335 research outputs found
Psychophysiological responsivity to script-driven imagery: an exploratory study of the effects of eye movements on public speaking flashforwards
No full textA principle characteristic of public speaking anxiety relates to intrusive mental images of potential future disasters. Previous research has found that the self-reported emotionality of such “flashforwards” can be reduced by a cognitively demanding, dual-task (e.g., making eye movements) performed whilst holding the mental image in-mind. The outcome measure in these earlier studies was participants’ self-reported emotional intensity of the mental image. The current study (N = 34) explored whether an objective measure of emotionality would yield similar results in students with public speaking anxiety. A script-driven imagery procedure was used to measure psychophysiological responsivity to an audio script depicting a feared (public speaking) scenario before and after an eye movement intervention. Relative to the control condition (imagery only), those who made eye movements whilst holding a mental image of this scenario in-mind demonstrated a significant decrease in heart rate, which acted as a measure of emotionality. These findings add to a previous body of research demonstrating the beneficial qualities of dual-tasks and their potential for treatment of both past and future-oriented anxieties. Keywords: flashforwards, eye movements, experiment, heart rate, anxiety, dual-task Citation: Kearns M and Engelhard IM (2015) Psychophysiological responsivity to script-driven imagery: an exploratory study of the effects of eye movements on public speaking flashforwards. Front. Psychiatry 6:115. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00115 Received: 31 October 2014; Accepted: 31 July 2015; Published: 14 August 2015 Edited by: Julie Krans, University of Leuven, Belgium Reviewed by: David G. Pearson, University of Aberdeen, UK Franck Salomé, University of Nantes, France Copyright: © 2015 Kearns and Engelhard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. *Correspondence: Iris M. Engelhard, Division of Clinical and Health Psychology, Utrecht University, PO Box 80140, Utrecht 3584 CS, Netherlands, [email protected] †Present address: Michelle Kearns, Department of Psychology, University of Limerick, Ireland Write a comment... Add People also looked at Understanding help-seeking amongst university students: the role of group identity, stigma, and exposure to suicide and help-seeking Michelle Kearns, Orla T. Muldoon, Rachel M. Msetfi and Paul W. G. Surgenor Family identification: a beneficial process for young adults who grow up in homes affected by parental intimate partner violence Catherine M. Naughton, Aisling T. O’Donnell and Orla T. Muldoon A Retrospective Review of CyberKnife Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy for Adrenal Tumors (Primary and Metastatic): Winthrop University Hospital Experience Amishi Desai, Hema Rai, Jonathan Haas, Matthew Witten, Seth Blacksburg and Jeffrey G. Schneider Barriers to Utilization of Antenatal Care Services in Eastern Nepal Krishna Kumar Deo, Yuba Raj Paudel, Resham Bahadur Khatri, Ravi Kumar Bhaskar, Rajan Paudel, Suresh Mehata and Rajendra Raj Wagle Commentary: “Consistent Superiority of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors Over Placebo in Reducing Depressed Mood in Patients with Major Depression” Eiko I. Fried, Lynn Boschloo, Claudia D. van Borkulo, Robert A. Schoevers, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Marieke Wichers, Peter de Jonge, Randolph M. Nesse, Francis Tuerlinckx and Denny Borsboom The Case for Making Health Care Advocacy a Discipline of Medicine; The Paradigm of a Vascular Patient Elias J. Arbid and Ibrahim G. Eid Unbiased Decoding of Biologically Motivated Visual Feature Descriptors Michael Felsberg, Kristoffer Öfjäll and Reiner Lenz Considerations for the Optimization of Induced White Matter Injury Preclinical Models Abdullah Shafique Ahmad, Irawan Satriotomo, Jawad Fazal, Stephen E. Nadeau and Sylvain Doré Differentiating Burnout from Depression: Personality Matters! Martin Christoph Melchers, Thomas Plieger, Rolf Meermann and Martin Reuter Non-Neuronal Acetylcholine: The Missing Link Between Sepsis, Cancer, and Delirium? Adonis Sfera, Michael Cummings and Carolina Osorio Editorial: Cognition Across the Psychiatric Disorder Spectrum: From Mental Health to Clinical Diagnosis Caroline Gurvich and Susan L. Rossel
Targeting avoidance via compound extinction
No full textExperimental files and data of the project "
Targeting avoidance via compound extinction" by Krypotos and Engelhard
The generalization of threat beliefs to novel safety stimuli induced by safety behaviors
No full texthttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003246 Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoe
Induction of conditioned avoidance via mental imagery
No full textThere is a growing interest on how mental imagery may be involved in the onset and maintenance of anxiety-related disorders. Here, we used an experimental design to investigate whether a key symptom across anxiety-related disorders, namely avoidance, can be induced via mental imagery. Healthy participants first learned that one neutral stimulus (A) was associated with a mild electric shock and two other neutral stimuli (B and C) were not. They then learned to cancel the shock when A was presented, by pressing a button on a keyboard ('behavioral avoidance'). Next, they were asked to imagine that stimulus B was followed by the shock (i.e., without actual B or shock presentations; Experiment 1; N = 66) or they were shown B and asked to imagine the shock (i.e., without actual shock presentations; Experiment 2; N = 60). Finally, in the test phase, they were shown each of the three stimuli (without the shock) and given the opportunity to make the avoidance response. Results showed that participants tended to avoid B in the test phase in Experiment 1, even though it had never been presented with the shock but not in Experiment 2. We discuss how the findings may explain the acquisition of avoidance in the presentation of innocuousstimuli across anxiety-related disorders.sponsorship: We would like to thank Lana Bojanic, Liza Schulze, Natasja Arends, Emilie van Helleputte, and Tessa Wormer for collecting the experimental data and Suzanne van Veen for recording the imagery scripts. The study was supported by a VICI grant (453-15-005) awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to Iris Engelhard. (VICI grant - Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)|453-15-005)status: Publishe
A review on mental imagery in fear conditioning research 100 years since the ‘Little Albert’ study
No full textSince the seminal ‘Little Albert’ study by Watson and Rayner (1920), fear conditioning has become one of the most commonly used paradigms for studying the etiology of anxiety-related disorders. In a fear conditioning procedure, a (neutral) conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), resulting in fear-related conditioned responses (CRs) to the CS. Whereas fear conditioning research initially focused on observable elements in the environment (i.e., CSs, USs, and their contingency) and their effects (i.e., CRs), subsequent research indicated that attention should also be given to unobservable mental events (e.g., intrusive memories of aversive outcomes) to more fully account for the symptomatology of anxiety disorders. In this paper, we review the research relating to four major research questions on the relationship between mental imagery and fear conditioning: (1) Can mental imagery substitute for actual stimulus administration? (2) Can mental imagery inflate CRs? (3) Can fear conditioning result in the installment of mental images as CRs (i.e., intrusions)? (4) Can mental imagery-based interventions reduce CRs? For all these research questions, tentative confirmatory evidence has been found and these findings corroborate contemporary conditioning theories. Nonetheless, we point to several open questions and methodological issues that require further research.sponsorship: This work was supported by a VICI grant (453-15-005) awarded to Iris Engelhard by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research|453-15-005, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research)status: Published onlin
Perseveration causes automatization of checking behavior in obsessive-compulsive disorder
No full textRepeated checking leads to reductions in meta-memory (i.e., memory confidence, vividness and detail), and automatization of checking behavior (Dek, van den Hout, Giele, & Engelhard, 2014, 2015). Dek et al. (2014) suggested that this is caused by increased familiarity with the checked stimuli. They predicted that defamiliarization of checking by modifying the perceptual characteristics of stimuli would cause de-automatization and attenuate the negative meta-memory effects of re-checking. However, their results were inconclusive. The present study investigated whether repeated checking leads to automatization of checking behavior, and if defamiliarization indeed leads to de-automatization and attenuation of meta-memory effects in patients with OCD and healthy controls. Participants performed a checking task, in which they activated, deactivated and checked threat-irrelevant stimuli. During a pre- and post-test checking trial, check duration was recorded and a reaction time task was simultaneously administered as dual-task to assess automatization. After the pre- and post-test checking trial, meta-memory was rated. Results showed that relevant checking led to automatization of checking behavior on the RT measure, and negative meta-memory effects for patients and controls. Defamiliarization led to de-automatization measured with the RT task, but did not attenuate the negative meta-memory effects of repeated checking. Clinical implications are discussed
Targeting avoidance via compound extinction
No full textAvoidance towards innocuous cues is a key diagnostic criterion across anxiety-related disorders. Importantly, the most effective intervention for anxiety-related disorders, exposure therapy with response prevention, sometimes does not prevent the relapse of anxiety's symptomatology. We tested whether extinction effects, the experimental proxy of exposure, are enhanced by increasing the discrepancy between the prediction of an unpleasant event happening (shock presentation), and the actual event (shock omission). Forty-eight individuals first saw pictures of three stimuli. Two pictures (CSA, CSB) were followed by a shock (US) and one (CS-) was not. Next, participants learned to avoid the US by pressing a computer key. An extinction and response prevention procedure followed. In the first part of it, participants saw unreinforced presentations of all CSs. In the second part, the single group saw unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CS-. The compound group encountered compound unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CSB, and separate presentations of the CS-. Return of avoidance and fear was tested after unsignalled presentations of the US. Compound extinction resulted in comparable reduction of fear and avoidance compared to standard extinction. We discuss how future research could enhance extinction effects by adding costs to the avoidance behaviour.</p
A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence for unaware fear conditioning
No full textWhether fear conditioning can take place without contingency awareness is a topic of continuing debate and conflicting findings have been reported in the literature. This systematic review provides a critical assessment of the available evidence. Specifically, a search was conducted to identify articles reporting fear conditioning studies in which the contingency between conditioned stimuli (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US) was masked, and in which CS-US contingency awareness was assessed. A systematic assessment of the methodological quality of the included studies (k = 41) indicated that most studies suffered from methodological limitations (i.e., poor masking procedures, poor awareness measures, researcher degrees of freedom, and trial-order effects), and that higher quality predicted lower odds of studies concluding in favor of contingency unaware fear conditioning. Furthermore, meta-analytic moderation analyses indicated no evidence for a specific set of conditions under which contingency unaware fear conditioning can be observed. Finally, funnel plot asymmetry and p-curve analysis indicated evidence for publication bias. We conclude that there is no convincing evidence for contingency unaware fear conditioning.</p
Safety behaviors and the persistence of irrational fears
No full textCognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), in particular, exposure therapy, is the treatment of first choice for anxiety disorders. Patients are repeatedly exposed to the feared, but innocuous stimulus to learn that the catastrophe that they expect does not follow, which typically decreases their fear response (i.e., extinction). Clinical guidelines recommend motivating patients to inhibit all safety behaviors during exposure. Safety behaviors are actions aimed at preventing, escaping, minimizing, or neutralizing a feared outcome. Patients may misattribute the nonoccurrence of the catastrophe to their safety behavior, which hampers exposure effects. However, empirical findings are inconsistent, and show detrimental, neutral, and beneficial effects of using safety behavior during exposure. Our first aim was to test whether the negative effects of safety behaviors on exposure outcomes depend on whether safety behavior precludes the occurrence of threat. A fear conditioning experiment showed that safety behavior that precluded the occurrence of threat prevented extinction, and that safety behavior that minimized the severity of threat allowed extinction for several participants, but prevented extinction for other participants. Additionally, we found that cleaning safety behavior, which logically precludes the occurrence of threat, did not prevent a decrease in threat beliefs about contamination and illness. Together these findings suggest that the negative effects of safety behavior on exposure outcomes do not only depend on whether safety behavior prevents the occurrence of threat. Secondly, we investigated the causal influence of safety behavior on anxiety. Healthy participants clinically representative checking safety behavior on a daily basis for one week. This exacerbated their cognitions about the severity of threat. Hence, checking behavior appears to contribute to the severity of fears in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which suggests that safety behavior contributes to the exacerbation of pathological anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, in a fear conditioning experiment, we found that using safety behavior after fear extinction can promote a return of fear. This suggests that safety behavior may be involved in relapse after exposure therapy. Third and finally, we explored the potentially beneficial effects of approach-enhancing safety behavior. We found that spider fearful individuals infer safety from approach behavior in spider-relevant scenarios. This suggests that approach itself may signal safety in anxious individuals. However, approach behavior did not add to the beneficial effects of exposure: repeated exposure to a spider by pulling it toward you and by having the experimenter pull it toward you caused similar reductions in spider fear. Safety behavior can maintain irrational fears by preventing extinction learning, contribute to the development of pathological anxiety by directly exacerbating threat beliefs, and may promote a return of fear after exposure therapy. However, safety behavior that allows threat occurrences may not hamper extinction for certain individuals, cleaning safety behavior may not be detrimental to the beneficial effects of exposure in the context of disgust, and safety behavior that motivates approach may directly increase safety perceptions. Pathological anxiety is a severe clinical and societal problem; therefore efforts to translate the current findings to clinical applications are warranted
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