Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Dec 2014
Do fibromyalgia patients benefit from cognitive restructuring and acceptance? An experimental study.
The aim of this study was to clarify mechanisms of psychological fibromyalgia treatment by experimentally examining the effectiveness of its core elements. We assessed the effects of cognitive restructuring and acceptance on experimentally-induced heat and cold pain tolerance and pain intensity in fibromyalgia patients. ⋯ Results show that both, cognitive restructuring and acceptance instructions, enhance pain tolerance in fibromyalgia patients.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Sep 2014
Implicit affective evaluation of somatosensory sensations in patients with noncardiac chest pain.
Etiological models of noncardiac chest pain (NCCP) stress the importance of abnormal implicit affective evaluations of somatosensory sensations, but this has never been studied empirically. The aim was therefore to assess implicit affective evaluations of somatosensory stimuli in NCCP using an experimental design. ⋯ Against theoretical assumptions, patients with NCCP do not seem to show a stronger implicit negative interpretation bias concerning somatosensory sensations in comparison to patients either with cardiac chest pain, or without chest pain. Nevertheless, anxiety sensitivity seems to contribute significantly to implicit affective interpretations of somatic sensations. Further studies are required investigating the relevance of implicit interpretative processes for the course of NCCP and distressing somatic symptoms in general.
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People who experience auditory hallucinations tend to show weak reality discrimination skills, so that they misattribute internal, self-generated events to an external, non-self source. We examined whether inducing negative affect in healthy young adults would increase their tendency to make external misattributions on a reality discrimination task. ⋯ These findings show that negative affect disrupts reality discrimination and suggest one way in which negative affect may lead to hallucinatory experiences.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Sep 2014
Behavioral techniques for attenuating the expression of fear associations in an animal model of anxiety.
Recent data indicate that extinguished fear often returns when the testing conditions differ from those of treatment. Several manipulations including extensive extinction training, extinction in multiple contexts, and spacing the extinction trials and sessions reduce the return of fear. Moreover, extensive extinction and extinction in multiple contexts summate in reducing return of fear, and the spacing of the extinction trials and the spacing of extinction sessions summate in reducing return of fear. Here we evaluated whether these techniques also attenuate the context specificity of latent inhibition, and whether they summate to further decrease fear responding at test. ⋯ Techniques effective in decreasing the return of conditioned fear following extinction are also effective in decreasing the context specificity of latent inhibition in an animal model of anxiety. Fear and anxiety disorders might be prevented in anxious human participants with the same techniques used here, but that is still an empirical question.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialThe influence of patients' preference/attitude towards psychotherapy and antidepressant medication on the treatment of major depressive disorder.
Preferences and attitudes patients hold towards treatment are important, as these can influence treatment outcome. In depression research, the influence of patients' preference/attitudes on outcome and dropout has mainly been studied for antidepressant medication, and less for psychological treatments. We investigated the effects of patients' preference and attitudes towards psychological treatment and antidepressant medication on treatment outcome and dropout, and tested specificity of effects. ⋯ Patients' preferences and attitudes towards depression treatments influence dropout from ADM, and moderate the short-term difference in effectiveness between BA and ADM. The fact that dropout from BA was not affected by preference/attitude speaks for its acceptability among patients.