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The present investigation examined the interactive effects of rumination and negative affectivity in relation to anxiety and depressive symptoms and psychopathology among 245 Latino adults (M age  = 39.7, SD = 11.4; 86.9 % female; 97.6 % reported Spanish as their first language) attending a community-based primary healthcare clinic. As expected, there was a significant interaction between rumination and negative affectivity for depressive, suicidal, social anxiety, anxious arousal symptoms, number of mood and anxiety disorders, and disability among the primary care Latino sample. Inspection of the interaction forms indicated a high degree of conceptual similarity. Specifically, rumination was related to greater levels of suicidal symptoms, social anxiety, anxious arousal, number of mood and anxiety disorders, and disability among individuals with higher, but not lower, levels of negative affectivity. The form of the interaction for depressive symptoms was in line with this pattern, but more extreme; rumination was related to greater levels of depressive symptoms among individuals with both higher and lower levels of negative affectivity. Together, these data provide novel empirical evidence suggesting that there is clinically relevant interplay between rumination and negative affectivity in regard to a relatively wide array of anxiety and depressive variables among Latinos in a primary care medical setting.

The National Institute of Mental Health recently launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The RDoC is an initiative to improve classification of mental health concerns by promoting research on the brain mechanisms underlying these concerns, with the ultimate goal of developing interventions that target these brain mechanisms. A key focus of RDoC involves opening new lines of research examining patients' responses on biological measures. The RDoC presents unique challenges to mental health professionals who work with children and adolescents. Indeed, mental health professionals rarely integrate biological measures into clinical assessments. Thus, RDoC's ability to improve patient care rests, in part, on the development of strategies for implementing biological measures within mental health assessments. Further, mental health professionals already carry out comprehensive assessments that frequently yield inconsistent findings. These inconsistencies have historically posed challenges to interpreting research findings as well as assessment outcomes in practice settings. In this introductory article, we review key issues that informed the development of a special issue of articles demonstrating methods for implementing low-cost measures of physiological functioning in clinical child and adolescent assessments. We also outline a conceptual framework, informed by theoretical work on using and interpreting multiple informants' clinical reports (De Los Reyes, Thomas, Goodman, & Kundey, 2013 ), to guide hypothesis testing when using physiological measures within clinical child and adolescent assessments. This special issue and the conceptual model described in this article may open up new lines of research testing paradigms for implementing clinically feasible physiological measures in clinical child and adolescent assessments.

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding, multidimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training. Urgent challenge areas across developmental periods are discussed, followed by a review of psychological symptoms that likely will increase in prevalence and require innovative solutions in both science and practice. Implications for new research directions, clinical approaches, and policy issues are discussed to highlight the opportunities for clinical psychological science to emerge as an updated, contemporary field capable of addressing the burden of mental illness and distress in the wake of COVID-19 and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research has highlighted the importance of testing interactions between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies when examining their associations with mental health. However, there has been little work on the interaction between adaptive strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and two forms of repetitive negative thinking (RNT)—worry and rumination. Furthermore, prior research has exclusively relied on self-report measures to assess mental health as the primary outcome and more research is needed to understand the psychophysiological correlates of emotion regulation. To address these limitations, we tested the interaction between cognitive reappraisal and RNT when predicting resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which measures heart rate variability across the respiratory cycle and is conceptualized as a transdiagnostic biomarker for psychopathology and emotion regulation capacities. We also predicted depression symptoms as a secondary outcome in an attempt to replicate prior research. In a sample of 233 undergraduates, we found that RNT had a negative association with resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia, but only among participants who reported low levels of cognitive reappraisal use. The effect of RNT on depressive symptoms was not moderated by cognitive reappraisal use. Overall, these results suggest that worry and rumination might have the most detrimental links with physiological functioning when people do not frequently use cognitive reappraisal to regulate affect. This study also underscores the necessity of utilizing psychophysiological measures when modeling interactions between regulatory strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objectives: A large body of work suggests that cognitive reappraisal is an effective strategy for modifying emotional intensity. In addition, its habitual use has been linked to adaptive psychological functioning, operationalized as low levels of symptoms of psychopathology. However, little is known about the impact of cognitive reappraisal on behavioral aspects of mental disorders. For example, the experience of fear is often accompanied by the behavioral urge to avoid the feared stimuli. Although there is evidence to suggest that cognitive reappraisal reduces fear in the moment, there is less information about the impact on behavioral correlates. Method: To that end, we recruited 90 participants who experienced substantial contamination concerns (i.e., obsessive‐compulsive disorder symptoms) and asked them to participate in exposure tasks that consisted of gradually coming into contact with contaminated objects (i.e., approach behavior). We randomly assigned participants to one of three conditions: (1) reappraise the emotion‐eliciting stimulus, (2) reappraise their emotional response, or (3) no specific emotion regulation instructions. Results: Reappraising the stimulus, but not reappraising the emotional response, led to significantly greater behavioral approach (p = .02) than the no‐instruction condition during exposure. There were no significant differences in subjective state anxiety between any of the conditions. Conclusion: These findings suggest that certain types of reappraisal may lead to greater approach behavior during exposure even in the absence of subjective emotional changes. More broadly, they underscore the importance of examining the role of emotion regulation strategies (including different types of reappraisal) on the behavioral aspects of mental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discusses a section within the issue on implementation of physiological measures in clinical assessment of mental health of adults.

The National Institute of Mental Health recently launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). RDoC is a framework that facilitates the dimensional assessment and classification of processes relevant to mental health (e.g., affect, regulation, cognition, social affiliation), as reflected in measurements across multiple units of analysis (e.g., physiology, circuitry, genes, self-reports). A key focus of RDoC involves opening new lines of research examining patients’ responses on biological measures, with the key goal of developing new therapeutic techniques that effectively target mechanisms of mental disorders. Yet applied researchers and practitioners rarely use biological measures within mental health assessments, which may present challenges in translating RDoC-guided research into improvements in patient care. Thus, if RDoC is to result in research that yields clinical tools that reduce the burden of mental illness and improve public health, we ought to develop strategies for effectively implementing biological measures in the context of clinical assessments. In this special issue, we sought to provide an initial step in this direction by assembling a collection of articles from leading research teams carrying out pioneering work on implementing multimodal assessments (biological, subjective, behavioral) of affective processes in applied settings. In this commentary, we expand upon the work presented in this special issue by making a series of suggestions for how to most parsimoniously conduct multimodal assessments of affective processes in applied research and clinical settings. We hope that this approach will facilitate translations of the RDoC framework into applied research and clinic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Putatively adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., acceptance, problem solving, reappraisal) show weaker associations with psychopathology than putatively maladaptive strategies (e.g., avoidance, self-criticism, hiding expression, suppression of experience, worry, rumination). This is puzzling, given the central role that adaptive strategies play in a wide range of psychotherapeutic approaches. We explored this asymmetry by examining the effects of context (i.e., emotion intensity, type of emotion, social vs. academic circumstances) on the implementation of adaptive and maladaptive strategies. We asked 111 participants to describe 8 emotion-eliciting situations and identify which strategies they used in order to regulate their affect. We found support for a contextual model of emotion regulation, in which adaptive strategies were implemented with more cross-situational variability than maladaptive strategies. In addition, the variability in implementation of two adaptive strategies (acceptance, problem solving) predicted lower levels of psychopathology, suggesting that flexible implementation of such strategies in line with contextual demands is associated with better mental health. We discuss these findings by underscoring the importance of adopting a functional approach to the delineation of contextual factors that influence the implementation of emotion regulation strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]