Depression and anxiety are associated with patterns of negative thinking that can be targeted through cognitive restructuring as a part of cognitive therapy (CT) or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Our team has created a set of cognitive distortion schemata (CDS) n-grams based on theories underlying CT to measure the linguistic markers that indicate cognitive vulnerability to depression. These CDS were specifically designed to examine online language. Our prior work supports a relationship between CDS and a diagnosis of depression, but less is known about the relationship between online language, CDS, and anxiety. The current study measures if CDS can be detected in people who report anxiety symptoms, and whether CDS increase with symptom severity.

Content-based models, which focus on observable symptom content, have dominated much of the literature on heterogeneity in OCD. However, alternate models emphasize the motivations underlying different symptom presentations, including harm avoidance (HA) and incompleteness (INC). To promote understanding of these motivations, we examined their associations with various content-based symptom dimensions, obsessive belief patterns, and other clinical characteristics.

Patients' perceived improvement has utility in contextualizing markers of treatment success, often measured through PTSD severity, other clinical factors, and clinically meaningful improvement (CMI). This study investigated the relationship between perceived improvement, self-reported PTSD symptom changes, and changes in other clinical factors in veterans undergoing PTSD treatment.

Insomnia, characterized by difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep, is a robust transdiagnostic correlate of suicidal ideation (SI). Nevertheless, there remains a lack of research exploring factors that may account for this association. One approach to advancing our understanding of these associations, is to draw from theoretical models of suicide including the interpersonal theory of suicide (IPTS). According to the IPTS, the desire for suicide emerges when one feels intractably socially disconnected (i.e., lonely and perceiving oneself as a burden). Initial research suggests that social disconnectedness explains, in part, the association between insomnia and suicidal ideation severity. However, less research has investigated this veterans in underserved communities, a sample at heightened risk for suicide.

Constructs of common mental disorder (CMD) symptoms, including anxiety, depression, obsessions, compulsions, and worry, are observed in a wide range of psychiatric conditions. Reliable and valid measurements of these CMD symptoms are essential for building a generalizable science of psychopathology and ensuring valid comparisons of scores across distinct groups. Accordingly, the current study determined the psychometric properties of four widely used CMD symptom measures in the United States (U.S.) and Singapore.

The tendency to negatively interpret ambiguous situations (i.e., interpretation bias) is associated with the development and maintenance of emotional disorders. Reliable measures of this transdiagnostic construct are critical for mechanistic studies and for evaluating treatment effects. However, few studies have validated common measures of interpretation bias across different ethnoracial groups. The Word-Sentence Association Paradigm (WSAP) is a commonly used measure of interpretation biases that has previously shown good reliability (Gonsalves, Whittles, Weisberg, Beard, & 2019). This study evaluated two versions of the WSAP in two different samples across four ethnoracial groups (Asian/Pacific Islander, Black/African, Hispanic, non-Hispanic White) in the United States.

Suicide is a significant public health concern; therefore, it is essential to develop interventions that effectively target suicidality and can be easily implemented with high-risk populations. This pilot randomized controlled trial investigated the feasibility and acceptability of a brief, daily, text-based mindfulness intervention (Mind-REST) targeting suicidality, as compared with a sham mindfulness control condition. A secondary aim was to examine potential differences in suicidal ideation within and between groups over the course of the study.

The perseverative cognition hypothesis stipulates that rumination (repetitive, passive, uncontrollable negative thinking) prolongs the experience of a stressor which impacts stress physiology. In line with this hypothesis, we proposed that in response to real-life experiences of social rejection, adolescent girls who ruminate would show a blunted diurnal cortisol slope the next day relative to girls who do not ruminate. We also examined the effects of social rejection and rumination on waking cortisol levels and the cortisol awakening response.

Despite impressive dissemination programs of best-practice therapies, clinical psychology faces obstacles in developing more efficacious treatments for mental disorders. In contrast to other medical disciplines, psychotherapy has made only slow progress in improving treatment outcomes. Improvements in the classification of mental disorders could enhance the tailoring of treatments to improve effectiveness. We introduce a multimodal dynamical network approach, to address some of the challenges faced by clinical research. These challenges include the absence of a comprehensive meta-theory, comorbidity, substantial diagnostic heterogeneity, violations of ergodicity assumptions, and a limited understanding of causal processes.

This is a secondary analysis of a multi-site, cluster (site) randomized trial of the efficacy of a combined Health and Wellness Cognitive Behavior Therapy (H&W CBT) and medication management approach for depression in youth with HIV (YWH) compared to standard care. In this study, we explored the association between H&W CBT factors and depression outcomes after 24 weeks of treatment to discover treatment elements associated with symptom reduction.

Low self-esteem and self-burdensomeness have been proposed as risk factors for suicidal ideation. Yet, self-burdensomeness may be more relevant to suicidal ideation than low self-esteem. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the association between self-esteem, self-burdensomeness, and suicidal ideation in a sample of adult outpatients.

Rumination is a well-established contributor to the severity of depression and anxiety. It is unknown, however, whether individual differences in the temporal dynamics of rumination over time predict longitudinal increases in depression or anxiety.

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) and experiential avoidance (EA) are associated with anxiety in both adults and youths. This study examined the separate contributions of AS and EA in predicting (a) anxiety (symptom severity) and (b) differential treatment outcomes in anxious youth receiving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Internalizing disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders in youth and are associated with a host of deleterious outcomes (e.g., self-harm, substance use, interpersonal difficulties), highlighting the critical need for identifying risk factors that confer risk for these disorders. The present study investigated the unique and shared roles of two prominent cognitive biases-anxiety sensitivity and interpretation biases-as predictors of internalizing symptom severity in clinically anxious youth, above and beyond the effects of negative emotionality and after accounting for sociodemographic covariates.

Clinical data are usually analyzed with the assumption that knowledge gathered from group averages applies to the individual. Doing so potentially obscures patients with meaningfully different trajectories of therapeutic change. Needed are "idionomic" methods that first examine idiographic patterns before nomothetic generalizations are made. The objective of this paper is to test whether such an idionomic method leads to different clinical conclusions.

Intrusive re-experiencing of trauma is a core symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder. Intrusive re-experiencing could potentially be reduced by 'rewinding', a new treatment approach assumed to take advantage of reconsolidation-updating by mentally replaying trauma fast-backward.

According to the Hopelessness Theory of Depression, a negative cognitive style increases an individual's vulnerability to depression during stressful life events. The Cognitive Style Questionnaire (CSQ) is a widely used self-report measure to assess negative cognitive style or cognitive vulnerability. A limitation of the CSQ is its length, limiting its use in larger-scale research and applied settings. This research aims to validate a brief version of the CSQ.

Dysfunctional threat appraisal plays a key role in both the development and treatment of PTSD. It is unclear how these appraisals can best be measured. This study aimed to explore the specific negative outcome predictions held by patients with PTSD and to develop and validate the Threat Appraisal in PTSD Scale (TAPS).

Emerging research investigating mechanisms underpinning PTSD has identified emotion regulation (ER) flexibility - the ability to flexibly use ER strategies according to contextual demands - as one promising mechanism. To date, however, no study has investigated whether brief training in ER flexibility can minimise negative affect elicited from evocative stimuli. This study investigated the impact of instructed ER flexibility on emotional responding in probable PTSD.

Cognitive vulnerability to anxiety can partly be explained by an interplay of attentional biases and control processes. This suggests that when aiming to reduce anxiety, simultaneously reducing an attentional bias for threat and strengthening control processes would be the optimal approach. We investigated whether a combined web-based Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) with affective Working Memory Training (WMT) was effective in reducing trait anxiety relative to control conditions and whether state anxiety moderated ABM effects.

While low self-esteem is an established risk factor for depressive and anxiety disorders, psychological underpinnings of unstable self-esteem remain understudied. We investigated the role of autonomy-connectedness, the psychological capacity for self-governance, in self-esteem and its change trajectories and instability.