Alexis An Yee Low

Google Scholar
@alexis_anyee

Mechanisms behind Worry and their role in Anxiety

Anxiety disorders significantly burden the individual and society. Central to anxiety is worry, which directly causes anxiety’s distressing nature. However, worry can also be maintained by beliefs that it is helpful, and literature indicates it improves problem-solving and perceived control. This suggests that adaptive worry is part of searching for solutions to avert threats, but maladaptive worriers are unable to stop this strategy if it proves to be ineffective. Using an ecologically valid paradigm that renders explicit and measurable the search of information during worry to avoid an aversive outcome, preliminary results found that a low observed probability of success adaptively increases search attempts (mean search attempts in low success condition 4.93 (SD 6.25), mean search attempts in high success condition 1.43 (SD 0.97), p=0.000560, n=31). This suggests that participants perceive that adaptively increasing search behaviour is worthwhile to compensate for low-success probability – potentially a “search until success” strategy, where search continues to point of success. This may drive worry. Furthermore, the high difference between means compared to between medians (medians: 1.66 and 1.34) indicates an intriguing differentiating factor between participants, where some are driven to search more during lower odds, but some maintain similar behaviour. Findings will be further analysed to explore correlations with trial-specific self-reported anxiety and worry and extended to 150 participants based on within-subject power calculations (effect size 0.3). Additionally, further findings will provide crucial insights into what causes and maintains worry, which is key to understanding anxiety trans-diagnostically and developing interventions such as personalised psychotherapies.

Fatima Chowdhury

Google Scholar
@fsiddchow
fatima.chowdhury [at] ucl.ac.uk

Model-based aversive learning in humans is supported by preferential task state reactivation
Paper here

Harm avoidance is critical for survival, yet little is known regarding the neural mechanisms supporting avoidance in the absence of trial-and-error experience. Flexible avoidance may be supported by a mental model (i.e., model-based), a process for which neural reactivation and sequential replay have emerged as candidate mechanisms. During an aversive learning task, combined with magnetoencephalography, we show prospective and retrospective reactivation during planning and learning, respectively, coupled to evidence for sequential replay. Specifically, when individuals plan in an aversive context, we find preferential reactivation of subsequently chosen goal states. Stronger reactivation is associated with greater hippocampal theta power. At outcome receipt, unchosen goal states are reactivated regardless of outcome valence. Replay of paths leading to goal states was modulated by outcome valence, with aversive outcomes associated with stronger reverse replay than safe outcomes. Our findings are suggestive of avoidance involving simulation of unexperienced states through hippocampally mediated reactivation and replay.

Cassondra Lyman

@CassondraLyman

cmlyman [at] buffalo.edu OR clyman2 [at] usf.edu

A New Method for Assessing Naturally Occurring Episodes of Rumination in Daily Life: The Day Reconstruction Method for Rumination (DRM-R)

Extensive research has shown that rumination serves as a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. However, relatively little is known about rumination in daily life. The present study tested the validity of a new approach for assessing daily episodes of rumination (i.e., the Day Reconstruction Method for Rumination; DRM-R) and collected initial descriptive information about ruminative episodes for individuals high and low in rumination-proneness (RP). One hundred and forty-five college students (85 high and 60 low in RP) completed self-report measures of psychological functioning and repetitive negative thinking, and reconstructed their previous day’s ruminative episodes by breaking the day down into scenes, identifying discrete periods of rumination, and answering follow-up questions about ruminative episodes. The DRM-R was found to effectively assess individuals’ daily episodes of rumination. As expected, those high in RP reported more frequent and longer-lasting ruminative episodes then those low in RP, and individuals high in RP more strongly endorsed past-focused thoughts and threatening thought content during ruminative episodes then those low in RP. Additionally, those high in RP generally indicated that they experience discrete periods of rumination. In sum, the DRM-R was able to capture individual differences in trait rumination. These results warrant future investigation of daily episodes of rumination using the DRM-R; it is anticipated that such studies might provide additional insight about the specific triggers for daily ruminative episodes and allow for further clarification regarding which factors help to differentiate the various forms of rumination.

Samanatha Reisman

Currently working in the Incarceration and Mental Health Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Psychiatry Department. The work featured in the talk was part of the Adaptive Memory Lab at Temple University. Samanatha will soon begin her PhD in the FeldmanHall Lab at Brown University.
reisman [at] brown.edu

Threat-related arousal, memory, and episodic narratives: insights into the cognition of rumination

Using a naturalistic paradigm where participants walked through a haunted house and later recalled their experience, Reisman et al. (in submission) show that when threat increases heart rate, memories are biased towards perceptual, sensory information at the expense of peripheral event details such as time, place, and location. This adaptive, threat-related “perceptual bias” is observed in both baseline (a lab environment) and threat contexts within individuals highly intolerant of uncertainty, suggesting that individuals at-risk for anxiety process “threat” in neutral environments.

How does arousal impact our ability to communicate threatening experiences?

In a follow-up study, we wanted to characterize how these biases influence the cohesion of memory narratives. Using free recall recordings from the haunted house study, participants listened to memories of the experience from individuals who differed in reactivity to threat (high vs. low threat reactivity) and rated each narrative on it’s “understandability”. Stories told by individuals highly reactive to threat were rated as less understandable than stories told by those with low threat reactivity. Thus, we show that individual differences in threat-related arousal impact how memories are communicated.

How might these studies inform clinical behaviors, such as rumination?

In tandem, these results may shed light on cognitive mechanisms underlying maladaptive behaviors seen in clinical anxiety disorders, such as rumination. Memories already dominated by threat-centric information may be further reduced the most threat-salient aspects of memories when subject to rumination, perpetuating one’s perception of ubiquitous environmental threat. Moreover, while forms of rumination, such as reflective rumination, can serve as a tool to analyze or better understand problems, arousal-based effects on memory communication may dampen the effectiveness of this strategy. These results can inform approaches to treatment and intervention, particularly in how memories are explored and discussed in therapeutic settings.

Nikki Puccetti

Lab website

Google Scholar

@puccetti_nikki

npuccetti [at] miami.edu

Repetitive Negative thinking & Real-World Emotion

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) represents a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology including depression and anxiety. Because the co-occurrence of depression and anxiety disorders is common, better understanding RNT will help us to more effectively identify and serve individuals who need intervention. Prominent theories of psychopathology suggest that cognitive risk factors, like RNT, lead to disorder through their habitual use and emotional consequences in everyday life (Beck, 1967). Yet, few studies have directly examined the real-world, daily emotional patterns associated with RNT to validate this claim. To this end, we examined the relationship between trait RNT and day-to-day patterns of emotion, measured via ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in 296 young adults. Higher RNT was associated with greater negative affect, on average, across a 10 week EMA period and, to a lesser extent, lower positive affect. In addition, we used the same EMA paradigm to test the relationship between a personalized and idiographic measure of RNT and daily affect in 61 young adults. Here, those who rated their specific worry and rumination thoughts as more intense and frequent also reported greater average negative affect across the EMA period. In contrast, the negative relationship between RNT and positive affect was not significant. These results provide crucial preliminary evidence of the ecological validity of Beck’s cognitive model of psychopathology. Moreover, we have identified unique patterns of day-to-day emotional experience to RNT, a transdiagnostic cognitive risk factor for depression and anxiety. In the future, we may be able to use these distinct patterns of everyday experience to not only identify who is at most at risk for developing a disorder but also to inform and tailor treatment choice for treatment seeking individuals.

Ondrej Zika

Google Scholar
@OndrejZika
zika.ondra [at] gmail.com

Trait anxiety is associated with hidden state inference during aversive learning
Preprint here

Aversive experiences often stay in memory longer than we want them to, and helping anxiety patients to update their beliefs and expectations represents a major obstacle in clinical practice. Updating beliefs in changing environments can be achieved by either adapting expectations gradually, or by identifying a hidden structure composed of separate states and inferring which state best fits one’s observations. Previous studies have found that relapse phenomena, such as return of fear, are associated with high trait anxiety (TA; Rodriguez et al. 1999; Staples-Bradley et al. 2018). We tested whether high trait anxiety in healthy individuals is associated with a tendency towards inferring a hidden structure of an aversive environment, as opposed to learning gradually from observations. In a Pavlovian probabilistic aversive learning paradigm, participants had to follow changes in shock contingencies by providing expectancy ratings on each trial. In three sessions, the contingencies switched between two levels of shock probability (60/40%, 75/25% and 90/10%) in semi-regular intervals. High trait anxiety was associated with closer tracking of true shock contingencies and steeper behavioral switches after contingency reversals. To elucidate the computational mechanisms behind these behavioral patterns we used a gradual updating “1-state” model (Wise & Dolan, 2020) and a novel state inference model (“n-state”). In the session characterized by most abrupt changes (90/10) high trait anxiety was strongly associated with better relative fit of the state inference model (n-state) compared to the gradual model (1-state). This finding provides evidence that high TA is associated with learning the hidden structure of the environment, particularly in environments with low outcome uncertainty. This association may represent the underlying cause for relapse phenomena observed among high trait anxious individuals.