Mood regulation in depression: Differential effects of distraction and recall of happy memories on sad mood.

Recent research suggests that the recall of positive memories plays an important role in mood regulation. In this study, the authors examined the ability of currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants to regulate sad mood through the recall of positive memories or through distraction. Although improvement in mood was found for all participants in response to distraction, under instructions to recall positive memories, never-depressed participants' moods improved, whereas formerly depressed participants' sad moods remained unchanged. It is important to note that depressed participants exhibited a worsening of their sad moods after recalling positive memories. These results suggest both that depression is associated with an impaired ability to use positive recall to regulate a sad mood and that this impairment continues to be evident following recovery. (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)     

Characteristics of the ice and thermal regimes of hydroelectric stations and pumped-storage stations

Conclusions Further development of investigations of the hydrological, ice, and thermal regimes of HESs and PSSs will enable a wider check of design assumptions, use of the method of analogy, and determination of the parameters of the hydrological, ice, and thermal regimes with a greater accuracy, which will improve the completeness and reliability of hydrological substàn tiation of designs.Translated from Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitel'stvo, No. 2, pp. 36–39, February, 1987.     

The role of cognition in depression: A critical appraisal.

Examines 5 broad areas of cognitive functioning: expectations and evaluations of performance, perception of environmental information, recall of information, cognitive biases, and attributional processes. A review of the literature suggests that neither A. T. Beck's (1967, 1976) nor the learned helplessness model of depression has a strong empirical base. Depressed persons present themselves negatively on a variety of measures, but less consistently than either model suggests. Differences between depressed and nondepressed persons with respect to extralaboratory experiences and self-presentational strategies remain viable alternative explanations for those results that have been obtained. In addition, specificity to depression has not been demonstrated consistently for any measure of cognitive bias or distortion. Attention is given to conceptual and methodological difficulties in unambiguously establishing what people think, in demonstrating biased or distorted cognitive processes, and in testing hypotheses about the fundamental role of cognition in depression. (4? p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Maternal depression and child adjustment: A longitudinal analysis.

This study examined the relation between maternal depression and child adjustment. Two major issues were addressed. First, to assess the specificity to depression of observed child adjustment difficulties, four groups of female subjects were included: clinically depressed psychiatric patients, nondepressed psychiatric patients, nondepressed medical patients, and nondepressed nonpatients. Second, to assess the stability of the observed effects, data were collected early in the patients' treatment and again approximately 8 weeks later. The results indicated that the depressed mothers described their children as having various behavior problems; interestingly, interviewers also rated these children as demonstrating disturbed behavior. Although the offspring of the depressed mothers were the most impaired children in the sample, the lack of significant differences between children of the depressed and the nondepressed psychiatric patients suggests that child adjustment is more strongly related to the presence of maternal psychopathology than it is to diagnostic status. Finally, children of the psychiatric patients continued to demonstrate problems at the second assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identification of emotional facial expressions following recovery from depression.

This study investigated the identification of facial expressions of emotion in currently nondepressed participants who had a history of recurrent depressive episodes (recurrent major depression; RMD) and never-depressed control participants (CTL). Following a negative mood induction, participants were presented with faces whose expressions slowly changed from neutral to full intensity. Identification of facial expressions was measured by the intensity of the expression at which participants could accurately identify whether faces expressed happiness, sadness, or anger. There were no group differences in the identification of sad or angry expressions. Compared with CTL participants, however, RMD participants required significantly greater emotional intensity in the faces to correctly identify happy expressions. These results indicate that biases in the processing of emotional facial expressions are evident even after individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response Criteria in Advanced Systemic Mastocytosis: Evolution in the Era of KIT Inhibitors

Systemic mastocytosis (SM) is a rare clonal hematologic neoplasm, driven, in almost all cases, by the activating KIT D816V mutation that leads to the growth and accumulation of neoplastic mast cells. While patients with advanced forms of SM have a poor prognosis, the introduction of KIT inhibitors (e.g., midostaurin, and avapritinib) has changed their outlook. Because of the heterogenous nature of advanced SM (advSM), successive iterations of response criteria have tried to capture different dimensions of the disease, including measures of mast cell burden (percentage of bone marrow mast cells and serum tryptase level), and mast cell-related organ damage (referred to as C findings). Historically, response criteria have been anchored to reversion of one or more organ damage finding(s) as a minimal criterion for response. This is a central principle of the Valent criteria, Mayo criteria, and International Working Group-Myeloproliferative Neoplasms Research and Treatment and European Competence Network on Mastocytosis (IWG-MRT-ECNM) consensus criteria. Irrespective of the response criteria, an ever-present challenge is how to apply response criteria in patients with SM and an associated hematologic neoplasm, where the presence of both diseases complicates assignment of organ damage and adjudication of response. In the context of trials with the selective KIT D816V inhibitor avapritinib, pure pathologic response (PPR) criteria, which rely solely on measures of mast cell burden and exclude consideration of organ damage findings, are being explored as more robust surrogate of overall survival. In addition, the finding that avapritinib can elicit complete molecular responses of KIT D816V allele burden, establishes a new benchmark for advSM and motivates the inclusion of definitions for molecular response in future criteria. Herein, we also outline how the concept of PPR can inform a proposal for new response criteria which use a tiered evaluation of pathologic, molecular, and clinical responses.     

BDNF genotype moderates the relation between physical activity and depressive symptoms.

Objective: To test whether the BDNF gene interacts with exercise to predict depressive symptoms. Physical activity is associated with a range of positive health outcomes, including fewer depressive symptoms. One plausible mechanism underlying these findings involves Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), a protein hypothesized to limit or repair the damage caused by stress. Physical activity increases expression of BDNF, which may enhance brain health. BDNF expression is controlled by the BDNF gene. Compared with individuals without a BDNF met allele, met-allele carriers have a lower expression of BDNF, which has been associated with Major Depressive Disorder. Design: Eighty-two healthy adolescent girls were genotyped for the BDNF val66met polymorphism, and their depressive symptoms and physical activity were assessed using questionnaires. Main Outcome Measures: BDNF genotype, Children’s Depression Inventory, and the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children and Adolescents. Results: The BDNF polymorphism was found to moderate the relation between exercise and depressive symptoms: being physically active was protective for girls with a BDNF met allele (fewer depressive symptoms) but not for girls with the val/val polymorphism. Conclusion: By integrating psychological and biological factors, the present study enhances our understanding of how physical activity contributes to resilience to psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

Two experiments examined the link between interpretation and memory in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Social Phobia (GSP). In Experiment 1, GSP and control participants generated continuations for nonsocial and ambiguous social scenarios. GSP participants produced more socially anxious and negative continuations for the social scenarios than did the controls. On the subsequent test of recalling the social scenarios, intrusion errors that shared meaning with the original continuations were made more frequently by the GSP group, producing false recall with emotionally negative features. To examine whether nonanxious individuals would also produce such errors if given emotional interpretations, in Experiment 2 the authors asked university students to read the scenarios plus endings produced by GSP participants in Experiment 1. The students either constructed vivid mental images of themselves as the main characters or thought about whether the endings provided closure. Low-anxious students in the closure condition produced fewer ending-based intrusions in recalling the social scenarios than did students in the other 3 conditions. Results illustrate the importance of examining the nature of source-monitoring errors in investigations of memory biases in social anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)