Journal of abnormal psychology
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As a commentary for the special section on Reconceptualizing the Classification of Mental Disorders, this article begins with a description of the impetus for the U. S. National Institute of Mental Health's (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative and provides an update of progress on that initiative to date. ⋯ The commentary then considers how Patrick's iterative "construct-network" method can be applied to RDoC construct validation, highlighting several aspects that are particularly useful. One aspect of this work involves determining subject inclusion and exclusion criteria that provide an appropriate range of variance. Finally, this commentary considers the Bilder group's article, explicating the ways in which multilevel models can foster development of hypotheses and informatics approaches needed for further RDoC progress.
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We examined prevalence, incidence, impairment, duration, and course for the proposed DSM-5 eating disorders in a community sample of 496 adolescent females who completed annual diagnostic interviews over 8 years. Lifetime prevalence by age 20 was 0.8% for anorexia nervosa (AN), 2.6% for bulimia nervosa (BN), 3.0% for binge eating disorder (BED), 2.8% for atypical AN, 4.4% for subthreshold BN, 3.6% for subthreshold BED, 3.4% for purging disorder (PD), and combined prevalence of 13.1% (5.2% had AN, BN, or BED; 11.5% had feeding and eating disorders not elsewhere classified; FED-NEC). Peak onset age was 19-20 for AN, 16-20 for BN, and 18-20 for BED, PD, and FED-NEC. ⋯ Diagnostic progression from subthreshold to threshold eating disorders was higher for BN and BED (32% and 28%) than for AN (0%), suggesting some sort of escalation mechanism for binge eating. Diagnostic crossover was greatest from BED to BN. Results imply that the new DSM-5 eating disorder criteria capture clinically significant psychopathology and usefully assign eating disordered individuals to homogeneous diagnostic categories.
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This study examined whether attentional biases for emotional information are associated with impaired mood recovery following a sad mood induction among individuals with and without major depressive disorder (MDD). Attentional biases were assessed with an exogenous cuing task using emotional facial expressions as cues among adults with (n = 48) and without (n = 224) current MDD. Mood reactivity and recovery were measured following a sad mood induction. ⋯ However, biases for sad stimuli were associated with significantly greater impairments in mood recovery among individuals with MDD than healthy controls. Furthermore, within the MDD group, impaired mood recovery was positively associated with depression severity. These results suggest that attentional biases maintain depression, in part, by facilitating the persistence of sad mood.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
"Asking why" from a distance: its cognitive and emotional consequences for people with major depressive disorder.
Although analyzing negative experiences leads to physical and mental health benefits among healthy populations, when people with depression engage in this process on their own they often ruminate and feel worse. Here we examine whether it is possible for adults with depression to analyze their feelings adaptively if they adopt a self-distanced perspective. We examined this issue by randomly assigning depressed and nondepressed adults to analyze their feelings surrounding a depressing life experience from either a self-distanced or a self-immersed perspective and then examined the implications of these manipulations for depressotypic thought accessibility, negative affect, implicit and explicit avoidance, and thought content. ⋯ It did not promote avoidance. Finally, self-distancing did not influence negative affect or depressotypic thought accessibility among nondepressed participants. These findings suggest that whether depressed adults' attempts to analyze negative feelings lead to adaptive or maladaptive consequences may depend critically on whether they do so from a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective.
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Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. ⋯ Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia.