Stuttering Thoughts: Negative Self-Referent Thinking Is Less Sensitive to Aversive Outcomes in People with Higher Levels of Depressive Symptoms

Reducing the stickiness of negative memory retrieval through positive memory training in adolescents

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Individuals at risk for depression exhibit a decreased ability to disengage from negative memory retrieval during times of mental distress, partly because they have difficulty retrieving positive memories to repair sad mood. In this study, we tested whether this persistent tendency for negative memory retrieval could be reduced in adolescents through repeated practice to retrieve positive autobiographical memories, namely Positive Memory Specificity Training (PMST). Further, we examined the impact of this intervention on secondary outcomes, including depressive symptoms, emotion regulation strategies, and fear of positive emotions.

METHODS

Adolescents (n = 68) between 16 and 18 years old were randomly allocated to either PMST or bogus control training. Persistent negative memory retrieval was assessed following the training using a behavioral decision-making task (Emotional Reversal Learning Task). Additionally, participants completed self-report measurements (e.g., depressive symptoms) before and two weeks after the training.

RESULTS

We found preliminary supportive evidence for a significant training effect such that adolescents following PMST showed less persistence in negative memory retrieval compared to those in the control group. Only for anhedonia a significant training effect was found, indicating a possible adverse effect of the intervention.

LIMITATIONS

The primary outcome was assessed only at post-intervention to prevent a potential learning effect due to repeated measurements. We cannot exclude the possibility that baseline individual differences contaminated our results. To examine possible adverse effects of PMST, larger sample are needed.

CONCLUSIONS

PMST may help to reduce persistent negative memory retrieval in adolescents. Recommendations for future studies are addressed.

Fear of Happiness Predicts Concurrent but not Prospective Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents

Background

It is increasingly recognised that the study of responses to positive emotions significantly contributes to our understanding of psychopathology. Notably, positive emotions are not necessarily experienced as pleasurable. Instead, some believe that experiencing happiness may have negative consequences, referred to as fear of happiness (FOH), or they experience a fear of losing control over positive emotions (FOLC). According to reward devaluation theory, such an association of positivity with negative outcomes will result in positive stimuli being devalued over time, contributing to or maintaining depressive symptoms. The prospective relationship between fears of positivity and depressive symptoms is yet to be examined in adolescents. The present longitudinal study investigated whether FOH and FOLC prospectively predict depressive symptoms.

Method

128 adolescents between 16-18 years of age (M = 16.87, SD = 0.80) recruited from two secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium, completed measures of depressive symptoms (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales) including consummatory anhedonia, FOH (Fear of Happiness Scale), and FOLC (Affective Control Scale) in their classroom at baseline and 2-months follow-up. Regression analyses were performed to test the association between FOH, FOLC, and depressive symptoms.

Results

FOH concurrently, but not prospectively, predicted depressive symptoms. There was no significant association between FOH and consummatory anhedonia. FOLC was not a significant predictor of depressive symptoms or consummatory anhedonia.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that FOH may only be concurrently related to depressive symptoms. Considering prior findings in adults, future research should investigate the association of FOH with anticipatory anhedonia in adolescents.

Behavioral and electrophysiological analyses of self-referential neural processing in major depressive disorder

Cognitive theories suggest that patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) constantly negatively evaluate their self-referential information. Unlike Westerners with an independent self, self-representation is strongly influenced by cultural differences; the Chinese self may include others (interdependent self). This study uses a self-referential effect task combined with event-related potentials (ERP), and 34 patients with MDD and 54 healthy controls (HC) were asked to judge whether an adjective was suitable for describing the self, mother, or a public person, followed by an unexpected recognition task. They were required to judge whether a word was presented during the encoding phase. The results reveal that during the encoding phase, for both self- and mother-referential adjectives, patients with MDD endorsed fewer positive adjectives and more negative adjectives than the HCs. During the recognition phase, both groups showed a typical task effect (self = mother > other), while patients recognized more self-referential adjectives than the HCs. ERP data reveal that patients with MDD show larger P2 amplitudes during the encoding stage than healthy individuals. During the recognition phase, negative adjectives evoked larger P2 amplitudes in patients than in HCs under the self-referential condition. These findings shed important light on the information processes that may contribute to our understanding of depression and may offer implications for clinical interventions.

Semantics-Prosody Stroop Effect on English Emotion Word Processing in Chinese College Students With Trait Depression

This study explored the performance of Chinese college students with different severity of trait depression to process English emotional speech under a complete semantics-prosody Stroop effect paradigm in quiet and noisy conditions. A total of 24 college students with high-trait depression and 24 students with low-trait depression participated in this study. They were required to selectively attend to either the prosodic emotion (happy, sad) or semantic valence (positive and negative) of the English words they heard and then respond quickly. Both prosody task and semantic task were performed in quiet and noisy listening conditions. Results showed that the high-trait group reacted slower than the low-trait group in the prosody task due to their bluntness and insensitivity toward emotional processing. Besides, both groups reacted faster under the consistent situation, showing a clear congruency-induced facilitation effect and the wide existence of the Stroop effect in both tasks. Only the Stroop effect played a bigger role during emotional prosody identification in quiet condition, and the noise eliminated such an effect. For the sake of experimental design, both groups spent less time on the prosody task than the semantic task regardless of consistency in all listening conditions, indicating the friendliness of basic emotion identification and the difficulty for second language learners in face of semantic judgment. These findings suggest the unneglectable effects of college students' mood conditions and noise outside on emotion word processing.

Latent classes of maladaptive personality traits exhibit differences in social processing

OBJECTIVE

Social processing (SP) deficits manifest across numerous mental disorders. However, this research has been plagued by heterogeneity and a piecemeal approach whereby skills are examined in isolation rather than as part of an integrated cognitive system. Here, we combined two dimensional frameworks of psychopathology to address these limitations.

METHOD

We utilized the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) to distill trait-related heterogeneity within a community sample (n = 200), and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) 'Systems for Social Processes' to comprehensively assess SP. We first applied latent class analyses (LCA) to derive AMPD-based groups and subsequently contrasted the performance of these groups on a SP test battery that we developed to align with the RDoC SP constructs.

RESULTS

Our LCA yielded four distinct subgroups. The recognizable trait profiles and psychopathological symptoms of these classes suggested they were clinically meaningful. The subgroups differed in their SP profiles: one displayed deficits regarding the self, a second displayed deficits in understanding others, a third displayed more severe deficits including affiliation problems, whilst the fourth showed normal performance.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results support the link between clusters of maladaptive personality traits and distinctive profiles of SP deficits, which may inform research on disorders involving SP dysfunctions.

Remembering happy times instead of sticking to negative memories after social exclusion

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES

Previous research shows that difficulty disengaging from negative (self-related) stimuli (i.e. negative self-referential processing; NSP) is a vulnerability factor for depression (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010) and contributes to its recurrence (LeMoult, Kircanski, Prasad, & Gotlib, 2017). The Emotional Reversal Learning Task (ERLT) was designed to investigate this, and we examined its construct validity by inducing social rejection, an etiological process of depression, within the ERLT model. We expected excluded participants to have difficulty disengaging from NSP.

METHODS

We administered Cyberball to 130 participants randomly assigned to the excluded or included condition. Participants then completed the ERLT: They chose a valence option (positive or negative), retrieved a memory of the same valence, and then were rewarded or punished for their valence choice. For the first phase, retrieving a negative memory was probabilistically rewarded, and this action-outcome contingency was twice reversed during the task. We used Q-learning models to analyze learning rates.

RESULTS

Excluded participants had no more difficulty disengaging from NSP than included participants: Bayesian computational modeling identified no difference between conditions regarding learning that retrieving negative memories was punished. Exploratory analyses found that excluded participants learned the association between retrieving positive memories and reward quicker than included participants, however.

LIMITATIONS

Doubts remain regarding whether participants fully understood action-outcome contingencies, and we did not explicitly check whether participants truly retrieved memories, which could have affected results.

CONCLUSIONS

We did not find support for the construct validity of the ERLT when using social exclusion to model depressogenic development within the ERLT.

Difficulty in updating positive beliefs about negative cognition is associated with increased depressed mood

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Depressed people hold positive beliefs about negative cognition (e.g., rumination is useful to find a solution), which may motivate those individuals to engage in sustained negative thinking. However, in reality, rumination often leads to unfavorable outcomes. Thus, such beliefs create a large discrepancy between one's expectations and the actual outcome. Therefore, we hypothesized that this prediction error would be associated with increased depressed mood.

METHODS

We observed how people update their positive beliefs about negative cognition within a volatile environment, in which negative cognition does not always result in a beneficial outcome. Forty-six participants were offered two response options (retrieving a negative or positive personal memory) and subsequently provided either an economic reward or punishment. Retrieving a negative (rather than positive) memory was initially reinforced, although this action-outcome contingency was reversed during the task. In the control condition, positive memory retrieval was initially reinforced, although a contingency reversal was employed to encourage negative memory retrieval.

RESULTS

Model-based computational modeling revealed that participants who showed a delay in switching from negative to positive (but not from positive to negative) responses experienced increased levels of depressed mood. This delay in switching was also found to be associated with depressive symptoms and trait rumination.

LIMITATIONS

The non-clinical nature of the sample may limit the clinical implications of the results.

CONCLUSIONS

Difficulty in updating positive beliefs (or outcome predictions) for negative cognition may play an important role in depressive symptomatology.

Examining the structure of ideas of reference in clinical and community samples

AIMS

This study addresses the psychometric properties of a Spanish validation of the REF scale of ideas of reference (IRs) in detecting and following at-risk mental states and psychosis.

METHODS

A total of 9447 participants were distributed in three groups: 676 patients with various diagnoses-154 with psychotic disorders, 6291 youths aged 11 to 20, and 2480 adult participants aged 21 to 84.

RESULTS

Youths had higher scores than adults on IRs, observing a progressive decrease and stabilization in the twenties. Exploratory factor analysis provided a structure for the overall IRs score, with five first-order dimensions and one second-order dimension. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the structure with excellent fit. The REF scale was invariant across sex and samples. The internal consistency of the complete scale was excellent and acceptable across the five first-order factors. Strong relationships were found with the positive dimension of the community assessment of psychic experience-42, as well as with aberrant salience. Low and moderate relationships were found with public self-consciousness, anxiety, and depression. Youths and patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders had a high mean IRs frequency. Male sex, greater age (among the adults), and the "causal explanations", "Songs, newspapers, books" and "laughing and commenting" REF subscales showed predictive power in the diagnostic categories of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

CONCLUSIONS

The results provide satisfactory that the REF scale could be used to study psychosis.