Journal of abnormal psychology
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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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Randomized Controlled Trial
The causal role of interpretive bias in anxiety reactivity.
Elevated anxiety vulnerability is associated with a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as threatening, but the causal basis of this relationship has not been established. Recently, procedures have been developed to systematically manipulate interpretive bias, but the impact of such manipulation on anxiety reactivity to a subsequent stressor has not yet been examined. ⋯ Following this interpretive training, participants' emotional reactions to a stressful video were assessed. The finding that the manipulation of interpretive bias modified emotional reactivity supports the hypothesis that interpretive bias can indeed play a causal role in anxiety vulnerability.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters.
This study examined the effect of anticipated food deprivation on intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters. Participants were randomly assigned to a diet condition, in which they expected to diet for a week, or to a control (no-diet) condition. ⋯ Unrestrained eaters consumed the same amount regardless of condition. These results confirm that merely planning to go on a diet can trigger overeating in restrained eaters, reflecting the dynamic connection between dieting and overeating.