Objective This open-trial study examined effects of a culturally-adapted Hebrew version of guided internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (ICBT) for depression. We examined therapeutic alliance with the therapist and with the programme (content) as potential predictors of outcomes. Furthermore, we examined whether anxious and avoidant attachment styles improved, although relationships were not the focus of treatment. Method: We examined alliance with therapist and alliance with programme and their time-lagged (1 week), longitudinal relationship with depression outcomes, and change in anxious and avoidant attachment during treatment. Results: Depression and insomnia improved significantly (Cohen’s d: depression = 1.34, insomnia = 0.86), though dropout was relatively high (49%). Alliance with programme and with the therapist predicted adherence and dropout, whereas only alliance with therapist predicted symptom improvement. Avoidant attachment decreased over treatment whereas anxious attachment did not. Conclusion: A culturally-adapted version of ICBT for depression showed that alliance with therapist and alliance with programme both can play an important role in its effectiveness: alliance with programme and the therapist drive adherence and dropout and alliance with therapist is related to symptom improvement. Although the focus of treatment is not interpersonal, avoidant attachment style can improve following ICBT.

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) may exhibit impaired emotion perception. However, research demonstrating this decline has been based almost entirely on the recognition of isolated emotional cues. In real-life, emotional cues such as expressive faces are typically encountered alongside expressive bodies. The current study investigated emotion perception in individuals with PD (n=37) using emotionally incongruent composite displays of facial and body expressions, as well as isolated face and body expressions, and congruent composite displays as baseline. In addition to a group of healthy controls (HC) (n=50), we also included control individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) (n=30), who display, as in PD, similar motor symptomology and decreased emotion perception abilities. The results show that individuals with PD showed an increased tendency to categorize incongruent face-body combinations in line with the body emotion, whereas HC showed a tendency to classify them in line with the facial emotion. No consistent pattern for prioritizing the face or body was found in individuals with SZ. These results were not explained by the emotional recognition of the isolated cues, cognitive status, depression or motor symptoms of individuals with PD and SZ. As real-life expressions may include inconsistent cues in the body and face, these findings may have implications for the way individuals with PD and SZ interpret the emotions of others.

Societies are often comprised of majority group members who feel threatened by minorities which, in return, are denied equal rights. How do perceived societal threats, that impact both majorities and minorities, influence perceived minority threat and the support for their rights? We utilized the February 2021 Myanmar coup – which has been perceived as threatening by most majority and minority citizens – to examine this question in a three-wave cross-sectional survey. One wave was conducted before the coup. The second (immediately after) and third (one year after) were aimed to understand short and long-term changes in perceived minority threat following the coup. Perceived minority threat decreased after the coup with increased perceived societal threat (wave 2) and increased back again when perceived societal threat diminished (wave 3). Perceived minority threat was also associated with higher support for minority rights. Our results reveal the dynamic nature of group-relevant threats using a unique non-WEIRD sample.

One striking commonality between languages is their Zipfian distributions: A power-law distribution of word frequency. This distribution is found across languages, speech genres, and within different parts of speech. The recurrence of such distributions is thought to reflect cognitive and/or communicative pressures and to facilitate language learning. However, research on Zipfian distributions has mostly been limited to spoken languages. In this study, we ask whether Zipfian distributions are also found across signed languages, as expected if they reflect a universal property of human language. We find that sign frequencies and ranks in three sign language corpora (BSL, DGS and NGT) show a Zipfian relationship, similar to that found in spoken languages. These findings highlight the commonalities between spoken and signed languages, add to our understanding of the use of signs, and show the prevalence of Zipfian distributions across language modalities, supporting the idea that they facilitate language learning and communication.

According to cybernetic approaches, emotion regulation is motivated by the desire to reduce discrepancies between experienced and desired emotions. Yet, this assumption has rarely been tested directly in healthy or unhealthy populations. In two ecological momentary assessment studies, we monitored motivated emotion regulation in daily life in participants who varied in the severity of their depressive symptoms (Study 1; N = 173) and in clinically depressed and nondepressed participants (Study 2; N = 120). Across studies, associations between motivation in emotion regulation and discrepancies between experienced and desired emotions differed by depression. As expected, as discrepancies between experienced and desired emotions increased, individuals with lower depressive symptoms or without a clinical depression diagnosis were more motivated to regulate their emotions. In contrast, we found no evidence (Study 1) or weaker evidence (Study 2) for sensitivity to the size of the discrepancies between experienced and desired emotions among individuals with higher depressive symptoms or those diagnosed with clinical depression. These individuals were consistently motivated to regulate their emotions, regardless of the size of the discrepancies. These findings suggest that individuals prone to or suffering from depression may be less sensitive than nondepressed individuals to regulatory demands in emotion regulation.

According to Lewin’s seminal motivational theory, conflicts between undesirable alternatives (avoidance–avoidance conflicts) are more difficult to resolve than conflicts between desirable alternatives (approach–approach conflicts). This difference in the difficulty of resolving approach–approach and avoidance–avoidance conflicts was suggested as a general law for human behavior, and subsequent research provided robust evidence to support it. Here we challenge this assertion. We argue that the difference in conflict resolution difficulty depends on the compatibility between the type of conflict (approach–approach vs. avoidance–avoidance) and the affective context (positive vs. negative) in which the conflict is being resolved. We report five studies. Data were collected from 2019 to 2021. In Studies 1–4, we presented participants with both conflict types, embedded in either a positive or a negative affective context. Across different designs and stimuli, and for both experienced difficulty and decision time, we found that in a positive affective context, avoidance–avoidance conflicts were more difficult to resolve than approach–approach conflicts; however, in a negative affective context, no difference between the conflict types was found. In Study 5, we added a neutral control condition to relate our findings to previous research, which did not manipulate the affective context. Taken together, our findings challenge a seminal motivational theory and show that choosing the lesser of two evils is not always more difficult than choosing the greater of two goods. Instead, the difference in conflict resolution difficulty depends on the affective context in which the choice is being made.

What are the major vulnerabilities in people with social anxiety? What are the most promising directions for translational research pertaining to this condition? The present paper provides an integrative summary of basic and applied translational research on social anxiety, emphasizing vulnerability factors. It is divided into two subsections: intrapersonal and interpersonal. The intrapersonal section synthesizes research relating to (a) self-representations and self-referential processes; (b) emotions and their regulation; and (c) cognitive biases: attention, interpretation and judgment, and memory. The interpersonal section summarizes findings regarding the systems of (a) approach and avoidance, (b) affiliation and social rank, and their implications for interpersonal impairments. Our review suggests that the science of social anxiety and, more generally, psychopathology may be advanced by examining processes and their underlying content within broad psychological systems. Increased interaction between basic and applied researchers to diversify and elaborate different perspectives on social anxiety is necessary for progress.

Individuals exhibiting restrained eating behaviors demonstrate increased inhibitory control when exposed to food-related stimuli, indicating the presence of an automatic food-inhibition association. Existing literature proposes that this association contributes to the devaluation of food within this population. Efforts to disrupt this association by promoting the complete elimination of the inhibition of food responses have resulted in increased food consumption but have also led to heightened food-related anxiety in individuals with restrained eating behaviors. In the current investigation, we investigated whether a novel flexible food response/inhibition computerized task could yield favorable changes in attitudes toward food in individuals with restrained eating. We randomly assigned 78 females who engage in restrained eating to one of three training groups. In the flexible response/inhibition group, participants were instructed to equally inhibit or respond to food stimuli. In the response group, participants consistently responded to food stimuli, while in the inhibition group, participants consistently inhibited their response to food cues. Implicit attitudes toward food were assessed both before and after the manipulation. To examine the stability of the effect of the training, participants also engaged in a seemingly unrelated bogus taste test. Our results revealed that only the flexible response/inhibition group demonstrated a significant improvement in positive attitudes toward high-calorie foods after eating, while there were no observable changes in negative attitudes among the other two groups. These findings suggest that promoting a balance between the responding and inhibiting responses to food stimuli can increase positive attitudes toward food amongst individuals with restrained eating.

Many individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have depressive symptoms that meet criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD). In our study, we examined the temporal relationship between symptoms of social anxiety and symptoms of depression during the course of an 11-week internet-delivered cognitive behavioral treatment (ICBT) for SAD (n = 170). Specifically, we investigated whether weekly changes in social anxiety mediated changes in depression, changes in depression mediated changes in anxiety, both or neither. In addition, we compared individuals with SAD and MDD (n = 50) and individuals with SAD and no MDD (n = 120) to examine the role of MDD as a moderator of the social anxiety—depression relationship. Lower-level mediational modeling revealed that changes in social anxiety symptoms mediated changes in depression symptoms to a greater extent than vice versa. In addition, mediation among individuals with SAD and MDD was significantly greater compared to individuals with SAD and no MDD. Our findings suggest that ICBT is effective in treating individuals with SAD regardless of comorbid depression, and that focusing ICBT interventions on social anxiety can lead to significant reductions in depression among individuals with SAD.

Background and Objectives

The habit formation model of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) suggests that overreliance on stimulus-driven behaviors leads to repetitive compulsive rituals. Failure in task control, which leads to the stimulus-driven behaviors overriding the goal-driven system, could explain the mechanisms involved in this process.

Methods

Patients with OCD and non-psychiatric controls completed the affordance task to understand the role of task control in maintaining compulsive behaviors. In the affordance task, participants are required to respond to a stimulus with one hand, while the stimulus on screen triggers a motor activation in either the congruent (same) or incongruent (other) hand. The affordance effect (accuracy for incongruent minus congruent trials) measures task control—the ability to suppress irrelevant, stimulus-driven, behaviors.

Results

The affordance effect was larger in the OCD group, indicating a deficit in task control in those patients. Furthermore, a binary logistic regression analysis, using the affordances effect as a predictor and group as the outcome variable, revealed that the affordance effect correctly classified about 65% of the individuals with OCD compared to the non-psychiatric controls. The correlation between the affordance effect and OCD symptom-severity was not significant.

Limitations

Handedness was assessed through self-report and OCD symptoms were mild–moderate.

Conclusions

These findings strengthen the notion that task control deficits might account for the imbalance between the goal-directed and habit formation systems and that this deficit might be a risk factor for OCD but does not account for symptom-severity.