Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemDoes prediction error during exposure relate to clinical outcomes in cognitive behavior therapy for social anxiety disorder? A study protocol(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2022-11-24)Facing your fears, or exposure therapy, is an effective psychological intervention for anxiety disorders that is often thought to work through fear extinction learning. Fear extinction learning is a type of associative learning where fear reduces through repeated encounters with a feared situation or stimulus in the absence of aversive outcomes. Laboratory research suggests fear extinction learning is driven by threat prediction errors, defined as when fearful predictions do not eventuate. Threat prediction error and its relationship to exposure therapy outcomes haven't been studied enough in actual therapy settings. It remains unclear whether prediction error and extinction learning are central mechanisms of exposure therapy. We are conducting a longitudinal and observational study of how threat prediction error during exposure in social anxiety disorder (SAD) treatment relates to session-by-session symptom change and treatment outcome in addition to exposure surprise and learning outcome. We aim to recruit 65 adults with a primary diagnosis of SAD through an outpatient psychology clinic. Participants will receive 12 sessions of individual manualized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), adapted from an efficacious group protocol, that includes graded exposure. Exposure processes, including self-report measures of anxiety, threat prediction, threat outcomes, surprise, and learning outcome, will be measured with smartphone-based event-contingent ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) of all behavioral experiments completed during treatment. Clinical outcomes include self-reported social anxiety symptoms and social threat appraisals, at each session, post and 3-months after treatment. Prediction error will be operationalized as the mismatch between the threat prediction and threat outcome. The joint effect of threat prediction and threat outcome on session-by-session symptom change, treatment outcome, exposure surprise, and learning outcome will be explored using multilevel modeling. The present study will help determine whether threat prediction error during exposures in SAD treatment is related to theoretically implied clinical outcomes. This would contribute to the larger research aim of clarifying exposure therapy mechanisms.
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ItemInelastic scattering of electrons in water from first principles: cross sections and inelastic mean free path for use in Monte Carlo track-structure simulations of biological damage(ROYAL SOC, 2022-05-18)Modelling the inelastic scattering of electrons in water is fundamental, given their crucial role in biological damage. In Monte Carlo track-structure (MC-TS) codes used to assess biological damage, the energy loss function (ELF), from which cross sections are extracted, is derived from different semi-empirical optical models. Only recently have first ab initio results for the ELF and cross sections in water become available. For benchmarking purpose, in this work, we present ab initio linear-response time-dependent density functional theory calculations of the ELF of liquid water. We calculated the inelastic scattering cross sections, inelastic mean free paths, and electronic stopping power and compared our results with recent calculations and experimental data showing a good agreement. In addition, we provide an in-depth analysis of the contributions of different molecular orbitals, species and orbital angular momenta to the total ELF. Moreover, we present single-differential cross sections computed for each molecular orbital channel, which should prove useful for MC-TS simulations.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNegative Emotion and Nonacceptance of Emotion in Daily Life(AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC, 2022-08)Nonacceptance of emotion is consistently linked with increased levels of psychopathology and diminished well-being. Research has found that negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion are positively associated cross-sectionally but has yet to directly investigate temporal associations between these constructs. Given that negative emotions are frequently the target of negative thoughts and other emotions, and that acceptance of emotion is associated with prospective decreases in negative emotion, we hypothesized that the temporal relation between negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion is bidirectional. The present study examined the association between these variables during people's daily lives using an experience sampling methodology. Multilevel modeling was used for all analyses, including hierarchical generalized linear modeling and log-normal hurdle modeling. A total of 187 women from the United States and Australia reported negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion 14 times a day for 5 days. Negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion were positively associated contemporaneously. Across time, nonacceptance of emotion was prospectively and positively associated with the intensity of negative emotion independent of immediately prior negative emotion, and negative emotion intensity was prospectively and positively associated with nonacceptance of emotion independent of immediately prior nonacceptance. Results support a bidirectional model of negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion wherein each variable predicts increases in the other across time. Our findings elucidate how individuals fall into maladaptive emotional patterns that are difficult to break and could possibly pave the way to the development and maintenance of psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSome Recommendations on the Use of Daily Life Methods in Affective Science(SPRINGERNATURE, 2022-06)Real-world emotions are often more vivid, personally meaningful, and consequential than those evoked in the lab. Therefore, studying emotions in daily life is essential to test theories, discover new phenomena, and understand healthy emotional functioning; in short, to move affective science forward. The past decades have seen a surge of research using daily diary, experience sampling, or ecological momentary assessment methods to study emotional phenomena in daily life. In this paper, we will share some of the insights we have gained from our collective experience applying such daily life methods to study everyday affective processes. We highlight what we see as important considerations and caveats involved in using these methods and formulate recommendations to improve their use in future research. These insights focus on the importance of (i) theory and hypothesis-testing; (ii) measurement; (iii) timescale; and (iv) context, when studying emotions in their natural habitat.
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ItemBlinded by and Stuck in Negative Emotions: Is Psychological Inflexibility Across Different Domains Related?(SPRINGERNATURE, 2022-12)UNLABELLED: Psychological inflexibility is theorized to underlie difficulties adjusting mental processes in response to changing circumstances. People show inflexibility across a range of domains, including attention, cognition, and affect. But it remains unclear whether common mechanisms underlie inflexibility in different domains. We investigated this possibility in a pre-registered replication and extension examining associations among attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures. Participants (N = 196) completed lab tasks assessing (a) emotion-induced blindness, the tendency for task-irrelevant emotional stimuli to impair attention allocation to non-emotional stimuli; (b) emotional inertia, the tendency for feelings to persist across time and contexts; and global self-report measures of (c) repetitive negative thinking, the tendency to repeatedly engage in negative self-focused thoughts (i.e., rumination, worry). Based on prior research linking repetitive negative thinking with negative affect inertia, on one hand, and emotion-induced blindness, on the other, we predicted positive correlations among all three measures of inflexibility. However, none of the three measures were related and Bayes factors indicated strong evidence for independence. Supplementary analyses ruled out alternative explanations for our findings, e.g., analytic decisions. Although our findings question the overlap between attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures, this study has methodological limitations. For instance, our measures varied across more than their inflexibility domain and our sample, relative to previous studies, included a high proportion of Asian participants who may show different patterns of ruminative thinking to non-Asian participants. Future research should address these limitations to confirm that common mechanisms do not underlie attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2.
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ItemSocial Support Predicts Differential Use, but not Differential Effectiveness, of Expressive Suppression and Social Sharing in Daily Life(SPRINGERNATURE, 2022-09)UNLABELLED: While emotion regulation often happens in the presence of others, little is known about how social context shapes regulatory efforts and outcomes. One key element of the social context is social support. In two experience sampling studies (Ns = 179 and 123), we examined how the use and affective consequences of two fundamentally social emotion-regulation strategies-social sharing and expressive suppression-vary as a function of perceived social support. Across both studies, we found evidence that social support was associated with variation in people's use of these strategies, such that when people perceived their environments as being higher (vs. lower) in social support, they engaged in more sharing and less suppression. However, we found only limited and inconsistent support for context-dependent affective outcomes of suppression and sharing: suppression was associated with better affective consequences in the context of higher perceived social support in Study 1, but this effect did not replicate in Study 2. Taken together, these findings suggest that the use of social emotion-regulation strategies may depend on contextual variability in social support, whereas their effectiveness does not. Future research is needed to better understand the circumstances in which context-dependent use of emotion regulation may have emotional benefits, accounting for personal, situational, and cultural factors. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00123-8.
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ItemHow Does It Feel to Be Treated Like an Object? Direct and Indirect Effects of Exposure to Sexual Objectification on Women's Emotions in Daily Life(American Psychological Association, 2019-06-01)Exposure to sexual objectification is an everyday experience for many women, yet little is known about its emotional consequences. Fredrickson and Roberts' (1997) objectification theory proposed a within-person process, wherein exposure to sexual objectification causes women to adopt a third-person perspective on their bodies, labeled self-objectification, which has harmful downstream consequences for their emotional well-being. However, previous studies have only tested this model at the between-person level, making them unreliable sources of inference about the proposed intraindividual psychological consequences of objectification. Here, we report the results of Bayesian multilevel structural equation models that simultaneously tested Fredrickson and Roberts' (1997) predictions both within and between persons, using data from 3 ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies of women's (N = 268) experiences of sexual objectification in daily life. Our findings support the predicted within-person indirect effect of exposure to sexual objectification on increases in negative and self-conscious emotions via self-objectification. However, lagged analyses suggest that the within-person indirect emotional consequences of exposure to sexual objectification may be relatively fleeting. Our findings advance research on sexual objectification by providing the first comprehensive test of the within-person process proposed by Fredrickson and Roberts' (1997) objectification theory.
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ItemSexual objectification in women's daily lives: A smartphone ecological momentary assessment study(WILEY, 2017-06)Sexual objectification, particularly of young women, is highly prevalent in modern industrialized societies. Although there is plenty of experimental and cross-sectional research on objectification, prospective studies investigating the prevalence and psychological impact of objectifying events in daily life are scarce. We used ecological momentary assessment to track the occurrence of objectifying events over 1 week in the daily lives of young women (N = 81). Participants reported being targeted by a sexually objectifying event - most often the objectifying gaze - approximately once every 2 days and reported witnessing sexual objectification of others approximately 1.35 times per day. Further, multilevel linear regression analyses showed that being targeted by sexual objectification was associated with a substantial increase in state self-objectification. Overall, individual differences had little impact in moderating these effects.
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ItemModerated online social therapy for depression relapse prevention in young people: pilot study of a "next generation' online intervention(WILEY, 2018-08)AIM: Implementation of targeted e-mental health interventions offers a promising solution to reducing the burden of disease associated with youth depression. A single-group pilot study was conducted to evaluate the acceptability, feasibility, usability and safety of a novel, moderated online social therapy intervention (entitled Rebound) for depression relapse prevention in young people. METHODS: Participants were 42 young people (15-25 years) (50% men; mean age = 18.5 years) in partial or full remission. Participants had access to the Rebound platform for at least 12 weeks, including the social networking, peer and clinical moderator and therapy components. RESULTS: Follow-up data were available for 39 (92.9%) participants. There was high system usage, with 3034 user logins (mean = 72.2 per user) and 2146 posts (mean = 51.1). Almost 70% of users had ≥10 logins over the 12 weeks, with 78.5% logging in over at least 2 months of the pilot. A total of 32 (84%) participants rated the intervention as helpful. There was significant improvement between the number of participants in full remission at baseline (n = 5; none of whom relapsed) relative to n = 19 at 12-week follow-up (P < 0.001). Six (14.3%) participants relapsed to full threshold symptoms at 12 weeks. There was a significant improvement to interviewer-rated depression scores (Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS); P = 0.014, d = 0.45) and a trend for improved strength use (P = 0.088, d = 0.29). The single-group design and 12-week treatment phase preclude a full understanding of the clinical benefits of the Rebound intervention. CONCLUSIONS: The Rebound intervention was shown to be acceptable, feasible, highly usable and safe in young people with major depression.