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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2021, corrected publication 2022, The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world., This project was supported by funds from: the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant (to E.M.B.); the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (JSPS KAKENHI; 16h03079, 17h00875, 18k12015, and 20h04581 to Y.Y.); the research programme Dipartimenti di Eccellenza from the Ministry of Education University and Research (MIUR to N. Cellini and G.M. and the Department of General Psychology of the University of Padua); statutory funds of the University of Wroclaw (to A. Sorokowska); the Charles University Research Programme PROGRES (Q18 to M. Vranka); the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2016:0229 to J.K.O.); the Rubicon Grant (019.183sg.007 to K.v.S.) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; the Australian Research Council (dp180102384 to R.M.R.); the US National Institutes of Health (NIMH111640 to M.N.-D.), the Huo Family Foundation to N.J.; the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Division of Social and Economic Sciences (1559511 to J.S.L.); the US National Institutes of Health (RO1-CA-224545 to J.S.L.); Eesti Teadusagentuur–Estonian Research Council (PSG525 to A. Uusberg); the J. William Fulbright Program (to F. Azevedo); the HSE Basic Research Program (to D. Dubrov); Dominican University (a Faculty Development Grant to A. Krafnick); and the French National Research Agency Investissements d’avenir supporting PSF (ANR-15-IDEX-02 to H.I.); the Slovak Research and Development Agency (project no. APVV-20-0319 to M. Adamkovič); the programme FUTURE LEADER of Lorraine Université d’Excellence within the French National Research Agency Investissements d’avenir (ANR-15-IDEX-04-LUE to S.M.). Computation for this research was assisted by: the Harvard Business School compute cluster (HBSGrid); and the Open Science Grid. The Open Science Grid is supported by the National Science Foundation award 1148698 and the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, as well as by the compute resources and assistance of the UW-Madison Center For High Throughput Computing (CHTC) in the Department of Computer Sciences. The CHTC is supported by UW-Madison, the Advanced Computing Initiative, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, and the National Science Foundation, and is an active member of the Open Science Grid, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Adolescence is a time of heightened risk for the development of psychopathology. Difficulties in emotion regulation and heightened levels of self-criticism are two processes that have been proposed as critical risk factors. Considering the accumulating evidence that risk factors rarely work in isolation, there is a pressing need to examine how self-criticism and emotion regulations strategies interact. The present study utilizes a network analysis approach to address this goal. One-hundred thirty-five children and adolescents (ages 8-15) completed daily-diaries every evening for 21 days (total N of assessments = 2,564), reporting self-criticism and use of emotion regulation strategies focused on negative and positive emotions. Network analysis was applied to estimate contemporaneous, temporal, and between-person networks. Results show that emotion regulation strategies are generally positively associated with each other at the within and between individual levels. As predicted, self-criticism was positively associated with rumination and dampening at the between and within-person networks; unexpectedly, problem-solving also clustered with them in the contemporaneous network. Moreover, problem-solving led to next-day increases in rumination and dampening, whereas self-criticism led to next-day increases in rumination but decreases in dampening. Finally, distraction in response to negative affect was closely tied with strategies that up-regulate positive affect. Collectively, these results shed light on the complex pathways through which self-criticism and emotion regulation interact over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). ispartof: EMOTION vol:21 issue:7 pages:1438-1451 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Frequent repetitive negative thinking and infrequent positive reappraisal use are theorized to increase risk for depression and anxiety. Yet, research has studied these regulatory strategies at the disorder level, ignoring the clinical heterogeneity and differential relations among their individual symptoms. In this study, we examined the associations among repetitive negative thinking, positive reappraisal, and individual symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders. Models of regularized partial-correlation networks were estimated using cross-sectional data from 468 participants. Results showed that repetitive negative thinking and positive reappraisal were differentially related to affective, cognitive, and somatic symptoms of depression and anxiety. Moreover, repetitive negative thinking was more central than positive reappraisal with stronger connections to individual symptoms. Finally, repetitive negative thinking was more important than positive reappraisal in connecting clusters of depression and anxiety symptoms. These findings cast light on potential pathways through which repetitive negative thinking and positive reappraisal may operate within depression and anxiety.

Background With the ever-expanding interconnectedness of the internet and especially with the recent development of the Internet of Things, people are increasingly at risk for cybersecurity breaches that can have far-reaching consequences for their personal and professional lives, with psychological and mental health ramifications. Objective We aimed to identify the dimensional structure of emotion processes triggered by one of the most emblematic scenarios of cybersecurity breach, the hacking of one’s smart security camera, and explore which personality characteristics systematically relate to these emotion dimensions. Methods A total of 902 participants from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands reported their emotion processes triggered by a cybersecurity breach scenario. Moreover, they reported on their Big Five personality traits, as well as on key indicators for resilient, overcontrolling (internalizing problems), and undercontrolling (aggression) personality types. Results Principal component analyses revealed a clear 3-dimensional structure of emotion processes: emotional intensity, proactive versus fight/flight reactions, and affective versus cognitive/motivational reactions. Regression analyses revealed that more internalizing problems (β=.33, P Conclusions To adequately describe the emotion processes triggered by a cybersecurity breach, two more dimensions are needed over and above the general negative affectivity dimension. This multidimensional structure is further supported by the differential relationships of the emotion dimensions with personality characteristics. The discovered emotion structure could be used for consistent predictions about who is at risk to develop long-term mental well-being issues due to a cybersecurity breach experience.

Filamentous fungi are important eukaryotic organisms crucial in substrate degradation and carbon cycle on the earth and have been harnessed as cell factories for the production of proteins and other high value-added products in recent decades. As cell factories, filamentous fungi play a crucial role in industrial protein production as both native hosts and heterologous hosts. In this review, the regulation strategies of carbohydrate active enzyme expression at both transcription level and protein level are introduced, and the transcription regulations are highlighted with induction mechanism, signaling pathway, and promoter and transcription factor regulation. Afterward, the regulation strategies in protein level including suitable posttranslational modification, protein secretion enhancement, and protease reduction are also presented. Finally, the challenges and perspectives in this field are discussed. In this way, a comprehensive knowledge regarding carbohydrate active enzyme production regulation at both transcriptional and protein levels is provided with the particular goal of aiding in the practical application of filamentous fungi for industrial protein production.

Emotion regulation (ER) difficulties are ubiquitous among individuals with schizophrenia and have been hypothesized to contribute to stress sensitivity and exacerbation of psychotic symptoms in this population. However, the evidence supporting this link is equivocal, potentially due to previous studies’ reliance on retrospective assessments of ER and psychosis, as well as lack of consideration of putative moderators such as emotion awareness. To address these limitations, we employed experience sampling method using mobile electronic devices to investigate the links between momentary in vivo use of ER strategies (mER), emotion awareness, and psychotic symptoms during daily functioning. Fifty-four individuals with schizophrenia completed assessment of mER and psychotic symptoms, along with traditional retrospective measures of ER and symptoms. Use of mER suppression predicted significant increases in momentary experiences of thought insertion, mind reading, auditory and visual hallucinations. Use of mER reappraisal predicted significant increases in momentary experiences of suspiciousness, thought insertion, and mind reading. Emotion awareness, driven primarily by difficulties identifying feelings, moderated the impact of ER on psychotic symptoms. There were no associations between retrospective measures of ER and symptoms. Our results indicate that, among individuals with schizophrenia, emotion awareness significantly impacts the relationship between use of ER and exacerbations in psychotic symptoms during the course of daily functioning. Our results highlight the need to incorporate emotion awareness and regulation difficulties into the development of treatment models and interventions for psychosis. In addition, our results underscore the need to employ in vivo, high time-resolution assessment methods to study dynamic clinical phenomena such as ER and psychotic symptoms.

It is important to gain more insight into specific subgroups of homeless young adults (HYA) to enable the development of tailored interventions that adequately meet their diverse needs and to improve their quality of life. Within a heterogeneous sample of HYA, we investigated whether subgroups are distinguishable based on risk- and protective factors for quality of life. In addition, differences between subgroups were examined regarding the socio-demographic characteristics, the use of cognitive coping strategies and quality of life. A total of 393 HYA using shelter facilities in the Netherlands were approached to participate, between December 2011 and March 2013. Structured face-to-face interviews were administered approximately 2weeks after shelter admission by trained research assistants. A latent class analysis was conducted to empirically distinguish 251 HYA in subgroups based on common risk factors (former abuse, victimisation, psychological symptoms and substance use) and protective factors (resilience, family and social support and perceived health status). Additional analysis of variance and chi-square tests were used to compare subgroups on socio-demographic characteristics, the use of cognitive coping strategies and quality of life. The latent class analysis yielded four highly interpretable subgroups: the at-risk subgroup, the high-risk and least protected subgroup, the low-risk subgroup and the higher functioning and protected subgroup. Subgroups of HYA with lower scores in risk factors showed higher scores in protective factors, the adaptive cognitive coping strategies and quality of life. Our findings confirm the need for targeted and tailored interventions for specific subgroups of HYA. Social workers need to be attentive to the pattern of risk- and protective factors in each individual to determine which risk factors are prominent and need to be targeted and which protective factors need to be enhanced to improve the quality of life of HYA.

Background: Adaptive recovery from stress promotes healthy cognitive affective functioning, whereas maladaptive recovery is linked to poor psychological outcomes. Neural regions, like the anterior cingulate and hippocampus, play critical roles in psychosocial stress responding and serve as hubs in the corticolimbic neural system. To date, however, it is unknown how cognitive emotion regulation traits (cER), adaptive and maladaptive, influence corticolimbic stress recovery. Here, we examined acute psychosocial stress neural recovery, accounting for cER., Methods: Functional neuroimaging data were collected while forty-seven healthy participants performed blocks of challenging, time-sensitive, mental calculations. Participants immediately received performance feedback (positive/negative/neutral) and their ranking, relative to fictitious peers. Participants rested for 90 seconds after each feedback, allowing for a neural stress recovery period. Collected before scanning, cER scores were correlated with neural activity during each recovery condition., Results: Negative feedback recovery yielded increased activity within the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala, but this effect was ultimately explained by maladaptive cER (M-cER), like rumination. Isolating positive after-effects (i.e. positive > negative recovery) yielded a significant positive correlation between M-cER and the anterior cingulate, anterior insula, hippocampus, and striatum., Conclusions: We provide first evidence of M-cER to predict altered neural recovery from positive stress within corticolimbic regions. Positive feedback may be potentially threatening to individuals with poor stress regulation. Identifying positive stress-induced activation patterns in corticolimbic neural networks linked to M-cER creates the possibility to identify these neural responses as risk factors for social-emotional dysregulation subsequent to rewarding social information, often witnessed in affective disorders, like depression.

Negative emotionality (NE) and positive emotionality (PE) have repeatedly shown to act as vulnerability factors for youth depression. Less research examined the mechanisms through which these reactive temperament traits may differently confer vulnerability to depression. Based on recent integrated models of depression proposing emotion regulation as a key underlying mechanism, the current study aimed to clarify the general and day-to-day relations among temperament, emotion regulation strategies, and depressive symptoms in Dutch-speaking youth (35% boys; Mage = 13.27 years, SD = 1.98) using a cross-sectional (n = 495) and a 7-day daily diary design (n = 469). Self-reported temperament, trait rumination, trait positive refocusing, and depressive symptoms were measured at baseline. State rumination, state positive refocusing, and depressive symptoms were further assessed daily. Whereas results revealed that NE and PE interacted in predicting baseline and daily depressive symptoms, the cross-sectional analyses provide preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that NE and PE each provide unique pathways for understanding vulnerability to depression. Additional analyses in the daily diary study showed NE to be significantly related to trajectories of state rumination. Results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the associations between temperament, emotion regulation strategies, and depressive symptoms in youth. ispartof: PLOS ONE vol:14 issue:10 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Reflecting on negative emotional experiences can be adaptive but it can also maintain or intensify detrimental emotional states. Which factors determine whether reflection can have one consequence or another is unclear. This study focused on two research programs that have concentrated on this topic in the last decades: processing-mode theory (PMT) and self-distancing theory (SDT). The article described and contrasted both programs and their findings. The promising results that PMT and SDT have achieved in identifying the differences between the forms of adaptive and maladaptive reflection are highlighted. Likewise, the disconcerting contradictions observed between both programs that make integrating the findings difficult are indicated. The PMT states that adaptive reflection is concrete, and it is focused on the how of the experience. The SDT states that adaptive reflection is self-distanced and focused on the global meaning of the experience. The article finishes by indicating possible explanations for these apparent contradictions and outlines the challenges to be solved to improve comprehension of the topic.

Background: Insight is impaired in the majority of schizophrenia patients. The exact neural correlates of impaired insight remain unclear. We assume that the ability to regulate emotions contributes to having good clinical insight, as patients should be able to regulate their emotional state in such a way that they can adapt adequately in order to cope with impaired functioning and negative stigma associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Numerous studies have shown emotional dysregulation in schizophrenia. We investigated the association between insight and brain activation and connectivity during emotion regulation. Methods: Brain activation during emotion regulation was measured with functional MRI in 30 individuals with schizophrenia. Two emotion regulation strategies were examined: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Clinical insight was measured with the Schedule for the Assessment of Insight – Expanded, and cognitive insight was measured with the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale. Whole brain random effects multiple regression analyses were conducted to assess the relation between brain activation during emotion regulation and insight. Generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) was used to investigate the relation between task-related connectivity and insight. Results: No significant associations were found between insight and neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal. For clinical insight and suppression, significant positive associations were found between symptom relabeling and activation in the left striatum, thalamus and insula, right insula and caudate, right pre- and postcentral gyrus, left superior occipital gyrus and cuneus and right middle and superior occipital gyrus and cuneus. Furthermore, reduced clinical insight was associated with more connectivity between midline medial frontal gyrus and right middle occipital gyrus. For cognitive insight and suppression, significant positive associations were found between self-reflectiveness and activation in pre- and postcentral gyrus and left middle cingulate gyrus. Conclusions: Our results suggest an association between the capacity to relabel symptoms and activation of brain systems involved in cognitive-emotional control and visual processing of negative stimuli. Furthermore, poorer self-reflectiveness may be associated with brain systems subserving control and execution. Keywords: Insight, Cognitive reappraisal, Expressive suppression, fMRI, gPPI, Emotion regulation

We investigated the function of parental attention to child pain in regulating parental distress and pain control behaviour when observing their child performing a painful (cold pressor) task (CPT); we also studied the moderating role of parental state anxiety. Participants were 62 schoolchildren and one of their parents. Parental attention towards or away from child pain (ie, attend to pain vs avoid pain) was experimentally manipulated during a viewing task pairing unfamiliar children's neutral and pain faces. Before and after the viewing task, parental distress regulation was assessed by heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). In a subsequent phase, parents observed their own child perform a CPT task, allowing assessment of parental pain control behaviour (indexed by latency to stop their child's CPT performance) and parental distress, which was assessed via self-report before and after observation of child CPT performance. Eye tracking during the viewing task and self-reported attention to own child's pain confirmed successful attention manipulation. Further, findings indicated that the effect of attentional strategy on parental emotion regulation (indexed by HR, self-report) and pain control behaviour depended on parents' state anxiety. Specifically, whereas low anxious parents reported more distress and demonstrated more pain control behaviour in the Attend to Pain condition, high anxious parents reported more distress and showed more pain control behaviour in the Avoid Pain condition. This inverse pattern was likewise apparent in physiological distress indices (HR) in response to the initial viewing task. Theoretical/clinical implications and further research directions are discussed.

Alexithymia is a psychological construct that can be divided into a cognitive and affective dimension. The cognitive dimension is characterized by difficulties in identifying, verbalizing and analysing feelings. The affective dimension comprises reduced levels of emotional experience and imagination. Alexithymia is widely regarded to arise from an impairment of emotion regulation. This is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to critically evaluate this by investigating the neural correlates of emotion regulation as a function of alexithymia levels. The aim of the current study was to investigate the neural correlates underlying the two alexithymia dimensions during emotion perception and emotion regulation. Using fMRI, we scanned 51 healthy subjects while viewing, reappraising or suppressing negative emotional pictures. The results support the idea that cognitive alexithymia, but not affective alexithymia, is associated with lower activation in emotional attention and recognition networks during emotion perception. However, in contrast with several theories, no alexithymia-related differences were found during emotion regulation (neither reappraisal nor suppression). These findings suggest that alexithymia may result from an early emotion processing deficit rather than compromised frontal circuits subserving higher-order emotion regulation processes.

OBJECTIVE: Deficits in emotion regulation (ER) skills are considered a putative maintaining factor for major depressive disorder (MDD) and hence a promising target in the treatment of MDD. However, to date, the association between the successful application of arguably adaptive ER skills and changes in depressive symptom severity (DSS) has yet to be investigated over the course of treatment. Thus, the primary aim of this study was to clarify reciprocal prospective associations between successful ER skills application and DSS over the course of inpatient cognitive behavioral therapy for MDD. Additionally, we explored whether such associations would differ across specific ER skills.METHOD: We assessed successful ER skills application and DSS 4 times during the first 3 weeks of treatment in 152 inpatients (62.5% women, average age 45.6 years) meeting criteria for MDD. We first tested whether successful skills application and depression were cross-sectionally associated by computing Pearson's correlations. Then, we utilized latent curve modeling to test whether changes in successful skills application were negatively associated with changes in DSS during treatment. Finally, we used latent change score models to clarify whether successful skills application would predict subsequent reduction of DSS.RESULTS: Cross-sectionally, successful ER skills application was associated with lower levels of DSS at all assessment times, and an increase of successful skills application during treatment was associated with a decrease of DSS. Moreover, successful overall ER skills application predicted subsequent changes in DSS (but not vice versa). Finally, strength of associations between successful application and DSS differed across specific ER skills. Among a broad range of potentially adaptive skills, only the abilities to tolerate negative emotions and to actively modify undesired emotions were significantly associated with subsequent improvement in DSS.CONCLUSIONS: Systematically enhancing health-relevant ER skills with specific interventions may help reduce DSS in patients suffering from MDD.

Emotion regulation has primarily been studied either experimentally or by using retrospective trait questionnaires. Very few studies have investigated emotion regulation in the context in which it is usually deployed, namely, the complexity of everyday life. We address this in the current paper by reporting findings of two experience-sampling studies (Ns = 46 and 95) investigating the use of six emotion-regulation strategies (reflection, reappraisal, rumination, distraction, expressive suppression, and social sharing) and their associations with changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in daily life. Regarding the relative use of emotion-regulation strategies, a highly similar ordering was found across both studies with distraction being used more than sharing and reappraisal. While the use of all six strategies was positively correlated both within- and between-persons, different strategies were associated with distinct affective consequences: Suppression and rumination were associated with increases in NA and decreases in PA, whereas reflection was associated with increases in PA across both studies. Additionally, reappraisal, distraction, and social sharing were related to increases in PA in Study 2. Discussion focuses on how the current findings fit with theoretical models of emotion regulation and with previous evidence from experimental and retrospective studies.