Wise Additions Bridge the Gap between Social Psychology and Clinical Practice: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy as an Exemplar

Ketamine reverses stress-induced hypersensitivity to sunk costs

How mood interacts with information processing in the brain is thought to mediate the maladaptive behaviors observed in depressed individuals. However, the neural mechanisms underlying impairments in emotion-cognition interactions are poorly understood. This includes influencing the balance between how past-sensitive vs. future-looking one is during decision-making. Recent insights from the field of neuroeconomics offer novel approaches to study changes in such valuation processes in a manner that is biologically tractable and readily translatable across species. We recently discovered that rodents are sensitive to "sunk costs" - a feature of higher cognition previously thought to be unique to humans. The sunk costs bias describes the phenomenon in which an individual overvalues and escalates commitment to continuing an ongoing endeavor, even if suboptimal, as a function of irrecoverable past (sunk) losses - information that, according to classic economic theory, should be ignored. In the present study, mice were exposed to chronic social defeat stress paradigm, a well-established animal model used for the study of depression. Mice were then tested on our longitudinal neuroeconomic foraging task, Restaurant Row. We found mice exposed to this severe stressor displayed an increased sensitivity to sunk costs, without altering overall willingness to wait. Mice were then randomly assigned to receive a single intraperitoneal injection of either saline or ketamine (20 mg/kg). We discovered that stress-induced hypersensitivity to sunk costs was renormalized following a single dose of ketamine. Interestingly, in non-defeated mice, ketamine treatment completely abolished sunk cost sensitivity, causing mice to no longer value irrecoverable losses during re-evaluation decisions who instead based choices solely on the future investment required to obtain a goal. These findings suggest that the antidepressant effects of ketamine may be mediated in part through changes in the processing of past-sensitive information during on-going decision-making, reducing its weight as a potential source of cognitive dissonance that could modulate behavior and instead promoting more future-thinking behavior.

"Like I'm Talking to a Real Person": Exploring the Meaning of Transference for the Use and Design of AI-Based Applications in Psychotherapy

AI-enabled virtual and robot therapy is increasingly being integrated into psychotherapeutic practice, supporting a host of emotional, cognitive, and social processes in the therapeutic encounter. Given the speed of research and development trajectories of AI-enabled applications in psychotherapy and the practice of mental healthcare, it is likely that therapeutic chatbots, avatars, and socially assistive devices will soon translate into clinical applications much more broadly. While AI applications offer many potential opportunities for psychotherapy, they also raise important ethical, social, and clinical questions that have not yet been adequately considered for clinical practice. In this article, we begin to address one of these considerations: the role of transference in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Drawing on Karen Barad’s conceptual approach to theorizing human–non-human relations, we show that the concept of transference is necessarily reconfigured within AI-human psychotherapeutic encounters. This has implications for understanding how AI-driven technologies introduce changes in the field of traditional psychotherapy and other forms of mental healthcare and how this may change clinical psychotherapeutic practice and AI development alike. As more AI-enabled apps and platforms for psychotherapy are developed, it becomes necessary to re-think AI-human interaction as more nuanced and richer than a simple exchange of information between human and nonhuman actors alone.

Expand your body when you look at yourself: The role of the posture in a mirror exposure task

Mirror exposure (ME) is one of the main components of the treatment of patients with eating disorders symptomatology and it has shown its effectiveness in improving several outcomes (e.g., body dissatisfaction). However, the study as to what body posture should be adopted to maximize its effectiveness has been neglected. From embodied cognition and emotion theories, the adoption of an expansive (vs. contractive) body posture has been associated with positive changes in cognitive and emotional responses. The objective of this study was to analyze the effect of adopting an expansive (vs. contractive) posture before an ME task on body-related emotions and cognitions, as well as to analyze the possible moderator and mediator variables of these relationships. The sample was composed of 68 women (age: M = 21.74, SD = 3.12) with high scores on body dissatisfaction. Participants were randomly assigned to the expansive or contractive condition, where the openness of the arms/legs and the back position were manipulated. Posture was monitored by an electronic device and participants filled out several self-reported measures. ANCOVAs, moderation, mediation, and moderated mediated analyses were performed. Results showed that women in the expansive condition showed higher positive emotions after the ME. Moreover, exploratory analyses showed that adopting an expansive posture improved positive emotions, leading to improvements in negative emotions, body image satisfaction, and appraisal of the person’s own body. Psychological interventions should explore the value of holding an expansive posture before the ME in women with body dissatisfaction.