characteristic, assuming that expectancy following an exposure exercise remains constant over time. This brief report outlines two different uses of a methodology for using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to assess between-session expectancy following exposure during treatment for anxiety, and reports on pilot trial results.

Clinical practice reveals that individuals with autism characterized by the absence of cognitive impairment (High Functioning Autism-HFA) show difficulty in sharing attention with unfamiliar people. We hypothesized that this difficulty could affect cognitive control by selectively impairing stimulus-encoding or response-selection.

Previous research has not established a consensus on the ability of higher socially anxious individuals to detect facial expressions. The purpose of this study was to examine this issue using Signal Detection Theory (SDT) as a framework.

Cognitive models of OCD posit that dysfunctional beliefs contribute to the maintenance of symptoms. In addition to well-established belief domains, beliefs about losing control has been identified as a novel cognitive domain which may influence OCD phenomena, including other dysfunctional beliefs. However, the exact nature of these relationships and whether such relationships are influenced by OCD symptoms is unclear. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between appraisals of losing control and other OCD-relevant appraisals in individuals scoring high and low on OCD symptoms.

A proposed strategy for attenuating the return of fear is conducting exposure therapy in multiple contexts (e.g., different locations), which is believed to enhance the generalizability of safety learning. Although conducting exposure in multiple contexts can be differentiated from conducting exposure with multiple stimuli, the two strategies are often conflated. Furthermore, researchers have not yet determined whether one of these strategies, or a combination thereof, is most effective in attenuating fear renewal.

People sometimes re-experience traumatic events via intrusive memories that spontaneously and unintentionally intrude into consciousness (i.e., intrusions). Such intrusions can be experienced without explicit awareness (i.e., meta-awareness). However, we do not know whether intrusions with and without meta-awareness differ in how people experience them (i.e., characteristics) or react to them via maladaptive responses (i.e., suppression, negative interpretations), and therefore whether they are important to differentiate. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to watch a trauma analogue film and-during a subsequent unrelated reading task-intermittently probed them to capture and assess one film-related intrusion. Intrusion meta-awareness positively correlated with intrusion negativity, re-experiencing, and suppression, but not with how people interpreted the meaning of their intrusion. Our findings suggest intrusions with and without meta-awareness can differ in how they are experienced and associated with thought suppression-highlighting the importance of considering both types of intrusions in theory and practice.

Beliefs about losing control over one's thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and/or bodily functions have been shown to cause obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The cognitive model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suggests that catastrophic misappraisals of intrusions will lessen if underlying maladaptive beliefs are effectively reduced. The primary aim of this study was to experimentally investigate whether preexisting negative appraisals about losing control could be reduced by reappraising a previous perceived loss of control.

The current study examined emotion dysregulation and self-compassion as an intervention in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms.

Depressive disorders are common mental illnesses associated with high burden of disease. In this study, the effects of an online group behavioral activation on depressive symptoms and rumination were evaluated, and trajectories of change in patients with major depressive disorder adapted for a lower-middle income context investigated.

Rates of mental health disorders are rising among adolescents and young adults. Therefore, scalable methods for preventing psychopathology in these age groups are needed. As repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a risk factor for depression and anxiety disorders, targeting RNT via smartphone app promises to be an effective, scalable strategy. The current three-arm, parallel group, randomized controlled trial tested whether a self-help app designed to reduce RNT decreased psychopathological symptoms and RNT in adolescents and young adults at risk for mental disorders.

The meta-analysis reported in Vahey et al. (2015) concluded that the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) has high clinical criterion validity (meta-analytic r‾ = .45) and therefore "the potential of the IRAP as a tool for clinical assessment" (p. 64). Vahey et al. (2015) also reported power analyses, and the article is frequently cited for sample size determination in IRAP studies, especially their heuristic of N > 37. This article attempts to verify those results. Results were found to have very poor reproducibility at almost every stage of the data extraction and analysis with errors generally biased towards inflating the effect size. The reported meta-analysis results were found to be mathematically implausible and could not be reproduced despite numerous attempts. Multiple internal discrepancies were found in the effect sizes such as between the forest plot and funnel plot, and between the forest plot and the supplementary data. 23 of the 56 (41.1%) individual effect sizes were not actually criterion effects and did not meet the original inclusion criteria. The original results were also undermined by combining effect sizes with different estimands. Reextraction of effect sizes from the original articles revealed 360 additional effect sizes that met inclusion criteria that should have been included in the original analysis. Examples of selection bias in the inclusion of larger effect sizes were observed. A new meta-analysis was calculated to understand the compound impact of these errors (i.e., without endorsing its results as a valid estimate of the IRAP's criterion validity). The effect size was half the size of the original (r‾ = .22), and the power analyses recommended sample sizes nearly 10 times larger than the original (N > 346), which no published original study using the IRAP has met. In aggregate, this seriously undermines the credibility and utility of the original article's conclusions and recommendations. Vahey et al. (2015) appears to need substantial correction at minimum. In particular, researchers should not rely on its results for sample size justification. A list of suggestions for error detection in meta-analyses is provided.

Residual symptoms represent risk factor for relapse. Attention bias modification (ABM) may reduce clinical and sub-clinical depressive symptoms, indicating that is may be of relevance when preventing relapse. Current evidence suggests that executive functions may moderate the outcome of interventions targeting depressive symptoms.

The conditioned-intrusion paradigm was designed to provide insight into the relationship between fear conditioning and intrusive memory formation, which is relevant to understanding posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and treatment. However, boundary conditions of this new paradigm have not been explored and it is currently not known whether findings from this work are valid in a clinical context.

Social anxious individuals show attention bias towards emotional stimuli, this phenomenon is considered to be an important cause of anxiety generation and maintenance. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a standard psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder. CBT decreases attention biases by correcting the maladaptive beliefs of socially anxious individuals, but it is not clear whether CBT alters neurophysiological features of socially anxious individuals at early automatic and/or late cognitive strategy stage of attentional processing.

Inhibitory Learning Theory (ILT) framework implies that in-session distress variability may promote extinction learning and thereby enhance exposure therapy efficacy. Thus far, research has mainly focused on in-session distress reduction. The aim of the current study was to assess whether in-session distress variability predicts next session PTSD symptom decline in PTSD patients receiving prolonged exposure (PE).

Transdiagnostic approaches have been promoted as a means of maximising preventative effects across multiple problems with depression and anxiety suitable targets as they appear to have highly interconnected systems in pathology development and maintenance. This study investigated long-term effects of two universal school-based programs, Emotion Regulation (ER) and Behavioral Activation (BA), that sought to prevent depression and anxiety by targeting worry (a transdiagnostic feature) to promote resilience.