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This study investigated the relationships between academic stress, mindfulness-related constructs (ie, mindfulness, self-compassion and psychological flexibility) and anxiety and depressive symptoms in a sample of 190 international university students. Participants filled in an online questionnaire. Multiple Regression Analyses showed that anxiety and depressive symptoms were significantly related to higher levels of perceived academic stress, and to lower levels of acting with (mindful) awareness, lower self-compassion and lower psychological flexibility. None of the mindfulness-related constructs was found to moderate the relationship between perceived academic stress and anxiety and depressive symptoms. The results provide possible targets for mental health interventions in international university students. Especially the training of mindfulness-related skills could be a promising path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become crucial to study how cognitive processes are implemented in the human brain. However, the question of whether participants recruited into fMRI studies differ from participants recruited into other study contexts has received little to no attention. This is particularly pertinent when effects fail to generalize across study contexts: for example, a behavioural effect discovered in a non-imaging context not replicating in a neuroimaging environment. Here, we tested the hypothesis, motivated by preliminary findings (N  = 272), that fMRI participants differ from behaviour-only participants on one fundamental individual difference variable: trait anxiety. Analysing trait anxiety scores and possible confounding variables from healthy volunteers across multiple institutions (N  = 3317), we found robust support for lower trait anxiety in fMRI study participants, consistent with a sampling or self-selection bias. The bias was larger in studies that relied on phone screening (compared with full in-person psychiatric screening), recruited at least partly from convenience samples (compared with community samples), and in pharmacology studies. Our findings highlight the need for surveying trait anxiety at recruitment and for appropriate screening procedures or sampling strategies to mitigate this bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning and decision-making are modulated by socio-emotional processing and such modulation is implicated in clinically relevant personality traits of social anxiety. The present study elucidates the computational and neural mechanisms by which emotionally aversive cues disrupt learning in socially anxious human individuals. Healthy volunteers with low or high trait social anxiety performed a reversal learning task requiring learning actions in response to angry or happy face cues. Choice data were best captured by a computational model in which learning rate was adjusted according to the history of surprises. High trait socially anxious individuals used a less-dynamic strategy for adjusting their learning rate in trials started with angry face cues and unlike the low social anxiety group, their dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity did not covary with the learning rate. Our results demonstrate that trait social anxiety is accompanied by disruption of optimal learning and dACC activity in threatening situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceived control can be broadly defined as the belief in one's ability to exert control over situations or events. It has long been known that perceived control is a major contributor toward mental and physical health as well as a strong predictor of achievements in life. However, one issue that limits a mechanistic understanding of perceived control is the heterogeneity of how the term is defined in models in psychology and neuroscience, and used in experimental settings across a wide spectrum of studies. Here, we propose a framework for studying perceived control by integrating the ideas from traditionally separate work on perceived control. Specifically, we discuss key properties of perceived control from a reward-based framework, including choice opportunity, instrumental contingency, and success/reward rate. We argue that these separate reward-related processes are integral to fostering an enhanced perception of control and influencing an individual's behavior and well-being. We draw on select studies to elucidate how these reward-related elements are implicated separately and collectively in the investigation of perceived control. We highlight the role of dopamine within corticostriatal pathways shared by reward-related processes and perceived control. Finally, through the lens of this reward-based framework of perceived control, we consider the implications of perceived control in clinical deficits and how these insights could help us better understand psychopathology and treatment options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freezing is a defensive response to acute stress that is associated with coping and alterations in attentional processing. However, it remains unclear whether individuals in high risk professions, who are skilled at making rapid decisions in emergency situations, show altered threat-induced freezing. Here we investigated the effect of incident experience in a high risk profession on freezing. Additionally, we explored whether any effect of incident experience on freezing would be different for profession-related and -unrelated threat. Forty experienced and inexperienced firefighters were presented neutral, pleasant, related-unpleasant, and unrelated-unpleasant pictures in a passive viewing task. Postural sway and heart rate were assessed to determine freezing. Both postural and heart rate data evidenced reduced freezing upon unpleasant pictures in the experienced versus the inexperienced group. Relatedness of the unpleasant pictures did not modulate these effects. These findings indicate that higher incident experience relates to decreased threat-induced freezing, at least in a passive task context. This might suggest that primary defense responses are malleable through experience. Finally, these findings demonstrate the potential of using animal to human translational approaches to investigate defensive behaviors in relation to incident experience in high risk professions and stimulate future research on the role of freezing in resilience and coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early life-stress, particularly maternal deprivation, is associated with long-lasting deviations in animals' freezing responses. Given the relevance of freezing for stresscoping, translational research is needed to examine the relation between insecure infant-parent attachment and bodily freezing-like behavior in humans. Therefore, we investigated threat-related reductions in body sway (indicative of freezing-like behavior) in 14-year-old adolescents (N = 79), for whom attachment security was earlier assessed in infancy. As expected, insecure (vs. secure) attachment was associated with less body sway for angry vs. neutral faces. This effect remained when controlling for intermediate life events. These results suggest that the long-lasting effects of early negative caregiving experiences on the human stress and threat systems extend to the primary defensive reaction of freezing. Additionally, we replicated earlier work in adults, by observing a significant correlation (in adolescents assessed as securely attached) between subjective state anxiety and reduced body sway in response to angry vs. neutral faces. Together, this research opens venues to start exploring the role of freezing in the development of human psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instrumental decision making has long been argued to be vulnerable to emotional responses. Literature on multiple decision making systems suggests that this emotional biasing might reflect effects of a system that regulates innately specified, evolutionarily preprogrammed responses. To test this hypothesis directly, we investigated whether effects of emotional faces on instrumental action can be predicted by effects of emotional faces on bodily freezing, an innately specified response to aversive relative to appetitive cues. We tested 43 women using a novel emotional decision making task combined with posturography, which involves a force platform to detect small oscillations of the body to accurately quantify postural control in upright stance. On the platform, participants learned whole body approach-avoidance actions based on monetary feedback, while being primed by emotional faces (angry/happy). Our data evidence an emotional biasing of instrumental action. Thus, angry relative to happy faces slowed instrumental approach relative to avoidance responses. Critically, individual differences in this emotional biasing effect were predicted by individual differences in bodily freezing. This result suggests that emotional biasing of instrumental action involves interaction with a system that controls innately specified responses. Furthermore, our findings help bridge (animal and human) decision making and emotion research to advance our mechanistic understanding of decision making anomalies in daily encounters as well as in a wide range of psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective serotonergic reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and cognitive therapies are effective in the treatment of anxiety and depression. Previous research suggests that both forms of treatments may work by altering cognitive biases in the processing of affective information. The current study assessed the effects of combining an SSRI with a cognitive intervention on measures of affective processing bias and resilience to external challenge. A total of 62 healthy participants were randomly assigned to receive either 7 days of citalopram (20 mg) or placebo capsules while also completing either an active or a control version of a computerized cognitive bias training task. After treatment, standard measures of affective processing bias were collected. Participants' resilience to external stress was also tested by measuring the increase in negative symptoms induced by a negative mood induction. Participants who received both citalopram and the active cognitive bias training task showed a smaller alteration in emotional memory and categorization bias than did those who received either active intervention singly. The degree to which memory for negative information was altered by citalopram predicted participants' resistance to the negative mood induction. These results suggest that co-administration of an SSRI and a cognitive training intervention can reduce the effectiveness of either treatment alone in terms of anxiety- and depression-relevant emotional processing. More generally, the findings suggest that pinpointing the cognitive actions of treatments may inform future development of combination strategies in mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluctuations in self-esteem resulting from social acceptance and rejection could guide social behaviour by putting us in a state that is more or less open to social experiences. However, it remains unclear whether social acceptance and rejection may shape learning from social information depending on individual differences in self-esteem changes. Here we used a social feedback paradigm to manipulate social acceptance and rejection in a between-subjects design. Subsequently, we administered a behavioural task that enables the assessment of how well individuals learn on the basis of own experiences versus social information. Participants receiving positive ( N = 43) versus negative ( N = 44) social evaluation demonstrated an increase in subjective self-esteem. Importantly, the effect of the social evaluation on social learning was moderated by self-esteem changes. Specifically, an increase in self-esteem, as induced by positive evaluation, was associated with increased learning from social, but decreased learning from individual information. A decrease in self-esteem in response to negative evaluation was associated with decreased learning from individual information. These data suggest that increases in self-esteem in response to positive evaluation can induce a shift in the inclination to use social versus non-social information and may open one up to constructive learning from others., Competing Interests: At the time of consideration and publication of this paper, J.L.C. was a member of the Royal Society Open Science Editorial Board; however, they had no involvement in the assessment of the manuscript., (© 2023 The Authors.)