Not I, but she: The beneficial effects of self-distancing on challenge/threat cardiovascular responses

Pain From a Distance: Can Third-Person Self-Talk Mitigate Pain Sensitivity and Pain Related Distress During Experimentally Induced Pain?

Pain is self-immersive, leading to a narrow, egocentric focus on the self in the here and now. Preliminary evidence suggests that distancing oneself from the pain can reduce experimentally induced pain. The primary aim of this experimental study was to examine whether a hitherto unexplored, simple self-distancing strategy - "third-person self-talk" - has an analgesic effect on physiological and psychological pain variables. Participants (N = 292) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (third-person self-talk, first-person self-talk, and two control conditions). Pain was induced with a cold pressor apparatus and pain tolerance, pain intensity, negative affect and blood pressure were measured for each group. While in pain, participants engaged in strategic self-talk aided by cue-cards. Data were analyzed with univariate planned comparisons. Few significant differences emerged for the third-person self-talk versus the other conditions. It is concluded that third-person self-talk does not seem to have a meaningful effect on physiological and psychological pain variables, although a small effect size could not be ruled out. Practical implications are discussed.The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov with the ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT05511857.

Pilot Study of Self-Distancing Augmentation to Exposure Therapy for Youth Anxiety

This pilot examines a self-distancing augmentation to exposure. Nine youth with anxiety (ages 11-17; 67% female) completed treatment. The study employed a brief (eight session) crossover ABA/BAB design. Exposure difficulty, engagement with exposure, and treatment acceptability were examined as primary outcome variables. Visual inspection of plots indicated that youth completed more difficult exposures during augmented exposure sessions [EXSD] than classic exposure sessions [EX] by therapist- and youth-report and that therapists reported higher youth engagement during EXSD than EX sessions. There were no significant differences between EXSD and EX on exposure difficulty or engagement by therapist- or youth-report. Treatment acceptability was high, although some youth reported that self-distancing was "awkward". Self-distancing may be associated with increased exposure engagement and willingness to complete more difficult exposures, which has been linked to treatment outcomes. Future research is needed to further demonstrate this link, and link self-distancing to outcomes directly.

Understanding the benefits of extrinsic emotion regulation in depression

Depression is a serious psychiatric illness that negatively affects people's feelings, thoughts, and actions. Providing emotion regulation support to others, also termed Extrinsic Emotion Regulation (EER), reduces depressive symptoms such as perseverative thinking and negative mood. In this conceptual review paper, we argue that EER may be especially beneficial for individuals with depression because it enhances the cognitive and affective processes known to be impaired in depression. Behavioral studies have shown that EER recruits processes related to cognitive empathy, intrinsic emotion regulation (IER), and reward, all impaired in depression. Neuroimaging data support these findings by showing that EER recruits brain regions related to these three processes, such as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex which is associated with IER, the ventral striatum, which is associated with reward-related processes, and medial frontal regions related to cognitive empathy. This conceptual review paper sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of EER for individuals with depression and therefore offers novel avenues for treatment.

Self-Reflection at Work: Why It Matters and How to Harness Its Potential and Avoid Its Pitfalls

It is difficult to fathom how an organization could be successful without its employees engaging in self-reflection. Gone would be its personnel's capacity to problem-solve, learn from past experiences, and engage in countless other introspective activities that are vital to success. Indeed, a large body of research highlights the positive value of reflection. Yet, as both common experience and a wealth of findings demonstrate, engaging in this introspective process while focusing on negative experiences often backfires, undermining people's health, well-being, performance, and relationships. Here we synthesize research on the benefits and costs of self-reflection in organizational contexts and discuss the role that psychological distance plays in allowing people to harness the potential of self-reflection while avoiding its common pitfalls.

Distanced self-talk increases rational self-interest

Does stepping back to evaluate a situation from a distanced perspective lead us to be selfish or fair? This question has been of philosophical interest for centuries, and, more recently, the focus of extensive empirical inquiry. Yet, extant research reveals a puzzle: some studies suggest that adopting a distanced perspective will produce more rationally self-interested behavior, whereas others suggest that it will produce more impartial behavior. Here we adjudicate between these perspectives by testing the effects of adopting a third-person perspective on decision making in a task that pits rational self-interest against impartiality: the dictator game. Aggregating across three experiments (N = 774), participants who used third-person (i.e., distanced) vs. first-person (i.e., immersed) self-talk during the dictator game kept more money for themselves. We discuss these results in light of prior research showing that psychological distance can promote cooperation and fairmindedness and how the effect of psychological distance on moral decision-making may be sensitive to social context.

Examining decentering as a moderator in the relation between non-suicidal self-injury and suicide ideation via cognitive-affective factors

OBJECTIVE

Given the high prevalence of self-injury but low treatment-seeking among young adults, brief, accessible interventions might help reduce risk of self-injurious thoughts and behavior in this population. This cross-sectional study examined the moderating effects of decentering-a cognitive-affective regulation strategy-in the relation between non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicide ideation via cognitive-affective factors that increase risk for both NSSI and suicide ideation.

METHODS

College students (N = 125, 79% women), ages 18-27, pre-screened for moderate levels of depression and anxiety, completed self-report measures of NSSI, decentering, rumination, hopelessness, depressive symptoms, and suicide ideation.

RESULTS

Young adults with past-year non-suicidal self-injury scored lower on decentering than their peers without NSSI. Decentering was associated with lower levels of all cognitive-affective risk factors and moderated the relation between NSSI and rumination, but not the relation between NSSI and hopelessness and depressive symptoms. Decentering moderated the indirect effect of past-year non-suicidal self-injury on past-week suicide ideation via rumination, but not via hopelessness or depressive symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS

Decentering is a potential cognitive-affective regulation strategy for targeting factors that increase risk of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Future studies should examine decentering as a buffer against risk using designs that allow for conclusions about temporal order of effects.

Strong hearts, open minds: Cardiovascular challenge predicts non-defensive responses to ingroup-perpetrated violence

Reminders of ingroup-perpetrated violence represent a psychological stressor that some people respond to defensively (e.g., justifying the violence), while others react non-defensively (e.g., accepting collective responsibility). To explain these divergent responses, we applied the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat to the context of intergroup conflict. Participants (N = 130) read about either an ingroup (American) or outgroup (Australian) soldier torturing an Iranian captive. We recorded cardiovascular responses while participants video-recorded introductions to an Iranian confederate who they believed they would meet. In the ingroup (but not the outgroup) condition, cardiovascular responses of challenge (relative to threat) were associated with less psychological defensiveness of ingroup-perpetrated violence and greater support for diplomacy towards its victims. Self-reported challenge/threat appraisals demonstrated no such relationships. These findings suggest that motivational states of challenge and threat can differentiate defensive and non-defensive responses, and that these motivational states may be better captured with physiological rather than self-report measures.

Self-Distancing as a Strategy to Regulate Affect and Aggressive Behavior in Athletes: An Experimental Approach to Explore Emotion Regulation in the Laboratory

Self-regulation, especially the regulation of emotion, is an important component of athletic performance. In our study, we tested the effect of a self-distancing strategy on athletes’ performance in an aggression-inducing experimental task in the laboratory. To this end, we modified an established paradigm of interpersonal provocation [Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP)], which has the potential to complement field studies in order to increase our understanding of effective emotion regulation of athletes in critical situations in competitions. In our experimental setting, we first tested the applicability of the self-distancing perspective and the athletes’ ability to dynamically adapt besides the self-distanced perspective a self-immersed perspective to provocation in the TAP. Secondly, we investigated how this altered perspective modulated regulatory abilities of negative affectivity, anger, and aggression. The experiment consisted of two conditions in which the participant adopted either a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Forty athletes (female: 23; male: 17) from different team (n = 27) and individual sports (n = 13) with a mean age of 23.83 years (SD = 3.41) competed individually in a reaction-time task against a (fictitious) opponent. Results show that athletes are equally able to adopt both perspectives. In addition, within-person analyses indicate that self-distancing decreased aggressive behavior and negative affect compared to the self-immersed perspective. Our results suggest that self-distancing modulates different levels of athletes’ experience (i.e., affect and anger) and behavior. Furthermore, this demonstrates the feasibility of testing self-regulation of emotion in athletes in a laboratory setting and allows for further application in research in sports and exercise psychology.

Stress and information processing: acute psychosocial stress affects levels of mental abstraction

BACKGROUND

One mechanism by which acute psychosocial stress effects health-related cognitions and behaviors is through changes in the level of mental abstraction when processing information. However, it is unclear whether levels of mental abstraction would be higher or lower after an acute psychosocial stressor.

OBJECTIVES

This research examined acute psychosocial stress's impact on levels of mental abstraction.

DESIGN

Randomized between-subjects experimental design.

METHODS

A diverse sample of 164 undergraduate students aged 18-24 years old were randomly assigned to an acute psychosocial stressor or non-stressful control condition. Blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), and negative affect were monitored throughout the study and mental abstraction was measured at the end of each condition.

RESULTS

Mental abstraction was statistically significantly higher (i.e., more abstract) after the stress condition than after the control condition (p = 0.005, d = 0.44). This association was partially explained by negative affect (p = 0.017), but not BP or HR (ps > 0.60).

CONCLUSIONS

Acute psychosocial stress is associated with higher levels of mental abstraction after the stressor. These findings may have implications for stress-relevant interventions as accounting for the level of mental abstraction may enhance the efficacy of the intervention.

A brief positive psychological intervention prior to a potentially stressful task facilitates more challenge-like cardiovascular reactivity in high trait anxious individuals

When confronted with stress, anxious individuals tend to evaluate the demands of an upcoming encounter as higher than the available resources, thus, indicating threat evaluations. Conversely, evaluating available resources as higher than the demands signals challenge. Both types of evaluations have been related to specific cardiovascular response patterns with higher cardiac output relative to peripheral resistance indicating challenge and higher peripheral resistance relative to cardiac output signaling threat. The aim of this research was to evaluate whether a brief positive psychological exercise (best possible selves intervention) prior to a potentially stress‐evoking task shifted the cardiovascular profile in trait anxious individuals from a threat to a challenge type. We randomly assigned 74 participants to either a best possible selves or a control exercise prior to performing a sing a song stress task and assessed their level of trait anxiety. Cardiac output (CO) and total peripheral resistance (TPR) were continuously recorded through baseline, preparation, stress task, and recovery, respectively, as well as self‐reported affect. Trait anxiety was related to higher CO in the best possible selves group and lower CO in the control group. While high trait anxious individuals in the control group showed increasing TPR reactivity, they exhibited a nonsignificant change in the best possible selves group. Moreover, in the latter group a stress‐related decrease in positive affect in high trait anxious participants was prevented. Findings suggest that concentrating on strengths and positive assets prior to a potentially stressful encounter could trigger a more adaptive coping in trait anxious individuals.

According to the biopsychosocial model anxious individuals may evaluate motivated performance tasks as threatening, resulting in stronger vascular than cardiac responding. We found that a positive writing exercise (best possible selves‐intervention) prior to a laboratory stress task led to a more challenge‐type response profile (i.e., higher cardiac output relative to peripheral resistance) in trait anxious individuals, suggesting that positive psychological micro‐interventions could foster more adaptive coping.

Physiological indices of challenge and threat: A data-driven investigation of autonomic nervous system reactivity during an active coping stressor task

We utilized a data-driven, unsupervised machine learning approach to examine patterns of peripheral physiological responses during a motivated performance context across two large, independent data sets, each with multiple peripheral physiological measures. Results revealed that patterns of cardiovascular response commonly associated with challenge and threat states emerged as two of the predominant patterns of peripheral physiological responding within both samples, with these two patterns best differentiated by reactivity in cardiac output, pre-ejection period, interbeat interval, and total peripheral resistance. However, we also identified a third, relatively large group of apparent physiological nonresponders who exhibited minimal reactivity across all physiological measures in the motivated performance context. This group of nonresponders was best differentiated from the others by minimal increases in electrodermal activity. We discuss implications for identifying and characterizing this third group of individuals in future research on physiological patterns of challenge and threat.

Linguistic Shifts: A Relatively Effortless Route to Emotion Regulation?

Prior research indicates that psychological distance facilitates emotion regulation. Here, we propose that the ability to transcend one’s immersed perspective may be hidden in plain sight, within the very structure of language. We review evidence regarding two linguistic mechanisms, distanced self-talk and generic “you,” that promote emotion regulation by allowing speakers to shift from an immersed to a more distanced perspective through the words they use to reflect on the self (e.g., shifting from “I” to their own name or other non-first-person-singular pronouns). We conclude by suggesting that these linguistic shifts occur relatively seamlessly and thus may provide a less effortful route to emotion regulation.

Restoring meaning in life by meaning-focused coping: The role of self-distancing

Meaning-focused coping is an important coping strategy in the face of stressful life events. The "construal level theory" and recent research suggest that reflecting on a stressful situation from a self-distanced stance (temporal or spatial) allows individuals to find meaning in negative life events; however, its long-term effects have not yet been explored. The present research had two main goals: (1) to determine whether distanced meaning making enhances meaning in life and (2) to explore the underlying emotional mechanism of this effect. We hypothesized that positive affect (relative to negative affect) may play a more important role in the relationship between self-distanced meaning making and meaning in life. A total of 136 university students were recruited as participants in two studies. The participants were prospectively instructed to make meaning of a highly stressful event. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (a) self-immersed, (b) temporally distanced, or (c) spatially distanced. The findings indicate that both the temporally and spatially distanced perspectives in the meaning-making process can enhance meaning in life and that they do so by promoting positive affect. Implications for future research on meaning-focused coping and self-distancing are discussed.

Beyond Willpower: Strategies for Reducing Failures of Self-Control

Almost everyone struggles to act in their individual and collective best interests, particularly when doing so requires forgoing a more immediately enjoyable alternative. Other than exhorting decision makers to "do the right thing," what can policymakers do to reduce overeating, undersaving, procrastination, and other self-defeating behaviors that feel good now but generate larger delayed costs? In this review, we synthesize contemporary research on approaches to reducing failures of self-control. We distinguish between self-deployed and other-deployed strategies and, in addition, between situational and cognitive intervention targets. Collectively, the evidence from both psychological science and economics recommends psychologically informed policies for reducing failures of self-control.

Imagining My Painful Hand Is Not Mine: Self-Distancing Relieves Experimental Acute Pain Induced by a Cold Pressor Task

Self-distancing has been shown to alleviate emotional pain and to have potential efficacy for treating chronic pain and imagined acute pain, relative to self-immersing. This study examined the efficacy of self-distancing in relieving acute physical pain caused by a cold pressor task (CPT) in healthy adults. A total of 65 undergraduates were assigned pseudorandomly to 1 of 3 groups: 1) a self-distancing group, in which participants were instructed to "take a step back" to simulate their current painful experience as an observer, 2) a self-immersed group, in which participants' current painful experience was stimulated from the egocentric perspective, and 3) a control group, in which participants coped with pains in their spontaneous ways. Three key sessions were included in the present experiment: the pretest CPT, the perspective training (instead of rest in the control group), and the posttest CPT. The participants were to adopt the designated perspective only during the posttest CPT. The results showed that 1) maintaining a self-distanced perspective while experiencing pain decreased the sensation of pain, relative to the self-immersed group and the control group; and (2) compared with the control group, maintaining a self-immersed perspective neither alleviated nor aggravated the pain. This result supports that self-distancing could relieve the acute pain induced by CPT. Perspective: This study presents a brief effective psychological intervention to manage acute pain. This result could potentially have clinical and everyday importance.