This study, grounded in emotion depletion theory, examines how workplace hurdles ( i.e., task, social, and organizational) impact employee solitude behavior. Besides, how does psychological strain mediate the relationship between workplace hurdles and solitude behavior? Empirical analyses of this study are performed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS 4 software. Data were collected by using a systematic random sampling approach from 468 university teachers in China. A three-wave time-lag design, with 50-day intervals between waves, is used to separate the predictors, the mediator, and the outcome. The findings of this study confirm that workplace hurdles are positively and significantly correlated with employees’ solitary behavior. Psychological strain partially mediates the relationship between workplace hurdles (task, social, and organizational) and solitude behavior. The results of this study refine theory on emotion-depletion dynamics in higher education and identify leverage points for organizational interventions that reduce strain and limit employee isolation.
Despite its first-line status, the dissemination of exposure is limited across disorders and health care systems. Research suggests that this is at least partially due to the high emotional distress experienced during exposure. Here, we employed a two-day differential fear-conditioning paradigm to investigate the effects of dog support and social support during extinction training (an analog to exposure therapy) on anxiety, stress, arousal, affect, and learning. We collected data from N = 123 participants (dog support: n = 41, social support: n = 40, control: n = 42) and found significantly lower state anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) and significantly more positive affect (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) during extinction training for dog but not for social support. Moreover, state anxiety significantly increased from pre-to post-extinction training for social and no support but not for dog support. A selective detriment in declarative, cognitive fear extinction for dog support, indicated by significantly higher US-expectancy difference scores during and after extinction training, was not present in the return of fear test (an analog of return-of-fear phenomena observed in relapse). In sum, our findings serve as a proof of concept for the potential of dog support to modulate emotional distress during exposure analogs.
Appetitive conditioning—the process by which neutral cues acquire positive value through repeated pairing with rewards—is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. Disturbances in this process may contribute to psychiatric symptoms, yet unlike fear conditioning, it has been relatively underexplored in clinical populations. We systematically reviewed PubMed, Embase/MEDLINE, and PsycINFO (August 2025) for studies examining appetitive conditioning in psychiatric disorders. Of 7077 records, only five met inclusion criteria,: two on ADHD, two on compulsive sexual behaviour, and one on major depressive disorder. Patients demonstrated differences in reward-related neural and behavioural responses compared with controls, including reduced striatal activation during reward anticipation and heightened responses to reward receipt in ADHD, increased amygdala activation and disrupted striatal–prefrontal connectivity in compulsive sexual behaviour, and impaired probabilistic reward learning and decision-making in depression. None of the studies directly assessed de novo appetitive learning; instead, appetitive conditioning was employed as a preliminary paradigm to probe downstream reward processes. Thus, it remains unclear whether, or which, psychiatric disorders involve abnormalities in the formation of conditioned reward associations. Future controlled experiments that explicitly and directly test the learning processes associated with appetitive conditioning are needed to clarify its role in psychopathology and its potential as a target for intervention.
Hair cortisol concentration (HCC) is a promising biomarker for chronic stress, yet its relationship with subjective distress and mental health remains unclear. Existing research has largely focused on group-level data over relatively short time frames. In the present longitudinal case study, we tracked HCC and subjective measures in a female PhD student across nine years (2014–2023), including depression severity, trait anxiety, resilience, coping strategies, and life events. Her data were compared with HCC, depression, and anxiety levels in a clinical outpatient sample (N = 33) and normative HCC data. Despite reporting numerous stressful life events, the PhD student’s HCC levels remained stable and comparable to the clinical sample, and the norm, with the exception of for a marked elevation during the first month of the PhD (HCC = 12.18 pg/mg; p < .001). She showed exceptionally high resilience (M = 4.7, p < .001) and use of problem-focused coping strategies (PR = 97.9), and low avoidant coping (PR = 28.2). In the clinical sample, HCC was not associated with diagnosis, depression severity, or trait anxiety. These findings suggest that HCC may not serve as a straightforward biomarker of psychological distress or reliably differentiate between clinical and non-clinical individuals. Instead, HCC appears to reflect a complex, context-dependent measure influenced by methodological and behavioral factors.
Background COVID-19 pandemic and associated quarantine measures heightened the risk of domestic violence (DV) globally. This systematic review and meta-analysis estimates the pooled prevalence of DV and its subtypes—psychological, physical, sexual, and verbal—among women during the pandemic. Method Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (January 23, 2020–December 2024) using MeSH and free-text terms for DV and COVID-19 quarantine, without language restrictions. Observational studies reporting DV prevalence among women aged ≥18 years with a sexual partner during quarantine were included. Data were extracted using a standardized form, and study quality was assessed with the Joanna Briggs Institute Checklist. Random-effects meta-analyses (DerSimonian–Laird) were performed in STATA 17 to estimate pooled prevalence, heterogeneity (I 2 , Cochran’s Q), and publication bias (Meta-regression). Subgroup, meta-regression, and sensitivity analyses explored heterogeneity and robustness. Results From 1117 records, 24 studies (14,831 women) from Africa (n=14), Asia (n=8), and America (n=2) met the inclusion criteria. The pooled prevalence of DV during quarantine was 36.0% (95% CI: 29.0–44.0; I 2 = 99.3%). Psychological violence was most common (32.0%; 95% CI: 23.0–41.0), followed by verbal (29%; 6.0–52.0), physical (16.0%; 13.0–19.0), and sexual (16.0%; 12.0–20.0) violence. Prevalence varied by continent: 33% in Africa, 39% in Asia, and 51% in America (p = 0.001). No temporal trend was observed. Sensitivity analyses confirmed stability (33.8–37.3%). Conclusions More than one in three women experienced DV during COVID-19 quarantine, with psychological violence predominating. Substantial regional disparities and high heterogeneity reflect cultural and methodological differences. Context-specific, multilevel interventions—combining health screening, economic support, and policy enforcement—are urgently needed. Standardized methodologies and inclusion of underrepresented regions should be prioritized in future research.
Although well-established questionnaires for various forms of trait disgust exist, state disgust measures, such as the State Disgust Scale by Ihme and Mitte (2009), remain unidimensional. However, previous research suggests that the reaction towards disgusting stimuli can be conceptualized across four distinct dimensions: object disgust, self disgust, moral disgust, and process disgust. As a first step, we designed a 53-item questionnaire based on the conceptual framework of these four dimensions. In the second step, we conducted a pilot study after which the questionnaire was reduced to 26 items. In a final step, we conducted four studies to develop and validate the final questionnaire. The results of the first study reduced the questionnaire to 18 items, while retaining a four-factor structure with high internal consistency and construct validity across all scales. However, items which remained within each factor made it necessary to rename the scales, such that the final questionnaire was divided into physical disgust, self disgust, moral disgust and contamination concerns. Three further studies were conducted to validate the questionnaire’s structure through confirmatory factorial analysis. This work demonstrates that state disgust can be divided into four distinct dimensions, which can be effectively measured using t he Multidimensional State Disgust Questionnaire (MSDQ) .
Mental images associated with possessions may maintain hoarding problems by impeding discarding. We tested whether generating a rescripted image, highlighting a positive outcome of discarding a hoarded object, would facilitate discarding relative to Thought Listing (TL) – a strategy commonly used in hoarding treatment that relies on verbal processing. Participants with hoarding symptoms ( N = 103) were invited to a videocall with a psychologist. They selected an object they were having difficulty discarding, identified interfering images connected to this item, and were then randomised into a therapist-guided imagery rescripting (ImRs) or TL exercise before engaging in a discarding task. Whereas both exercises made discarding less aversive, ImRs outperformed TL at post-test by reducing some maladaptive savings beliefs, increasing positive affect, enhancing motivation, and increasing discarding frequency. No effect of condition was found on measures assessing the impact of the original interfering image over time, although participants high in imagery use tendency reported less vividness after rescripting. At 1-week follow-up, both exercises reduced hoarding symptoms, and discarding frequency became equivalent between conditions. Given the advantages that generating rescripted imagery demonstrated on some indices of discarding ease relative to an established approach, this technique may hold clinical utility for individuals with hoarding problems.
Research on the automated assessment of mental disorders has primarily focused on adult participants and on behaviors on the individual level. We propose an approach to automatically assess the severity of children's behavioral, emotional, and social problems from videos of face-to-face parent-child interaction. Children's behavioral, emotional, and social problems were quantified using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), focusing on the two broad categories "internalizing" and "externalizing" and the more specific categories "anxious", "withdrawn", and "aggressive". Our experimental data comes from a cohort of 81 8- to 10-year-old children and their parents. We constructed features to represent the nonverbal face and head behaviors of the parents and children, combined them with the children's symptom scores, and then fed these data to binary classifiers to make broad estimations of symptom severity. Prediction performance was good only for anxiety scores, although the prediction of withdrawal and internalizing scores did show some promise as well. We moreover identified the behaviors that were most informative in the context of predicting anxiety and withdrawal and investigated how they were influenced by symptom severity and topic of conversation. Our results exemplify how machine learning and computer vision can be used to gain further insights into child psychopathology.
Prior research linking anxiety and depression to risky decision-making has yielded inconsistent findings. This may reflect differing definitions of risk, characterized as outcome variance or potential negative consequences. This cross-sectional experimental study investigated affective distress and aimed to determine whether choices were driven by aversion to riskier (higher variance) outcomes, sensitivity to negative outcomes, or a combination of the two. A sample of adults (N = 526, aged 18-60) completed a risky decision-making task involving choices between probabilistic gambles with positive and/or negative outcomes. An affective distress component was obtained from self-report measures of anxiety and depression using principal component analysis. When losses were possible, choice behavior reflected risk aversion and heightened sensitivity to differences in expected value; however, this was attenuated with increasing levels of affective distress, resulting in less reliable selection of mathematically advantageous options. In gain-only lotteries, choices were consistent with risk seeking and reduced sensitivity to differences in expected value, regardless of affective distress. These findings suggest that decision-making and risk attitudes are substantially influenced by the presence or absence of potential loss. Affective distress alters choice behavior specifically when loss is present, suggesting that loss may play a more prominent role than variance in risky decision-making for anxiety and depression.
We aimed to validate word lists developed by Tabri and Palmer (2020) for use in attentional bias research on appearance-related concerns. Three lists contained appearance words (attractiveness, stigmatized appearance, general appearance), and three contained non-appearance words (positive emotion, negative emotion, inanimate objects). Although matched on lexical criteria, their perceived meanings had not been assessed. Using a semantic differential approach, we examined perceptions of evaluation, potency, activity, and threat, and explored associations with eating disorder psychopathology. Participants from the community (Study 1: N = 299; Study 2: N = 311) rated attractiveness and positive emotion words as similarly positive, and stigmatized appearance and negative emotion words as similarly negative. General appearance and inanimate object words were rated as neutral. Differences reflected intensity, not type. Appearance word ratings were modestly associated with appearance overvaluation, body dissatisfaction, and weight stigma. Associations for non-appearance words were weaker and inconsistent. These findings support the semantic validity of the word lists and their utility in attentional bias research on eating disorders and other conditions involving appearance concerns.
Avoidance of potential danger is crucial to an individual’s survival, but in the absence of threat, avoidance contributes to the development and maintenance of anxiety-related psychopathology. Researchers typically study avoidance of neutral stimuli by using conditioning procedures, where participants learn to emit an experimenter-defined response (e.g., pressing a button) to avoid a threatening cue (e.g., presentation of loud noise). Although such tasks can help to discover the relevant learning mechanisms, it is unclear whether they can also reveal individual differences in learning. Here, we recruited a large sample of individuals (>400) and tested the relationships between anxiety-related characteristics (i.e., trait anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty, and neuroticism) and performance in an avoidance conditioning task, where participants could avoid unpleasant cues by means of a button press. Using network and cluster analyses, we were unable to identify a strong relationship between avoidance conditioning and the individual characteristics. We discuss our findings and suggest that a paradigm shift in this experimental task is urgently needed for studying individual variations in avoidance learning.
This study investigates the intricate relationship between Internet addiction disorder and employee performance. Besides, this study investigates the mediating function of workplace harassment between Internet addiction disorder and employees’ performance. Drawing upon the theory of planned behavior, we meticulously gathered responses online from 345 employees across various non-governmental organizations worldwide. This paper employed the partial least squares structural equation modeling approach and SmartPLS-4 software for analyses. The results show that Internet addiction disorder substantially and adversely impacts employees’ performance. Workplace harassment emerges as a critical mediator, as it partially mediates the relationship between Internet addiction disorder and employees’ performance. This study contributes to the existing literature by shedding light on this complex relationship. It advances our expertise in Internet addiction disorder’s effect on painting-associated results. Organizations can leverage those insights to combat Internet addiction disorder, foster healthier virtual habits, and create supportive work environments that guard employees against the toxic effects of harassment.
Researchers have documented biases in attention and memory in depressed and dysphoric individuals. Several studies have examined these biases among previously depressed individuals, and while there is evidence that attention and memory biases persist in remitted depression, the findings are not consistent. One limitation of previous research is that few studies have used a stress or negative mood induction (MI) to activate the cognitive vulnerability posited to underlie attention and memory biases. The present study used a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm to assess previously depressed participants’ attention biases for positive and negative words before and after a sad MI. Memory biases were assessed using tests of incidental recognition. Only participants who were successfully mood-induced were included in the analyses. Unlike previously depressed participants, never depressed participants exhibited attention and memory biases that favored positive over neutral words, both before and after the sad MI, suggesting a protective bias that is maintained in a sad mood state. After the sad MI, previously depressed participants had smaller attention biases for positive words and smaller memory biases for negative words compared to never depressed participants. The findings are generally supportive of the notion that cognitive vulnerability is maintained to some extent in remitted depression and can be influenced by a sad mood.
Psychopathy is a syndrome of personality pathology associated with callousness, manipulation, and persistent antisocial behavior. Whereas several contemporary perspectives emphasize innate emotional unresponsiveness as the core deficit in psychopathy, the negative preception hypothesis proposes that individuals with psychopathic traits experience negative emotions and disattend from some affective cues to attenuate negative emotional experiences. To examine whether psychopathy is associated with static attentional unresponsiveness to affect inductions and cues or with dynamic attentional biases away from affective cues, 94 incarcerated men assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised completed a dot-probe task before and after a sadness induction. Multilevel modeling indicated psychopathy predicted greater increases in self-reported negative affect due to a sadness induction. Moreover, the relation between psychopathic traits and attentional bias changed as a function of the induction. Psychopathy was independent of attentional bias regarding affective faces under baseline conditions but was associated with increasing attention away from sad faces following the sadness induction. In addition, psychopathy was associated with greater attention towards angry faces only following the sadness induction. These findings suggest individuals with psychopathic traits are responsive to some sadness inductions and exhibit anomalous attentional biases regarding emotion in some conditions, suggesting the utility of explanations that can explain maladaptive emotion regulation in individuals with psychopathic traits.
Mindfulness interventions have gained empirical support for treating anxiety. This study investigated the benefit of adding anxiety-specific practice to a mindfulness intervention for anxiety symptoms in young adults. A pre-post design was used with 117 undergraduate students to compare three interventions: a mindfulness intervention with anxiety-specific practice, a conventional mindfulness control, and an audiobook control intervention. Participants completed self-report scales of social anxiety, agoraphobia, interoceptive fear, worry, and trait mindfulness at baseline and post-intervention. Results indicated that compared to audiobook control, the mindfulness group with anxiety-specific practice reported less post-intervention social anxiety. Furthermore, albeit only at high baseline symptom levels, the mindfulness group with anxiety-specific practice reported less post-intervention agoraphobia and interoceptive fear compared to the audiobook group, and the conventional mindfulness group reported less post-intervention agoraphobia compared to the audiobook group. There were no group differences on worry or mindfulness. No convincing evidence was found that the mindfulness intervention with anxiety-specific practice had an advantage compared to the conventional mindfulness intervention. Possible mechanisms for observed effects include exposure and mindfulness-related processes. Considerations for future research include using samples with elevated anxiety. More research is needed to interpret these results with more confidence.
Research has shown that some individuals do not benefit from exposure therapy and for those who do, fear can return. Occasional reinforcement, which involves intermittently reinforcing the feared outcome during exposure, and affect labeling, in which individuals describe their current affective state during exposure, are two inhibitory retrieval strategies that have shown promise for augmenting exposure interventions. Yet, it remains unclear whether these strategies differ in their efficacy for attenuating return of fear across multiple levels of analysis. Accordingly, the present treatment-analogue experiment examined the effects of a multi-session imagery-based exposure manipulation that included reminders of the feared outcome or prompts to label one’s affective experience in a phobic sample on threat expectancy, behavioral avoidance, and attentional bias for threat. Community adults ( N = 136) who met diagnostic criteria for snake phobia were randomized to a single-cue video exposure alone condition (S), a multiple-cue video exposure condition that occasionally reinforced the feared outcome (i.e., snake bite; FO), or a multiple-cue video exposure condition that instructed participants to label their affective response (AL). Results revealed significant reductions in threat expectancy and behavioral avoidance, but not attentional bias for threat, for all three groups. Although there were no significant group differences in threat expectancy and attentional bias for threat at a 1-week follow up, those in the FO condition completed significantly more BAT steps than the AL group and this group difference was partially mediated by distress variability and within-session fear reduction. The implications of these findings for the inhibitory retrieval theory are discussed.
In view of the discrepancy across studies and the absence of a relationship between behavioural inhibitory control and cognitive control tasks, there appears to be a need, and hence our study purpose, to explore the relationships between inhibitory behavioural control and attentional cognitive control, and possible associated metacognitive variables, in affective contexts of displeasure and arousal. Forty-five people (40 females), aged between 18 and 71 (M = 21.9; SD = 8.03), volunteered to take part in research on cognitive intrusion. The instruments they made were GAD-7, MCQ-30, TCQ and two experimental tasks: An Emotional Go/No-Go and an Emotional Flanker Task. This study has sought to use behavioural tasks to discover whether the capacity for behavioural inhibition when faced with potentially anxiety-provoking stimuli (i.e. unpleasant affective images with high arousal) is mediated by metacognitive variables or by attentional cognitive control. The results suggest the following: (1) worry and anxiety predict errors in the emotional Go/No-Go task and (2) shorter RTs in the flanker task increase the errors in the emotional Go/No-Go task when viewing unpleasant images with high arousal.
Some studies suggest Imagery Rescripting (ImRs) may be more effective than Imaginal Exposure (IE) for processing trauma when non-fear emotions are predominant. ImRs has been proposed to work through positive memory revaluation and increasing mastery, while IE focuses on fear toleration through inhibitory learning. We present standardized ImRs and IE analogues to explore their impact on non-fear emotions and underlying mechanisms. Forty-one participants selected an autobiographic event and were randomly assigned to ImRs, IE, or a control condition. Core elements of ImRs and IE were delivered via audio. We repeatedly assessed event-related emotions, distress, mastery, and tolerance for negative emotions. Participants in ImRs showed greater reductions in distress, fear, and anger, but not in self-conscious emotions, compared to IE. Unexpectedly, IE participants experienced increased negative emotions, including fear, with no specific advantage for increasing tolerance. Reductions in negative emotions were also observed in the control group. We found tentative indications for positive revaluation following ImRs. In conclusion, the ImRs analogue largely facilitated expected changes, while IE led to adverse effects. We discuss potential reasons for these findings and suggest improvements for the analogues and overall procedure.
Appetitive and aversive conditioning seemingly plays a role in the development and maintenance of various psychopathologies, including anxiety, mood, eating, and substance use disorders. However, studies on conditioning typically only study either appetitive or aversive conditioning in the context of psychopathology, and they are poorly integrated. In this study, 80 healthy volunteers performed both an appetitive and an aversive conditioning task, in which they associated complex 3D objects with appetitive or aversive tastes. An individual measure of learning asymmetry was calculated by comparing their expectancy ratings for these tastes, which was examined in relation to self-report scales on psychological distress, substance use frequency, impulsivity, and anhedonia to determine whether stronger learning asymmetry is associated with more symptoms of psychopathology. It was found that learning asymmetry was significantly associated with psychological distress (R 2 = .05). Aversive learning showed no difference related to distress, but weaker appetitive learning was associated with higher distress. Substance use, impulsivity, and anhedonia showed no relation to learning asymmetry. These findings suggest that relative differences in appetitive and aversive learning may play a role in the sensitivity to psychopathology.
