Nilly Mor

Self-focused attention and negative affect: A meta-analysis

This meta-analysis synthesized 226 effect sizes reflecting the relation between self-focused attention and negative affect (depression, anxiety, negative mood). The results demonstrate the multifaceted nature of self-focused attention and elucidate major controversies in the field. Overall, self-focus was associated with negative affect. Several moderators qualified this relationship. Self-focus and negative affect were more strongly related in clinical and female-dominated samples. Rumination yielded stronger effect sizes than nonruminative self-focus. Self-focus on positive self-aspects and following a positive event were related to lower negative affect. Most important, an interaction between foci of self-attention and form of negative affect was found: Private self-focus was more strongly associated with depression and generalized anxiety, whereas public self-focus was more strongly associated with social anxiety.

Linking Executive Control and Emotional Response

Rumination, a maladaptive self-reflection, is a risk factor for depression, thought to be maintained by executive control deficits that impair ruminators’ ability to ignore emotional information. The current research examined whether training individuals to exert executive control when exposed to negative stimuli can ease rumination. A total of 85 participants were randomly assigned to one of two training conditions. In the experimental condition activation of executive control was followed predominantly by the presentation of negative pictures, whereas in the control condition it was followed predominantly by neutral pictures. As predicted, participants in the experimental group showed reduced state rumination compared with those in the control group. Furthermore, trait rumination, and particularly its maladaptive subtype brooding, was associated with increased sadness only among participants in the control group, and not in the experimental group. We argue that training individuals to exert executive control when processing negative stimuli can alleviate ruminative thinking and rumination-related sad mood.

The Northwestern-UCLA Youth Emotion Project: Associations of cognitive vulnerabilities, neuroticism and gender with past diagnoses of emotional disorders in adolescents

Neuroticism has been hypothesized to be a non-specific risk factor for both anxiety and unipolar mood disorders whereas some cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities have been hypothesized to be more specific to depression. Using a retrospective design with a sample of 575 high school juniors, we tested three competing models of the associations among these variables. Both neuroticism and the cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities had significant zero-order associations with rates of past diagnoses of both anxiety and unipolar mood disorders. Neuroticism had significant unique associations with past anxiety disorders and comorbid anxiety and unipolar mood disorders whereas the other vulnerabilities did not. In addition, gender interacted with neuroticism but not with the other vulnerabilities in associating with past diagnoses of mood disorders, showing that neuroticism is more highly associated with past unipolar mood diagnoses in males than in females. Finally, the cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities overlapped with substantial portions of the variance that neuroticism shared with diagnoses. These results suggest that, at least for retrospective associations with past anxiety and unipolar mood disorders, the cognitive and other personality-cognitive vulnerabilities are non-specific facets of neuroticism.

Can Emotion Modulate Attention? Evidence for Reciprocal Links in the Attentional Network Test

Evolution theory suggests that adaptive behavior depends on our ability to give preferential attention to emotional information when it is necessary for our survival, and to down-regulate irrelevant emotional influence. However, empirical work has shown that the interaction between emotion and attention varies, based on the attentional network in question. The aim of the current research was to examine the influence of stimulus emotionality on attention in three attentional networks: alerting, orienting, and executive functions. In two studies, using negative and neutral cues in a modified version of the Attention Network Test, it was found that negative cues impaired task performance in the absence of executive conflict, but not when executive processes were activated. Moreover, it was found that the influence of negative cues on task performance in a given trial was attenuated following activation of executive processes in the previous trial. These results suggest that when executive resources are required, inhibitory mechanisms are recruited to decrease the disruptive effect of emotional stimuli. More importantly, these findings indicate that the effect of emotional stimuli on attention is down-regulated both during cognitive conflict and after the conflict has already ended.

Within-person variations in self-focused attention and negative affect in depression and anxiety: A diary study

This study examined within-person co-occurrence of self-focus, negative affect, and stress in a community sample of adolescents with or without emotional disorders. As part of a larger study, 278 adolescents were interviewed about emotional disorders. Later, they completed diary measures over three days, six times a day, reporting their current thoughts, affect, and levels of stress. Negative affect was independently related to both concurrent stress and self-focus. Importantly, the association between negative affect and self-focus was stronger among participants with a recent unipolar mood disorder, compared to those with an anxiety disorder, comorbid anxiety and depression, or those without an emotional disorder. The implications of these findings to theories of self-focus and its role in emotional disorders are discussed.

Rumination and emotion-related biases in refreshing information.

The present research examined rumination-related biases in refreshing, a component process of memory updating that involves briefly thinking back to a just-activated thought or percept. In 2 studies, participants were presented with neutral words and with task-relevant (Study 1) and task-irrelevant (Study 2) emotional words. We predicted that brooding, a maladaptive subtype of rumination would be associated with biased refreshing. Compared with nonbrooders, brooders showed slowed refreshing (of emotional and neutral words) when relevant emotional words were presented. Moreover, whereas among nonbrooders only task-relevant emotional words impaired refreshing of neutral words, among brooders both relevant and irrelevant emotional words led to this impairment. These biases were not accounted for by depression, and they were specific to refreshing words rather than to perceptual processing of the words. These findings are discussed in relation to the magnitude and nature of emotional interference in rumination.

Depression and Empathic Accuracy in Couples An Interpersonal Model of Gender Differences in Depression

We examine the link between depression and empathic accuracy, the ability to infer other people’s thoughts and feelings, as a possible mechanism underlying gender differences in the association between depression and interpersonal difficulties within intimate relationships. Fifty-one heterosexual couples completed questionnaires assessing depressive symptoms and participated in both a lab and a daily diary procedure assessing empathic accuracy. In the lab measures, women’s (but not men’s) higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with lower empathic accuracy regarding partners’ thoughts and feelings. In the daily diary data, women’s depressive symptoms were specifically associated with lower levels of empathic accuracy for negative feelings but not for positive feelings, and with lower levels of their partners’ empathic accuracy for the women’s negative feelings. Men’s depressive symptoms were again unrelated to levels of empathic accuracy. Our findings suggest that depressive symptoms may have a stronger impact on interpersonal perception in intimate relationships among women than among men.

The Relationships of Personality and Cognitive Styles with Self-Reported Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety

Many studies have reported concurrent relationships between depressive symptoms and various personality, cognitive, and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities, but the degree of overlap among these vulnerabilities is unclear. Moreover, whereas most investigations of these vulnerabilities have focused on depression, their possible relationships with anxiety have not been adequately examined. The present study included 550 high school juniors and examined the cross-sectional relationships among neuroticism, negative inferential style, dysfunctional attitudes, sociotropy, and autonomy, with a wide range of anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as the incremental validity of these different putative vulnerabilities when examined simultaneously. Correlational analyses revealed that all five vulnerabilities were significantly related to symptoms of both anxiety and depression. Whereas neuroticism accounted for significant unique variance in all symptom outcomes, individual cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities accounted for small and only sometimes statistically significant variance across outcomes. Importantly, however, for most outcomes the majority of symptom variance was accounted for by shared aspects of the vulnerabilities rather than unique aspects. Implications of these results for understanding cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities to depression and anxiety are discussed.

Brooding and attentional control in processing self-encoded information: Evidence from a modified Garner task

The association between brooding and reflection, components of rumination, and attentional control, was examined using a novel executive attention task. Participants (n=156) self-encoded words from two semantic categories by providing autobiographical memories involving the words. They subsequently classified the self-encoded and non-self encoded (new) words into the two semantic categories. The degree to which stimuli self-encoding interfered with semantic classification was used as a measure of attentional control impairment. Whereas brooding was positively associated with attentional impairment, reflection was negatively associated with such impairment. These associations were not attributable to current depression levels or to differences in the nature (valence and meaningfulness) of the autobiographical memories generated by participants. These findings emphasise the importance of self-referential processing biases in rumination.

Training Ruminators to Inhibit Negative Information: A Preliminary Report

Although depression and rumination have been associated with a difficulty ignoring irrelevant negative content, the causal direction of this relationship is unclear. The aim of this study was to train individuals who engage in habitual brooding, a particularly maladaptive subtype of rumination, to inhibit or to attend to negative stimuli. The effects of the training on rumination and depression were examined. Participants were randomly assigned to four sessions of training to inhibit or to attend to negative stimuli or to a sham-training group, in a two-week span. At both pre and post training, participants completed measures of depressive symptoms, rumination and inhibition bias. Compared with individuals in the sham training condition, those who were trained to attend to negative stimuli exhibited a significant decrease in inhibition of irrelevant negative content whereas those who were trained to inhibit negative stimuli, showed a trend toward improved inhibition of irrelevant negative content and a reduction in brooding, but not in depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that inhibition training may be beneficial for reducing brooding.