Disentangling emotion processes in borderline personality disorder: Physiological and self-reported assessment of biological vulnerability, baseline intensity, and reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli.

This study investigated M. Linehan’s (1993) theory that individuals meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) have high biological vulnerability to emotion dysregulation, including high baseline emotional intensity and high reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli. Twenty individuals with BPD, 20 age-matched individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD), and 20 age-matched normal controls (NCs) participated in 2 separate emotion induction conditions, a standardized condition, and a personally relevant condition. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), skin conductance response (SCR), and self-report measures were collected throughout the experiment. BPD participants displayed heightened biological vulnerability compared with NCs as indicated by reduced basal RSA. BPD participants also exhibited high baseline emotional intensity, characterized by heightened SCR and heightened self-reported negative emotions at baseline. However, the BPD group did not display heightened reactivity, as their physiological and self-reported changes from baseline to the emotion inductions tasks were not greater than the other 2 groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impact of depression on response to comedy: A dynamic facial coding analysis.

Individuals suffering from depression show diminished facial responses to positive stimuli. Recent cognitive research suggests that depressed individuals may appraise emotional stimuli differently than do nondepressed persons. Prior studies do not indicate whether depressed individuals respond differently when they encounter positive stimuli that are difficult to avoid. The authors investigated dynamic responses of individuals varying in both history of major depressive disorder (MDD) and current depressive symptomatology (N = 116) to robust positive stimuli. The Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1978) was used to measure affect-related responses to a comedy clip. Participants reporting current depressive symptomatology were more likely to evince affect-related shifts in expression following the clip than were those without current symptomatology. This effect of current symptomatology emerged even when the contrast focused only on individuals with a history of MDD. Specifically, persons with current depressive symptomatology were more likely than those without current symptomatology to control their initial smiles with negative affect-related expressions. These findings suggest that integration of emotion science and social cognition may yield important advances for understanding depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A preliminary investigation of cognitive flexibility for emotional information in major depressive disorder and non-psychiatric controls.

Clinical research suggests that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) are cognitively inflexible, exhibiting ruminative, rigid, and automatic thoughts within a negative schema. However, existing neuropsychological research on cognitive flexibility in this population has not employed emotional stimuli. Because research suggests that the performance of individuals with MDD is modulated when emotional stimuli are used, this study investigates the impact of emotional stimuli on cognitive flexibility performance through a novel emotional modification of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Controls were less flexible when stimuli were positive and individuals with MDD were less flexible when stimuli were negative relative to the controls. These divergent styles of responding to emotional information may contribute to the relative risk or protection from depressed mood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associations between serotonin transporter gene promoter region (5-HTTLPR) polymorphism and gaze bias for emotional information.

The serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) is associated with neural response to negative images in brain regions involved in the experience of emotion. However, the behavioral implications of this sensitivity have been studied far less extensively. The current study used eye-tracking methodology to examine how individuals genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR, including the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs25531, allocated attention during prolonged (30-s) exposure to face stimuli depicting positive and negative emotion. Short 5-HTTLPR allele carriers and carriers of the long allele with guanine at the sixth nucleotide (S/LG) displayed a stronger gaze bias (total fixation time, number of fixations, mean fixation length) for positive than for sad, threat, or neutral stimuli. In contrast, those homozygous for the long 5-HTTLPR allele with adenine at the sixth nucleotide (LA) viewed the emotion stimuli in an unbiased fashion. Time course analyses indicated no initial 5-HTTLPR group differences; however, S/LG 5-HTTLPR allele carriers were more likely than LA 5-HTTLPR homozygotes to direct gaze toward happy than toward sad stimuli over time. This bias toward positive stimuli during the later stages of information processing likely reflects a strategic effort to downregulate heightened reactivity to negative stimuli among 5-HTTLPR S/LG allele carriers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do schizophrenic patients show a disjunctive relationship among expressive, experiential, and psychophysiological components of emotion?

Recent research has found a discrepancy between schizophrenic patients' outward expression of emotion and their reported emotional experience. In this study, which attempts to replicate and extend the findings of previous studies, participants with and without schizophrenia viewed emotional film clips while their facial expressions were videotaped and skin conductance was recorded. Participants also reported their subjective experience of emotion following each film. Those with schizophrenia were less facially expressive than controls during the emotional films and reported experiencing as much positive and negative emotion, replicating previous findings. Additionally, schizophrenic patients exhibited greater skin conductance reactivity to all films than controls. These findings suggest a disjunction among emotional response domains for schizophrenic patients; alternative explanations for the findings are considered as well as suggestions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sadness and amusement reactivity differentially predict concurrent and prospective functioning in major depressive disorder.

Depressed individuals often fail to react to emotionally significant stimuli. The significance of this pattern of emotional dysregulation in depression is poorly understood. In the present study, depressed and nondepressed participants viewed standardized neutral, sad, fear, and amusing films; and experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses to each film were assessed. Compared with nondepressed controls, depressed participants reported sadness and amusement in a flattened, context-insensitive manner. Those depressed participants who reported the least reactivity to the sad film exhibited the greatest concurrent impairment. Prospectively, the depressed participant who exhibited the least behavioral and heart rate reactivity to the amusing film were the least likely to recover from depression. Loss of the context-appropriate modulation of emotion in depression may reflect a core feature of emotion dysregulation in this disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory capacity and the self-regulation of emotional expression and experience.

This research examined the relationship between individual differences in working memory capacity and the self-regulation of emotional expression and emotional experience. Four studies revealed that people higher in working memory capacity suppressed expressions of negative emotion (Study 1) and positive emotion (Study 2) better than did people lower in working memory capacity. Furthermore, compared to people lower in working memory capacity, people higher in capacity more capably appraised emotional stimuli in an unemotional manner and thereby experienced (Studies 3 and 4) and expressed (Study 4) less emotion in response to those stimuli. These findings indicate that cognitive ability contributes to the control of emotional responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ambivalence over emotional expression and well-being: Nomothetic and idiographic tests of the stress-buffering hypothesis.

Examined nomothetic and idiographic relations between ambivalence over emotional expression (as expressed by the Ambivalence Over Emotional Expression Questionnaire; AEQ) and well-being in a 4-mo study with an interim 2-wk diary component. Ss were 66 undergraduates. Nomothetic and idiographic analyses both revealed that AEQ was related to psychological health but not to physical well-being. The nomothetic test of stress-buffering showed that AEQ was more predictive of depression among Ss who had experienced higher levels of positive life-event stress. In contrast, the idiographic test of stress-buffering revealed that Ss higher in AEQ exhibited less covariation between daily stress and negative affect over time. It is proposed that AEQ may reflect 2 types of emotional vulnerability: emotional reactivity and emotional perseveration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural and temperamental variation in emotional response.

To examine the relative influence of cultural and temperamental factors on emotional response, we compared the emotional behavior, reports of emotional experience, and autonomic responses of 50 European American (EA) and 48 Chinese American (CA) college-age dating couples during conversations about conflicts in their relationships. EA couples showed more positive and less negative emotional behavior than did CA couples, despite similarities in reports of emotional experience and autonomic reactivity. Group differences in emotional behavior were mediated by cultural (values and practices) but not temperamental factors (neuroticism and extraversion). Collapsing across groups, cultural factors accounted for greater variance in emotional behavior but lesser variance in reports of emotional experience compared with temperamental factors. Together, these findings suggest that the relative influence of cultural and temperamental factors on emotion varies by response component. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion at the expense of cognition: Psychopathic individuals outperform controls on an operant response task.

The impact of emotional stimuli on a simple motor response task in individuals with psychopathy and comparison individuals was investigated. Psychopathy was assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991). Participants were presented with the Emotional Interrupt Task, in which they responded with left and right button presses to shapes that were temporally bracketed by positive, negative, and neutral visual images taken from the International Affective Picture System. The comparison group showed increased response latencies if the shape was temporally bracketed by either a positive or negative emotional stimulus relative to a neutral stimulus. Individuals with psychopathy did not show this modulation of reaction time for either positive or negative emotional stimuli. Results are discussed with reference to current models regarding the modulation of attention by emotion and the emotional impairment seen in individuals with psychopathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and emotional reactivity: Variation among Asian Americans of East Asian descent and European Americans.

Studies of Western samples (e.g., European Americans [EAs]) suggest that depressed individuals tend to show diminished emotional reactivity (J. G. Gehricke & A. J. Fridlund, 2002; G. E. Schwartz, P. L. Fair, P. Salt, M. R. Mandel, & G. L. Klerman, 1976a, 1976b). Do these findings generalize to individuals oriented to other cultures (e.g., East Asian cultures)? The authors compared the emotional reactions (i.e., reports of emotional experience, facial behavior, and physiological reactivity) of depressed and nondepressed EAs and Asian Americans of East Asian descent (AAs) to sad and amusing films. Their results were consistent with previous findings: Depressed EAs showed a pattern of diminished reactivity to the sad film (less crying, less intense reports of sadness) compared with nondepressed participants. In contrast, depressed AAs showed a pattern of heightened emotional reactivity (greater crying) compared with nondepressed participants. Across cultural groups, depressed and nondepressed participants did not differ in their reports of amusement or facial behavior during the amusing film. Physiological reactivity to the film clips did not differ between depressed and control participants for either cultural group. Thus, although depression may influence particular aspects of emotional reactivity across cultures (e.g., crying), the specific direction of this influence may depend on prevailing cultural norms regarding emotional expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anhedonia and the experience of emotion in individuals with schizophrenia.

Research shows that individuals with schizophrenia report symptoms of anhedonia when assessed by interview or questionnaire. However, when presented with emotional stimuli, they report emotional experiences that are similar to those of control participants. The authors hypothesized that deficits in working memory and episodic memory contribute to such discrepancies. They administered measures of working and episodic memory, self-report anhedonia questionnaires, and several types of emotional stimuli to 49 individuals with schizophrenia and 47 control participants. All participants reported experiencing similar amounts of pleasant-unpleasant emotion (valence) in response to stimuli, but individuals with schizophrenia reported experiencing less arousal for negative stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia also reported greater social and physical anhedonia on a traditional anhedonia questionnaire. Disturbances in working memory moderated the relationship between physical anhedonia and participants' emotional experience of positive stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alcohol and human emotion: A multidimensional analysis incorporating startle-probe methodology.

The effect of alcohol intoxication on emotional response was investigated using a model of emotion that includes both arousal and valence dimensions. Thirty-six university students were exposed to multiple presentations of photographic slides selected to elicit distinctive emotional reactions ranging from very pleasant to very unpleasant; half of them received a moderate (approximately .75 ml/kg) dose of ethanol. The students' psychophysiological responses indicated that both general startle reactivity and autonomic indices specific to emotional arousal were diminished by alcohol. However, the affective modulation of startle, occurring with emotional states manipulated by slides with distinct valences, remained intact. These findings suggest that "stress-response dampening" by alcohol may involve a nonspecific attenuation of arousal reactions evident for positive as well as negative stimuli and that theories of motivation for drinking that are based on mood alteration may need refinement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an established program shown to reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. MBSR is believed to alter emotional responding by modifying cognitive–affective processes. Given that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by emotional and attentional biases as well as distorted negative self-beliefs, we examined MBSR-related changes in the brain–behavior indices of emotional reactivity and regulation of negative self-beliefs in patients with SAD. Sixteen patients underwent functional MRI while reacting to negative self-beliefs and while regulating negative emotions using 2 types of attention deployment emotion regulation—breath-focused attention and distraction-focused attention. Post-MBSR, 14 patients completed neuroimaging assessments. Compared with baseline, MBSR completers showed improvement in anxiety and depression symptoms and self-esteem. During the breath-focused attention task (but not the distraction-focused attention task), they also showed (a) decreased negative emotion experience, (b) reduced amygdala activity, and (c) increased activity in brain regions implicated in attentional deployment. MBSR training in patients with SAD may reduce emotional reactivity while enhancing emotion regulation. These changes might facilitate reduction in SAD-related avoidance behaviors, clinical symptoms, and automatic emotional reactivity to negative self-beliefs in adults with SAD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression.

Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, respectively, active in WM. Compared with controls, depressed participants were both slower to disengage from sad stimuli and faster to disengage from happy facial expressions. In contrast, nondepressed controls took longer to disengage from happy stimuli than from neutral or sad stimuli. These group differences in reaction times may reflect both protective and maladaptive biases in WM that underlie the ability to effectively regulate negative affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An fMRI study of personality influences on brain reactivity to emotional stimuli.

Functional imaging studies have examined which brain regions respond to emotional stimuli, but they have not determined how stable personality traits moderate such brain activation. Two personality traits, extraversion and neuroticism, are strongly associated with emotional experience and may thus moderate brain reactivity to emotional stimuli. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to directly test whether individual differences in brain reactivity to emotional stimuli are correlated with extraversion and neuroticism in healthy women. Extraversion was correlated with brain reactivity to positive stimuli in localized brain regions, and neuroticism was correlated with brain reactivity to negative stimuli in localized brain regions. This study provides direct evidence that personality is associated with brain reactivity to emotional stimuli and identifies both common and distinct brain regions where such modulation takes place. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of depression on social economic decision making.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 119(3) of Journal of Abnormal Psychology (see record 2010-15289-020). In the article, the last revision received date printed on the final page of the article was incorrect due to an error in the production process. The correct publication dates are as follows: Received April 14, 2009; Revision received November 6, 2009; Accepted November 9, 2009.] Although the role of emotion in social economic decision making has been increasingly recognized, the impact of mood disorders, such as depression, on such decisions has been surprisingly neglected. To address this gap, 15 depressed and 23 nondepressed individuals completed a well-known economic task, in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Although depressed individuals reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair offers, they accepted significantly more of these offers than did controls. A positive relationship was observed in the depressed group, but not in controls, between acceptance rates of unfair offers and resting cardiac vagal control, a physiological index of emotion regulation capacity. The discrepancy between depressed individuals' increased emotional reactions to unfair offers and their decisions to accept more of these offers contrasts with recent findings that negative mood in nondepressed individuals can lead to lower acceptance rates. This suggests distinct biasing processes in depression, which may be related to higher reliance on regulating negative emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression.

An individual's self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials while individuals reporting features of anxiety and depression completed an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, and depression were associated with self-reported emotion abilities, consistent with prior literature. In addition, lower anxious apprehension and greater reported emotional clarity were related to slower processing of negative stimuli indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Higher anxious arousal and reported attention to emotion were associated with ERP evidence of early attention to all stimuli regardless of emotional content. Reduced later engagement with stimuli was also associated with anxious arousal and with clarity of emotions. Depression was not differentially associated with any emotion processing stage indexed by ERPs. Research in this area may lead to the development of therapies that focus on minimization of anxiety to foster successful emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional experience and expression in schizophrenia and depression.

Examined the emotional responses of schizophrenic, depressed, and normal Ss and whether differences in the emotional responding of these groups depended on how emotional responses were elicited or measured. 23 blunted and 20 nonblunted schizophrenics, 17 unipolar depressed Ss, and 20 normal Ss were exposed to a series of affect-eliciting stimuli. The stimuli varied in valence (positive vs negative) and in level of cognitive demand. Ss reported their subjective experiences, and their facial expressions were videotaped. Blunted schizophrenics were the least facially expressive, although their reported subjective experiences did not differ from those of the other groups. The nonblunted schizophrenics were more responsive than the depressed Ss to the positive stimuli, although the 2 groups did not differ in their clinical ratings of affective flatness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)