An affect in its own right: Investigating the relationship of social safeness with positive and negative affect

Threat, safety, safeness and social safeness 30 years on: Fundamental dimensions and distinctions for mental health and well-being

In 1993, the British Journal of Clinical Psychology published my paper titled 'Defence and safety: Their function in social behaviour and psychopathology'. The paper highlights that to understand people's sensitivity to threat, we also need to understand their ability to identify what is safe. This paper offers an update on these concepts, highlighting distinctions that were implicit but not clearly defined at the time. Hence, the paper seeks to clarify distinctions between: (i) threat detection and response, (ii) safety and safety seeking, (iii) safeness and (iv) their social and non-social functions and forms. Threat detection and response are to prevent or minimize harm (e.g., run from a predator or fire). Safety checking relates to monitoring for the absence and avoidance of threat, while safety seeking links to the destination of the defensive behaviour (e.g., running home). Safety seeking also relates to maintaining vigilance to the appearance of potential harms and doing things believed to avoid harm. Threat-defending and safety checking and seeking are regulated primarily through evolved threat processing systems that monitor the nature, presence, controllability and/or absence of threat (e.g., amygdala and sympathetic nervous system). Safeness uses different monitoring systems via different psychophysiological systems (e.g., prefrontal cortex, parasympathetic system) for the presence of internal and external resources that support threat-coping, risk-taking, resource exploration. Creating brain states that recruit safeness processing can impact how standard evidence-based therapies (e.g., exposure, distress tolerance and reappraisal) are experienced and produce long-term change.

Energizing compassion: using music and community focus to stimulate compassion drive and sense of connectedness

Objectives

The last 20 years have seen considerable research on the nature and biopsychosocial impacts of compassion training on self and others. This training is usually focused on calming and slowing the mind and body and on individual imagery practices and mantras. This study explored the effects of three variations: 1. The impact of using energizing music to generate activation and "drive" for compassion; 2. To focus on imagining "breathing in and breathing out a white light or mist of compassion" to bring compassion to the world; and 3. While listening to energizing music, participants were guided to imagining connecting to the compassion (Sangha) community, imagining oneself as linking with others as part of communities seeking to help the world.

Methods

From approximately 1,600 members of the Compassionate Mind discussion list, participants were invited to take part in a new energizing focused self-practice study. The study involved listening to recorded guidance on the evolutionary model of compassion and the need to address the potentially harmful side of our nature. This was followed by a 4 1/2-min tonglen-informed guided practice of breathing in and breathing out compassion accompanied by energizing music. Forty-three participants completed several self-report scales measuring compassion orientation, wellbeing, social safeness, and positive affect before and following 2 weeks of practice. Participant experiences were recorded from 6 open explorative questions.

Results

Self-report measures taken before and following 2 weeks of practice revealed significant increases in self-compassion, compassion to others, openness to compassion from others, activated positive affect, safe positive affect, social safeness, and wellbeing, with the largest effect size relating to compassion for the self (d = -0.76). In addition, qualitative data revealed that the participants had experienced the practice as energizing, inspiring, and felt socially connected and that it had significant impacts on other aspects of their lives. Some participants noted that engaging with suffering also stimulated sadness.

Conclusion

This study found that pairing energizing music with breathing practices and specific compassion visualizations, focusing on the desire to bring compassion to the world and be part of a compassionate community, was well-accepted and had a range of significant positive impacts. This study indicates the potential value of exploring energizing in comparison to the more standard soothing and settling practices as ways of stimulating the biopsychosocial processes of compassion.

No safety without emotional safety

This Personal View highlights how emotional safety is required for a person to keep themselves physically safe. We explain how trying to control behaviour to increase physical safety in the short term can carry the unintended consequence of reducing emotional safety, which might in turn result in higher levels of stress and hopelessness. We use examples from institutions with psychiatric inpatients to describe these processes. We argue that emotional and physical safety cannot be separated, and therefore that the absence of emotional safety compromises basic care either in an acute crisis or in the long term. Staff who fear being criticised, and so feel driven to take autonomy and responsibility away from patients, unwittingly undermine patients' experience of being empathically understood and supported, adding to patients' sense of emotional turmoil and lack of safety. We suggest that a change in culture and regulatory reform is required to bring psychiatric care more in line with the psychological needs of patients to achieve both physical and emotional safety.

The associations of pandemic-related difficulties with depressive symptoms and psychological growth among American older adults: Social support as moderators

The COVID-19 pandemic brought social, health-related, and financial risks to older adults, yet their associations with depressive symptoms and posttraumatic growth (PTG) were not systematically examined. With 3504 respondents aged 60 and over from Health and Retirement Survey, this study found pandemic-related healthcare delay and financial hardship associated with elevated depressive symptoms and decreased PTG, whereas social disruption predicted greater PTG. When confronted with multidimensional difficulties, a higher level of social support buffered depressive symptoms and enhanced PTG following healthcare delay, while those from immediate family members carried the weighing of moderation. Additionally, the moderation effect varied between support types, as exclusive instrumental support engendered more depressive symptoms and squeezed PTG by stimulating a sense of incompetence for older adults. Inversely, receiving both instrumental and emotional support helped individuals of older age against financial-related depressive symptoms. These findings shed light on older adults' mental health promotion in a pandemic context.

Dimensionality and measurement invariance of the Social Safeness and Pleasure Scale in adolescents from community and residential youth care

BACKGROUND

Social safeness has been proposed as the individual's perception of the social world as being warmth and soothing. The lack of social safeness has been suggested as a transdiagnostic socio-emotional vulnerability for several mental health difficulties. To date there was no study addressing experiences of social safeness in adolescents.

OBJECTIVE

To validate and study the psychometric properties of the Social Safeness and Pleasure Scale to Portuguese adolescents from community and residential care homes.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

A total of 731 Portuguese adolescents from community and residential youth care homes participated on this study. The community sample was composed of adolescents recruited from regular schools (208 boys; 224 girls). The residential youth care sample was composed of adolescents placed in residential care homes (145 boys; 154 girls).

METHODS

A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, and measurement invariance investigated.

RESULTS

A one-factor solution presented a good fit across all samples and proved to be invariant (configural, metric, scalar and strict measurement invariance). Moreover, internal consistency values were excellent for all samples (α > 0.93) and evidence for construct validity in relation to external variables was found. Means comparisons revealed significant differences between all tested groups. Community adolescents reported higher social safeness in comparison to the adolescents placed in residential care. Within both samples, boys scored higher in the SSPS-A when compared to girls.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provide evidence on the SSPS-A validity and its use across diverse adolescent samples.

Compassion Focused Group Therapy for People With a Diagnosis of Bipolar Affective Disorder: A Feasibility Study

Background

Compassion focused therapy (CFT) is an evolutionary informed, biopsychosocial approach to mental health problems and therapy. It suggests that evolved motives (e.g., for caring, cooperating, competing) are major sources for the organisation of psychophysiological processes which underpin mental health problems. Hence, evolved motives can be targets for psychotherapy. People with certain types of depression are psychophysiologically orientated towards social competition and concerned with social status and social rank. These can give rise to down rank-focused forms of social comparison, sense of inferiority, worthlessness, lowered confidence, submissive behaviour, shame proneness and self-criticism. People with bipolar disorders also experience elevated aspects of competitiveness and up rank status evaluation. These shift processing to a sense of superiority, elevated confidence, energised behaviour, positive affect and social dominance. This is the first study to explore the feasibility of a 12 module CFT group, tailored to helping people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder understand the impact of evolved competitive, status-regulating motivation on their mental states and the value of cultivating caring and compassion motives and their psychophysiological regulators.

Methods

Six participants with a history of bipolar disorder took part in a CFT group consisting of 12 modules (over 25 sessions) as co-collaborators to explore their personal experiences of CFT and potential processes of change. Assessment of change was measured via self-report, heart rate variability (HRV) and focus groups over three time points.

Results

Although changes in self-report scales between participants and across time were uneven, four of the six participants consistently showed improvements across the majority of self-report measures. Heart rate variability measures revealed significant improvement over the course of the therapy. Qualitative data from three focus groups revealed participants found CFT gave them helpful insight into: how evolution has given rise to a number of difficult problems for emotion regulation (called tricky brain) which is not one's fault; an evolutionary understanding of the nature of bipolar disorders; development of a compassionate mind and practices of compassion focused visualisations, styles of thinking and behaviours; addressing issues of self-criticism; and building a sense of a compassionate identity as a means of coping with life difficulties. These impacted their emotional regulation and social relationships.

Conclusion

Although small, the study provides evidence of feasibility, acceptability and engagement with CFT. Focus group analysis revealed that participants were able to switch from competitive focused to compassion focused processing with consequent improvements in mental states and social behaviour. Participants indicated a journey over time from 'intellectually' understanding the process of building a compassionate mind to experiencing a more embodied sense of compassion that had significant impacts on their orientation to (and working with) the psychophysiological processes of bipolar disorder.

Feeling Safe and Nostalgia in Healthy Aging

The population of older adults worldwide is growing, with an urgent need for approaches that develop and maintain intrinsic capacity consistent with healthy aging. Theory and empirical research converge on feeling safe as central to healthy aging. However, there has been limited attention to resources that cultivate feeling safe to support healthy aging. Nostalgia, "a sentimental longing for one's past," is established as a source of comfort in response to social threat, existential threat, and self-threat. Drawing from extant theory and research, we build on these findings to position nostalgia as a regulatory resource that cultivates feeling safe and contributes to intrinsic capacity to support healthy aging. Using a narrative review method, we: (a) characterize feeling safe as a distinct affective dimension, (b) summarize the character of nostalgia in alignment with feeling safe, (c) propose a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which nostalgia cultivates feeling safe, (d) highlight the contribution of nostalgia to feeling safe and emotional, physiological, and behavioral regulatory capabilities in healthy aging, and (e) offer conclusions and direction for research.

Compassion Protects Mental Health and Social Safeness During the COVID-19 Pandemic Across 21 Countries

Objectives

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented detrimental impact on mental health in people around the world. It is important therefore to explore factors that may buffer or accentuate the risk of mental health problems in this context. Given that compassion has numerous benefits for mental health, emotion regulation, and social relationships, this study examines the buffering effects of different flows of compassion (for self, for others, from others) against the impact of perceived threat of COVID-19 on depression, anxiety, and stress, and social safeness.

Methods

The study was conducted in a sample of 4057 adult participants from the general community population, collected across 21 countries from Europe, Middle East, North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania. Participants completed self-report measures of perceived threat of COVID-19, compassion (for self, for others, from others), depression, anxiety, stress, and social safeness.

Results

Perceived threat of COVID-19 was associated with higher scores in depression, anxiety, and stress, and lower scores in social safeness. Self-compassion and compassion from others were associated with lower psychological distress and higher social safeness. Compassion for others was associated with lower depressive symptoms. Self-compassion moderated the relationship between perceived threat of COVID-19 on depression, anxiety, and stress, whereas compassion from others moderated the effects of fears of contracting COVID-19 on social safeness. These effects were consistent across all countries.

Conclusions

Our findings highlight the universal protective role of compassion, in particular self-compassion and compassion from others, in promoting resilience by buffering against the harmful effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and social safeness.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12671-021-01822-2.

At the heart of change: Differences in young offenders' HRV patterns after the delivery of the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP program

INTRODUCTION

Literature has pointed the need for intervention programs specifically tailored to target the treatment needs of young offenders, as well as the need to test the efficacy of such programs through physiological indexes of emotion regulation (e.g., heart rate variability; HRV), complementing self-reports typically used as outcome measures. The PSYCHOPATHY.COMP is a 20-session individual intervention program based on Compassion Focused Therapy aiming to reduce psychopathic traits and disruptive behavior among young offenders through the development of a compassionate motivation, while stimulating the soothing system as a strategy to improve emotion regulation. Previous research with young offenders has shown decreases in vagally mediated HRV (vmHRV) when the soothing system is activated. This physiological pattern seems to mirror threat-like responses that contrast with relaxed states.

METHODS

To test the efficacy of the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP, a clinical trial was implemented encompassing a treatment (n = 56) and a control group (n = 53). Treatment participants attended the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP, while controls received the Treatment As Usual (TAU) delivered in Portuguese juvenile detention facilities. HRV data was collected throughout a standardized procedure (encompassing resting, reactivity and recovery phases) specifically designed to trigger the soothing system. Participants were assessed at pre-treatment, post-treatment and 6-months follow-up.

RESULTS

Although treatment participants continued to process the soothing system as unpleasant (with decreased vmHRV), they seem to become able to adaptively recover from the stimuli without avoiding it or resorting to maladaptive coping strategies. The physiological pattern was in line with participants' decreases in difficulties in emotion regulation across the assessment periods. In contrast, controls seemed to have actively employed coping strategies associated with increases in vmHRV not only when the soothing system was triggered, but also when recovering from the stimuli. Congruently, for controls, increases in difficulties in emotion regulation were found, with increases in the lack of emotional clarity across the assessment periods.

DISCUSSION

Findings offer new evidence for the efficacy of the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP program in improving emotion regulation in young offenders, assessed through both self-report and physiological measures. Additionally, findings support the assessment of the autonomic balance as a treatment efficacy index in future research, targeting the rehabilitation of these youth.

CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION

ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT03971682.

Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts Between Sharing and Caring Versus Controlling and Holding Evolved Strategies

For thousands of years, various spiritual traditions and social activists have appealed to humans to adopt compassionate ways of living to address the suffering of life. Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. While there has been considerable engagement with these issues, particularly in the area of moral psychology and ethics, this paper explores an evolutionary analysis relating to evolved resource-regulation strategies that can be called "care and share" versus "control and hold." Control and hold are typical of primates that operate through intimidatory social hierarchies. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness. As a result of our new 'intelligence', our ancestors developed agriculture that reduced mobility, increased group size, resource availability and storage, and resource competition. These re-introduced competing for, rather than sharing of, resources and advantaged those who now pursue (often aggressively) control and hold strategies. Many of our most typical forms of oppressive and anti-compassionate behavior are the result of these strategies. Rather than (just) thinking about individuals competing with one another, we can also consider these different resource regulation strategies as competing within populations shaping psychophysiological patterns; both wealth and poverty change the brain. One of the challenges to creating a more compassionate society is to find ways to create the social and economic conditions that regulate control and hold strategies and promote care and share. No easy task.

Compassion: From Its Evolution to a Psychotherapy

The concept, benefits and recommendations for the cultivation of compassion have been recognized in the contemplative traditions for thousands of years. In the last 30 years or so, the study of compassion has revealed it to have major physiological and psychological effects influencing well-being, addressing mental health difficulties, and promoting prosocial behavior. This paper outlines an evolution informed biopsychosocial, multicomponent model to caring behavior and its derivative "compassion" that underpins newer approaches to psychotherapy. The paper explores the origins of caring motives and the nature and biopsychosocial functions of caring-attachment behavior. These include providing a secure base (sources of protection, validation, encouragement and guidance) and safe haven (source of soothing and comfort) for offspring along with physiological regulating functions, which are also central for compassion focused therapy. Second, it suggests that it is the way recent human cognitive competencies give rise to different types of "mind awareness" and "knowing intentionality" that transform basic caring motives into potentials for compassion. While we can care for our gardens and treasured objects, the concept of compassion is only used for sentient beings who can "suffer." As psychotherapy addresses mental suffering, cultivating the motives and competencies of compassion to self and others can be a central focus for psychotherapy.