The pleasure of unadulterated sadness: Experiencing sorrow in fiction, nonfiction, and "in person."

We often experience intense emotions when we enter fictional worlds in film and literature and often shed real tears. The goal of this study was to determine whether emotional reactions (sadness and anxiety) to fiction are distinguishable from emotional reactions to fact. Fifty-nine young adults rated their sadness and anxiety levels in response to 4 film clips, 2 presented as fiction, 2 as nonfiction, and in response to the recall of an actual sad event personally experienced. Participants experienced equivalent levels of sadness and anxiety in response to films presented as fictional or factual. They also experienced equivalent levels of sadness in response to films and in response to a sad personal event. Anxiety levels, however, were significantly higher in response to personally experienced events. The fact that sadness elicited by films is unadulterated by the anxiety that accompanies the sadness of personal experience may explain, in part, the pleasure we derive from watching sad films. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infidelity and separations precipitate major depressive episodes and symptoms of nonspecific depression and anxiety.

This study examined whether humiliating marital events (HMEs; husbands' infidelity, threats of marital dissolution) precipitated Major Depressive Episodes (MDEs) when controlling for marital discord. Participants were 25 women who recently experienced an HME and 25 control women who did not experience an HME. Both groups reported similar levels of marital discord. Results indicated that HME participants were 6 times more likely to be diagnosed with an MDE than control participants. These results remained even after controlling for family and lifetime histories of depression. HME participants also reported significantly more symptoms of nonspecific depression and anxiety than control participants. However, HME and control participants did not report significantly different numbers of anhedonic depression and anxious arousal symptoms. The research and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional self-disclosure and emotional avoidance: Relations with symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Research suggests that individuals with heightened symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders engage in diminished emotional disclosure. On the basis of emotion regulation theories, the authors hypothesized that this symptom–disclosure relationship would be mediated by the avoidance of emotional experience and expression. In Study 1, college students (N = 831) completed measures of depression and anxiety symptoms, measures of tendencies to avoid emotional expression, and measures of tendencies to self-disclose distress. Structural equation modeling revealed that anhedonic depression and anxious arousal were associated with lessened emotional self-disclosure tendencies as mediated by avoidance of emotional expression. In Study 2, participants (N = 153) completed new measures of depression and anxiety symptoms, reflected on the most significant emotional event experienced during the past week, and rated their avoidance of emotion about the event and their self-disclosure of the event. Depression (but not anxiety) symptoms were negatively related to the disclosure of a specific event, but avoidance of emotional experience did not mediate this depression–disclosure relationship. These findings extend emotion dysregulation theory and suggest that depressive symptoms in particular are associated with reduced emotional disclosure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unresolved anger and sadness: Identifying vocal acoustical correlates.

The authors conducted 2 studies to identify the vocal acoustical correlates of unresolved anger and sadness among women reporting unresolved anger toward an attachment figure. In Study 1, participants (N = 17) were induced to experience and express anger then sadness or sadness then anger. In Study 2, a 2nd group of participants (N = 22) underwent a relationship-oriented, emotion-focused analogue therapy session. Results from both studies showed that, relative to emotionally neutral speech, anger evoked an increase in articulation rate and in mean fundamental frequency (F0) and F0-range, whereas sadness evoked an increase in F0-perturbation. Both F0 and F0-range were larger for anger than for sadness. In addition, results from the mood-induction-procedure study revealed 2 Emotion×Order interactions. Whereas variations in amplitude range suggested that anger evoked less physiological activation when induced after sadness, variations in F0-perturbation suggested that sadness evoked more physiological activation when induced after anger. These findings illustrate the feasibility of using acoustical measures to identify clients' personally and clinically meaningful emotional experiences, and shifts between such emotional experiences, in the context of psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing of observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy.

Facial autonomic responses may contribute to emotional communication and reveal individual affective style. In this study, the authors examined how observed pupillary size modulates processing of facial expression, extending the finding that incidentally perceived pupils influence ratings of sadness but not those of happy, angry, or neutral facial expressions. Healthy subjects rated the valence and arousal of photographs depicting facial muscular expressions of sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust. Pupil sizes within the stimuli were experimentally manipulated. Subjects themselves were scored with an empathy questionnaire. Diminishing pupil size linearly enhanced intensity and valence judgments of sad expressions (but not fear, surprise, or disgust). At debriefing, subjects were unaware of differences in pupil size across stimuli. These observations complement an earlier study showing that pupil size directly influences processing of sadness but not other basic emotional facial expressions. Furthermore, across subjects, the degree to which pupil size influenced sadness processing correlated with individual differences in empathy score. Together, these data demonstrate a central role of sadness processing in empathetic emotion and highlight the salience of implicit autonomic signals in affective communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousing primary vulnerable emotions in the context of unresolved anger: “Speaking about” versus “speaking to”.

Arousing and processing primary vulnerable emotions is a core change mechanism across a wide range of psychotherapies and clinical populations. This study examined the utility of 2 emotion-focused interventions—relational reframes and empty-chair enactments—in terms of arousing primary sadness associated with loss and longing among individuals suffering from unresolved anger. Twenty-nine women reporting unresolved anger underwent a single, analogue emotion-focused therapy session comprised of empathy, relational reframe, and empty-chair interventions. The arousal of sadness was measured with voice signal, voice quality, and speech fluency measures. Results indicated that both relational reframe and empty-chair interventions led to increased arousal of sadness relative to baseline nonemotional speech. Empty-chair interventions also led to increases in fear/anxiety, presumably due to the potential for rejection or attack by the significant other (i.e., attachment figure). Treatment implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How affiliation affects stress in fear and anxiety situations.

Three experiments with 156 male undergraduates investigated why the presence of calm others reduces an individual's arousal in a fear situation but intensifies the arousal in an anxiety situation. In the fear situation, Ss anticipated receiving a physically painful stimulus; in the anxiety condition, Ss anticipated receiving an innocuous but embarrassing stimulus. Overall results indicate that (a) Ss stressed by a fear context only underwent stress reduction with a calm other present if he looked at the calm other; (b) the mere presence of a co-participant was stress-inducing for Ss stressed by an anxiety context; (c) the stressed-fear Ss directed attention outward toward impinging environmental stimuli, whereas the highly aroused anxiety Ss did not or could not do so. It is argued that stressed-fear Ss were able to model a calm co-participant because their attention was directed outward, whereas stressed-anxiety Ss did not model a calm co-participant because their attention was turned inward. Some ideas are offered as to how a calm model may be able to serve as a stress preventer for a person in an anxiety situation. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comorbid anxiety disorders and treatment of depression in people with multiple sclerosis.

Objective: Anxiety is highly comorbid with depression, but little is known about the impact of anxiety disorders on the effectiveness of empirically supported psychotherapies for depression. We examined such outcomes for people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and depression, with versus without comorbid anxiety disorders. Design: Participants with MS (N = 102) received 16 weeks of telephone-administered psychotherapy for depression and were followed for one year post-treatment. Results: Participants with comorbid anxiety disorders improved to a similar degree during treatment as those without anxiety disorders. Outcomes during follow-up were mixed, and thus we divided the anxiety diagnoses into distress and fear disorders. The distress disorder (GAD) was associated with elevated anxiety symptoms during and after treatment. In contrast, fear disorders (i.e., panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, specific phobia) were linked to depression, specifically during follow-up, across 3 different measures. Conclusions: People with GAD receiving treatment for depression may benefit from additional services targeting anxiety more specifically, while those with comorbid fear disorders may benefit from services targeting maintenance of gains after treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prospective incidence of first onsets and recurrences of depression in individuals at high and low cognitive risk for depression.

Do negative cognitive styles provide similar vulnerability to first onsets versus recurrences of depressive disorders, and are these associations specific to depression? The authors followed for 2.5 years prospectively college freshmen (N = 347) with no initial psychiatric disorders at high-risk (HR) versus low-risk (LR) for depression on the basis of their cognitive styles. HR participants had odds of major, minor, and hopelessness depression that were 3.5-6.8 times greater than the odds for LR individuals. Negative cognitive styles were similarly predictive of first onsets and recurrences of major depression and hopelessness depression but predicted first onsets of minor depression more strongly than recurrences. The risk groups did not differ in incidence of anxiety disorders not comorbid with depression or other disorders, but HR participants were more likely to have an onset of anxiety comorbid with depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating models of affect: Relationships among EEG alpha asymmetry, depression, and anxiety.

The approach-withdrawal and valence-arousal models both predict that depressive and anxious profiles will be associated with relatively reduced left frontal and increased right frontal activity respectively, while the valence-arousal model also proposes a dissociation by lower and higher right parietotemporal activity, respectively. Recent work further suggests that subtypes of anxiety disorders may be characterized by distinctive patterns of activity depending on their type of arousal (anxious arousal/apprehension). The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships among nonclinical depression/anxiety and lateralized frontal/parietotemporal activity by categorizing participants (N = 428) on the basis of both negative mood and alpha EEG. Key findings include: (i) greater right frontal lateralization in anxious participants, symmetrical frontal activity in depressed/comorbid, and left frontal lateralization in healthy controls; (ii) right frontal lateralization in anxious arousal participants, left frontal and right parietotemporal lateralization in anxious apprehension; (iii) bilateral increase in frontal and increased right parietotemporal activity in depressed/comorbid participants. Findings support predictions for frontal but not posterior regions. Grouping on the basis of EEG may not be reciprocally predictive of negative mood groupings, suggesting involvement of additional factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading voices and hearing text: Talker-specific auditory imagery in reading.

A series of experiments was conducted to determine if linguistic representations accessed during reading include auditory imagery for characteristics of a talker's voice. In 3 experiments, participants were familiarized with two talkers during a brief prerecorded conversation. One talker spoke at a fast speaking rate, and one spoke at a slow speaking rate. Each talker was identified by name. At test, participants were asked to either read aloud (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) a passage that they were told was written by either the fast or the slow talker. Reading times, both silent and aloud, were significantly slower when participants thought they were reading a passage written by the slow talker than when reading a passage written by the fast talker. Reading times differed as a function of passage author more for difficult than for easy texts, and individual differences in general auditory imagery ability were related to reading times. These results suggest that readers engage in a type of auditory imagery while reading that preserves the perceptual details of an author's voice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety meets fear in perception of dynamic expressive gaze.

This study investigated in 2 experiments whether reflexive cuing of attention that occurs after perception of a gaze cue is greater for fearful than for happy faces in normal participants, as hypothesized from a social neuroscience perspective. To increase neuroecological validity, dynamic stimulus presentation was used to display faces that simultaneously morphed from a neutral expression into a happy or fearful one and shifted eye gaze from the center to the periphery. Shifts of attention resulting from a natural fearful gaze were expected to be related to participants' anxiety traits, in agreement with the often found increased selective attention to threat in anxious participants. Both hypotheses were confirmed: Fearful faces induced stronger gaze cuing than happy faces, and the strength of this cuing effect was correlated to participants' anxiety levels. These results suggest a neural network, which integrates the processing of gaze, expression, and emotional states to adaptively prime vigilance under threatening circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of worry on physiological and subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli in generalized anxiety disorder and nonanxious control participants.

The present study examined the effect of worry versus relaxation and neutral thought activity on both physiological and subjective responding to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Thirty-eight participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and 35 nonanxious control participants were randomly assigned to engage in worry, relaxation, or neutral inductions prior to sequential exposure to each of four emotion-inducing film clips. The clips were designed to elicit fear, sadness, happiness, and calm emotions. Self reported negative and positive affect was assessed following each induction and exposure, and vagal activity was measured throughout. Results indicate that worry (vs. relaxation) led to reduced vagal tone for the GAD group, as well as higher negative affect levels for both groups. Additionally, prior worry resulted in less physiological and subjective responding to the fearful film clip, and reduced negative affect in response to the sad clip. This suggests that worry may facilitate avoidance of processing negative emotions by way of preventing a negative emotional contrast. Implications for the role of worry in emotion avoidance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A test of reciprocal inhibition: are anxiety and sexual arousal in women mutually inhibitory?

Tested J. Wolpe's (1958) prediction that autonomic sexual and anxiety arousal states are mutually inhibitory. Using a new physiological measure of female sexual arousal (vaginal blood volume), changes in 7 sexually experienced Ss (mean age 27 yrs) were compared during erotic video stimulation following anxiety and control stimulus preexposure and during anxiety and control stimulation following erotic stimulus preexposure. Consistent with reciprocal inhibition theory, when Ss were sexually aroused by erotic preexposure, anxiety arousal inhibited sexual arousal more rapidly than did an attention control stimulus. However, contrary to reciprocal inhibition theory, Ss became more rapidly aroused sexually following anxiety preexposure than following neutral preexposure. In the case of heart rate, changes were compared during erotic and neutral stimulation following anxiety preexposure and during anxiety arousal following erotic and neutral preexposure. Consistent with the literature to date, there were no heart rate changes that could be attributed to differential preexposure. Taken together, the results do not support Wolpe's reciprocal inhibition theory but do suggest a context interpretation: The way in which sexual and anxiety arousal states interact with each other may depend on the context in which Ss perceive the stimuli that generate these respective arousal states. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A meta-analysis of the effect of cognitive bias modification on anxiety and depression.

Cognitive biases have been theorized to play a critical role in the onset and maintenance of anxiety and depression. Cognitive bias modification (CBM), an experimental paradigm that uses training to induce maladaptive or adaptive cognitive biases, was developed to test these causal models. Although CBM has generated considerable interest in the past decade, both as an experimental paradigm and as a form of treatment, there have been no quantitative reviews of the effect of CBM on anxiety and depression. This meta-analysis of 45 studies (2,591 participants) assessed the effect of CBM on cognitive biases and on anxiety and depression. CBM had a medium effect on biases (g = 0.49) that was stronger for interpretation (g = 0.81) than for attention (g = 0.29) biases. CBM further had a small effect on anxiety and depression (g = 0.13), although this effect was reliable only when symptoms were assessed after participants experienced a stressor (g = 0.23). When anxiety and depression were examined separately, CBM significantly modified anxiety but not depression. There was a nonsignificant trend toward a larger effect for studies including multiple training sessions. These findings are broadly consistent with cognitive theories of anxiety and depression that propose an interactive effect of cognitive biases and stressors on these symptoms. However, the small effect sizes observed here suggest that this effect may be more modest than previously believed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A latent growth examination of fear development in infancy: Contributions of maternal depression and the risk for toddler anxiety.

Growth modeling was used to examine the developmental trajectory of infant temperamental fear with maternal fear and depressive symptoms as predictors of infant fearfulness and change in infant fear predicting toddler anxiety symptoms. In Study 1, a sample of 158 mothers reported their own depressive symptoms and fear when their children were 4 months of age and infant fearfulness at 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months. Maternal symptoms of depression predicted steeper increases in infant fearfulness over time (z = 2.06, p z = 2.32, p z = 1.88, p z = 2.30, p z = 2.08, p     

Effects of anxiety on attentional allocation and task performance: an information processing analysis

An information processing signal detection methodology was employed to examine attentional allocation and its correlates in both normal comparison (NC) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) participants. In particular, the impact of neutral distractor and negative feedback cues on performance of an attention vigilance task was investigated. Individuals with GAD (N = 15) evidenced impaired performance on an attention vigilance task relative to NC participants (N = 15) when neutral distractor cues were presented. Contrary to prediction, no group differences in performance were detected under conditions in which participants were presented negative feedback cues they were told were relevant to their performance. Instead, GAD participants exhibited improvement during the experimental task such that their performance was equivalent to NC participants. Across trials, the clinically anxious group endorsed significantly higher levels of worry and negative affectivity; however, they failed to respond with concomitant physical arousal (e.g. increased muscle tension). These data are discussed within the context of Eysenck and Calvo's (1992, Cognition and Emotion, 6, 409-434) processing efficiency theory. Additionally, the results of this investigation provide support for Barlow's (1988, Anxiety and its disorders: The nature and treatment of anxiety and panic) conceptualization of anxiety as requiring the interaction of cognitive schema and physiological arousal.     

The lay assessment of subclinical depression in daily life.

This study examined how laypersons assess subclinical depression in others on the basis of information about their daily lives. For 2 days, 96 participants were tracked with the Electronically Activated Recorder, a naturalistic observation method that samples ambient sounds from participants' momentary environments. Judges rated participants' levels of depression after listening to the sampled ambient sounds. Participants' depressive symptoms were assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory. Overall, judges showed little accuracy at determining participants' levels of depressive symptoms from the ambient sounds. Exploratory analyses, however, revealed that judges were more accurate among moderately and severely depressed participants, presumably because the cues judges used to assess depression (e.g., spending time alone, not socializing, not laughing) discriminated successfully only at high levels of subclinical depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression in British and American children and its relation to anxiety and fear.

The relations between the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), and the Fear Survey Schedule for Children—Revised (FSSC-R) were examined in 327 British and 336 American children. Relations were similar for both samples of children, with depression more closely related to anxiety than to fear. In addition, the utility of M. Kovacs's (see record 1981-31663-001) recommended cutoff score (CDI?≥?19) for identifying extreme groups of depressed children was evaluated. Children who reported high levels of depression also reported high levels of anxiety and social evaluative fears. The findings are discussed in light of D. Watson and L. A. Clark's (see record 1985-12093-001) notion of negative affectivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

State and trait anxiety, coping styles and depression among psychiatric inpatients.

Examined relationships among state and trait anxiety, coping styles, and depression in 17 male and 26 female adult psychiatric inpatients. Ss completed measures of state and trait anxiety, situation perception, depression and coping styles (Multidimensional Anxiety Scales, Multidimensional Coping Inventory, and Beck Depression Inventory) at 2 times (approximately 2 days after admission to the hospital and approximately 4 days after the 1st test administration). Results reveal significant positive correlations between level of depressive symptomatology and both state and trait anxiety. Emotion-oriented coping was positively correlated with depression, whereas task-oriented coping was negatively correlated with depression. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)