Browsing by Subject "Affect"
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Item Open Access A craniofacial-specific monosynaptic circuit enables heightened affective pain.(Nature neuroscience, 2017-12) Rodriguez, Erica; Sakurai, Katsuyasu; Xu, Jennie; Chen, Yong; Toda, Koji; Zhao, Shengli; Han, Bao-Xia; Ryu, David; Yin, Henry; Liedtke, Wolfgang; Wang, FanHumans often rank craniofacial pain as more severe than body pain. Evidence suggests that a stimulus of the same intensity induces stronger pain in the face than in the body. However, the underlying neural circuitry for the differential processing of facial versus bodily pain remains unknown. Interestingly, the lateral parabrachial nucleus (PBL), a critical node in the affective pain circuit, is activated more strongly by noxious stimulation of the face than of the hindpaw. Using a novel activity-dependent technology called CANE developed in our laboratory, we identified and selectively labeled noxious-stimulus-activated PBL neurons and performed comprehensive anatomical input-output mapping. Surprisingly, we uncovered a hitherto uncharacterized monosynaptic connection between cranial sensory neurons and the PBL-nociceptive neurons. Optogenetic activation of this monosynaptic craniofacial-to-PBL projection induced robust escape and avoidance behaviors and stress calls, whereas optogenetic silencing specifically reduced facial nociception. The monosynaptic circuit revealed here provides a neural substrate for heightened craniofacial affective pain.Item Open Access Affect before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza(2009) Leo, Russell JosephAffects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before
Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize
bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of
activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition
of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,
devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across
confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,
emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans
and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency
and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John
Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis
of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate
developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's
configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives
towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza
and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and
determinism.
Item Open Access Affect Theory and the Politics of Ambiguity: Liminality, Disembodiment, and Relationality in Music(2014) Lee, GavinThis dissertation develops a "politics of ambiguity" through case studies of affect in contemporary works by European, American and Singaporean composers. While studies of intercultural music have focused on narratives of power relations (e.g. orientalism, postcolonial ambivalence), a new method of interpretation can be based on the affective ambiguity that arises from intercultural encounters, indicating a less than totalitarian power and thus forming a basis for political struggle. The focus is on three pieces of music by American-born John Sharpley, Belgium-born Robert Casteels, and Singaporean Joyce Koh, who hail from across the globe and incorporate Asian musics, arts, and philosophies into a variety of modernist, neo-romantic, and postmodern musical idioms. Modalities of ambiguity include: perceptual focus on musicalized Chinese calligraphy strokes, versus perceptual liminality arising from modernist technique; the musical embodiment of Buddhist disembodiment; and, ambiguous relationality of intercultural sounds. Liminality, disembodiment, and relationality mark the cessation of identity politics in favor of a form of cultural hermeneutics that pays heed to the complex interaction between society, sonic media and the neurophysiology of listening.
Item Open Access Autobiographical memories of anxiety-related experiences.(Behav Res Ther, 2004-03) Wenzel, Amy; Pinna, Keri; Rubin, David CNinety-nine undergraduate students retrieved three memories associated with each of the five emotional experiences: panic, trauma, worry, social anxiety, and feeling content. Subsequently, they answered 24 questions assessing properties of each memory, including the vividness and perceived accuracy of the memories and sensory, emotional, and anxiety-related experiences during retrieval. Memories were coded for affective tone and specificity. Results indicated that panic-related and trauma-related memories were rated similarly as content memories, but that they generally were associated with more imagery and emotional experiencing than worry-related or social anxiety-related memories. Participants experienced panic and worry symptoms to the greatest degree when they retrieved panic-related and trauma-related memories. All anxiety-related memories were characterized by more negative tone than content memories. Panic-related and trauma-related memories were more specific than worry-related, social anxiety-related, and content memories. These findings can explain partially why individuals with some, but not all, anxiety disorders experience enhanced memory for threatening material.Item Open Access Cosmetic Citizenship: Beauty, Affect and Inequality in Southeastern Brazil(2010) Jarrin, AlvaroThis dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.
In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.
Item Open Access Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel(2020) Nayak, Sonia“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logic, the project uses a more nuanced definition of the field of Global Anglophone literature as a space to contend with the economic, racial, and emotional legacies of empire. In turn, affective and aesthetic readings of the diverse novels of Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rachel Cusk as Global Anglophone, rather than British, allows for a criticism of global capitalism that is grounded within legacies of empire. The project shows how Jamaica Kincaid’s and W.G. Sebald’s focus on everyday cruelties and historical anachronisms reestablish narrative connections between the networks of violence between colony and empire. It also illustrates how Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters connect the mental and physical servitude within imperial power dynamics to current conditions of work. Finally, locating Rachel Cusk’s novels within a financialized world shows the ubiquitous anxiety of neoliberal present. While the project embraces the universalism of capitalist realities and their imperial foundations, it is only through the concrete expressions and everyday realities of life that the universal architecture of global capitalism can be assessed. Ultimately, linking colonialism with contemporary capitalism formally carves out new “ways beyond” the erasure, paralysis, and the anxiety of the crushing force of dominating world-systems by embracing a politics of refusal, allyship, solidarity, and the bolstering of a “collective intelligence” that comes from the systematic appraisal of cruel aesthetics.
Item Open Access Cumulative stress in childhood is associated with blunted reward-related brain activity in adulthood.(Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 2016-03) Hanson, JL; Albert, WD; Iselin, AR; Carré, JM; Dodge, KA; Hariri, AREarly life stress (ELS) is strongly associated with negative outcomes in adulthood, including reduced motivation and increased negative mood. The mechanisms mediating these relations, however, are poorly understood. We examined the relation between exposure to ELS and reward-related brain activity, which is known to predict motivation and mood, at age 26, in a sample followed since kindergarten with annual assessments. Using functional neuroimaging, we assayed individual differences in the activity of the ventral striatum (VS) during the processing of monetary rewards associated with a simple card-guessing task, in a sample of 72 male participants. We examined associations between a cumulative measure of ELS exposure and VS activity in adulthood. We found that greater levels of cumulative stress during childhood and adolescence predicted lower reward-related VS activity in adulthood. Extending this general developmental pattern, we found that exposure to stress early in development (between kindergarten and grade 3) was significantly associated with variability in adult VS activity. Our results provide an important demonstration that cumulative life stress, especially during this childhood period, is associated with blunted reward-related VS activity in adulthood. These differences suggest neurobiological pathways through which a history of ELS may contribute to reduced motivation and increased negative mood.Item Open Access Differential predictability of four dimensions of affect intensity.(Cogn Emot, 2012) Rubin, David C; Hoyle, Rick H; Leary, Mark RIndividual differences in affect intensity are typically assessed with the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Previous factor analyses suggest that the AIM is comprised of four weakly correlated factors: Positive Affectivity, Negative Reactivity, Negative Intensity and Positive Intensity or Serenity. However, little data exist to show whether its four factors relate to other measures differently enough to preclude use of the total scale score. The present study replicated the four-factor solution and found that subscales derived from the four factors correlated differently with criterion variables that assess personality domains, affective dispositions, and cognitive patterns that are associated with emotional reactions. The results show that use of the total AIM score can obscure relationships between specific features of affect intensity and other variables and suggest that researchers should examine the individual AIM subscales.Item Open Access Disputes over memory ownership: What memories are disputed?(Genes Brain Behav, 2006) Sheen, M; Kemp, S; Rubin, DCThe ownership of memories is sometimes disputed, particularly by twins. Examination of 77 disputed memories, 71 provided by twins, showed that most of the remembered events are negative and that the disputants appear to be self-serving. They claim for themselves memories for achievements and suffered misfortunes but are more likely to give away memories of personal wrongdoing. The research suggests that some of the memories in which we play a leading role might in fact have been the experiences of others.Item Open Access Domain-General Affect: Neural Mechanisms and Clinical Implications(2014) Winecoff, Amy AileenEmotions guide the way individuals interact with the world, influencing nearly every psychological process from attention, to learning, to metacognition. Constructionist models of emotion posit that emotions arise out of combinations of more general psychological ingredients. These psychological ingredients, however, also form the building blocks of other affective responses such as subjective reactions to rewarding and social stimuli. Here, I propose a domain-general account of affective functioning; I contend that subjective responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli all depend on common psychological and neural mechanisms. I support this hypothesis with three independent studies using both a basic science approach and a clinical approach. In the first study (Chapter 2) I demonstrate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which has been implicated in encoding the value of primary, monetary, and social rewards, also encodes the hedonic value of emotional stimuli. In addition to showing that the mechanisms responsible for processing affective information are shared across reward and emotional processing, I also discuss the relevance of a domain-general constructionist account of affect for clinical disorders. In particular, I hypothesize that in anorexia nervosa (AN), affective disturbances should be manifest across responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I provide empirical evidence for this conclusion by demonstrating that when viewing social stimuli, women with a history of AN show disturbances in the insula, a brain region that is responsible for interoceptive and affective processing. This suggests that the interpersonal difficulties frequently observed in patients with AN may be due to biases in domain-general affective responses. In Chapter 5, I support this conclusion by showing that individual differences in harm avoidance in healthy women, women with a current diagnosis of AN, and women who have recovered from AN explain the relationship between disordered eating and social dysfunction. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective affective responses to rewarding, emotional, and social information all rely on common mechanisms as would be suggested by a domain-general theory of affect. Furthermore, the application of a constructionist domain-general account of affect can help to explain the fundamental nature of affective disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as AN.
Item Open Access Effects of varenicline and cognitive bias modification on neural response to smoking-related cues: study protocol for a randomized controlled study.(Trials, 2014-10-07) Attwood, Angela S; Williams, Tim; Adams, Sally; McClernon, Francis J; Munafò, Marcus RBACKGROUND: Smoking-related cues can trigger drug-seeking behaviors, and computer-based interventions that reduce cognitive biases towards such cues may be efficacious and cost-effective cessation aids. In order to optimize such interventions, there needs to be better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the effects of cognitive bias modification (CBM). Here we present a protocol for an investigation of the neural effects of CBM and varenicline in non-quitting daily smokers. METHODS/DESIGN: We will recruit 72 daily smokers who report smoking at least 10 manufactured cigarettes or 15 roll-ups per day and who smoke within one hour of waking. Participants will attend two sessions approximately one week apart. At the first session participants will be screened for eligibility and randomized to receive either varenicline or a placebo over a seven-day period. On the final drug-taking day (day seven) participants will attend a second session and be further randomized to one of three CBM conditions (training towards smoking cues, training away from smoking cues, or control training). Participants will then undergo a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan during which they will view smoking-related pictorial cues. Primary outcome measures are changes in cognitive bias as measured by the visual dot-probe task, and neural responses to smoking-related cues. Secondary outcome measures will be cognitive bias as measured by a transfer task (modified Stroop test of smoking-related cognitive bias) and subjective mood and cigarette craving. DISCUSSION: This study will add to the relatively small literature examining the effects of CBM in addictions. It will address novel questions regarding the neural effects of CBM. It will also investigate whether varenicline treatment alters neural response to smoking-related cues. These findings will inform future research that can develop behavioral treatments that target relapse prevention. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered with Current Controlled Trials: ISRCTN65690030. Registered on 30 January 2014.Item Open Access Hedonic Benefits of Experiential Preparation(2007-07-24) Lieb, Daniel StephenWhile a vast amount of research in marketing has examined how information prior to purchase helps consumers to make purchase decisions, relatively little work has considered how marketers can increase the value consumers derive from subsequent experiences using this information. This dissertation develops a construct called "experiential preparation" that describes how consumers can increase the hedonic benefit of their experiences. This dissertation defines "experiential preparation" as any mechanism that allows consumers to familiarize themselves with upcoming experiences in advance of consumption, while the "preparation effect" refers to the increase in liking for an event due to experiential preparation.In a series of ten experimental studies this dissertation demonstrates that experiential preparation increases satisfaction, particularly where the respondent is in a positive mood. It also identifies the primary mechanism through which experiential preparation works, showing that increased satisfaction is fully mediated by fluency. These effects occurred across a range of experiences and modes of preparation. In all the studies, participants viewed feature-length and short, films and read short stories. Participants who engaged in experiential preparation received previews in the form of plot summaries or actual excerpts from the films and stories. In all studies, participants reported their enjoyment for the experiences, and, in several studies additional preference measures were collected. Finally, measures were developed to test for the ways in which fluency mediates and positive moods moderate the preparation effect.This dissertation is organized in three chapters. In Chapter One, experiential preparation and the preparation effect are defined, and background literature is discussed. Chapter Two analyses the results of the ten studies thematically around various mechanisms, some of which have a significant impact on the preparation effect, and some, little impact. Chapter Three presents the studies' results in detail.Item Open Access Heuristics for Truth Across the Lifespan(2018) Brashier, Nadia M.Misleading claims surround us – we encounter them in news stories, advertising campaigns, and political propaganda. How do people separate facts from fiction? Decades of work implicate fluency, or subjective ease. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus more truthful, than new ones (i.e., illusory truth). This dissertation identifies additional cues for truth and takes a lifespan perspective. Older adults accumulate impressive amounts of knowledge (which may protect them), but also unduly attend to positive information (which may leave them vulnerable to emotional appeals). In two experiments, older adults exhibited illusory truth only when they lacked knowledge about claims, unlike young adults. Three additional experiments encouraged young adults to “stick with” what they knew. Evaluating truth at exposure prompted young adults to use their knowledge later, wiping out the illusion. Three final experiments disproved the idea that positivity “feels like” truth. Young adults exhibited a negativity bias, where negative faces made claims seem less true than neutral ones. Neither positive nor negative faces swayed older adults’ judgments. These results inform many theoretical perspectives – from fluency and referential theories of truth, to dual-process and socioemotional selectivity theories of aging. They also have important practical implications for preventing and correcting misconceptions in a “post-truth world,” where falsehoods travel farther and faster than the truth.
Item Open Access Investigating Cognitive/Affective/Sleep disturbance symptoms in Patients Receiving High-Dose Interleukin-2 Therapy(2018) Mann, TaraPatients undergoing intensive treatments for life-limiting chronic illnesses such as cancer often experience severe cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms. Immunotherapies such as high-dose Interleukin-2 (IL-2) can result in severe alterations in cognition, affect, and sleep. These alterations not only prevent patients from receiving their full course of treatment but also severely impact the quality of life of patients and their care partners. A mixed-method case study approach was used to investigate the trajectory of these symptoms from three key informants (the patient receiving IL-2, the care partner, and the primary nurse) in ten IL-2 cases over up to four treatment hospitalizations. Quantitative measurement scores and qualitative reports of symptom change were compiled to understand the symptom trajectory within and across treatment hospitalizations.
This dissertation includes a systematic literature review in Chapter 2 that highlights the lack of trajectory analysis surrounding cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms in patients undergoing IL-2, as well as the gravity and impact that these symptoms have on patients and their families. Chapter 3 features the study team’s evaluation of methods using a case study approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data from one patient, care partner, and primary nurse as a case triad to examine cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms one patient diagnosed with MRCC experienced during one hospitalization for IL-2 treatment and served as the foundation for the larger study. Chapters 4 and 5 synthesized data from case informants in the larger study and described the trajectory of cognitive symptoms and affective and sleep disturbance symptoms, respectively, that patients receiving IL-2 therapy for renal cell carcinoma experienced within and across hospitalizations.
Cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms are often synergistic and interdependent. Of these symptoms, fatigue and anxiety were the most frequently reported, worsening with each subsequent dose of IL-2, suggesting a cumulative dosing effect. Interventions should be uniquely designed to target patients receiving IL-2, care partners, nurses, and the healthcare team with the aim of reducing commonly reported yet severely incapacitating symptoms. A reduction in these symptoms can reduce other cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms, improving the patient’s overall symptom trajectory experience.
Item Open Access Learning from falling.(Child Dev, 2006-01) Joh, Amy S; Adolph, Karen EWalkers fall frequently, especially during infancy. Children (15-, 21-, 27-, 33-, and 39-month-olds) and adults were tested in a novel foam pit paradigm to examine age-related changes in the relationship between falling and prospective control of locomotion. In trial 1, participants walked and fell into a deformable foam pit marked with distinct visual cues. Although children in all 5 age groups required multiple trials to learn to avoid falling, the number of children who showed adult-like, 1-trial learning increased with age. Exploration and alternative locomotor strategies increased dramatically on learning criterion trials and displays of negative affect were limited. Learning from falling is discussed in terms of the immediate and long-term effects of falling on prospective control of locomotion.Item Open Access Life scripts help to maintain autobiographical memories of highly positive, but not highly negative, events.(Mem Cognit, 2003-01) Rubin, David C; Berntsen, DortheA representative sample of 1,307 respondents between the ages of 20 and 94 was asked how old they were when they felt most afraid, most proud, most jealous, most in love, and most angry. They were also asked when they had experienced their most important event and whether this event was positive or negative. In general, there was a reminiscence "bump" for positive but not negative events. To provide data on life scripts, 87 psychology students answered the same questions for a hypothetical 70-year-old. The undergraduates were more confident in dating positive than in dating negative events, and when they were confident, the distribution of responses predicted the survey data. The results support the idea of culturally shared life scripts for positive but not negative events, which structure retrieval processes and spaced practice.Item Open Access Love and the Racial Enemy: Theological Possibilities of Racial Reconciliation Between Black and White US Christians(2018) Wickware, MarvinIn this dissertation, I examine the widespread failure of racial reconciliation work between black and white Christians in US American churches. I treat such failure as a failure of love, specifically the failure of black and white Christians to love each other as enemies. This sets two primary tasks for the dissertation. First, I work to understand this failure of love. Drawing on black studies—on the work of Frank Wilderson, in particular—I examine what I call the racial enemy relation, which I argue is a fundamental antagonism between black people and white people. This antagonism is grounded in and perpetuates white supremacist systems of violence and exploitation. I turn to affect theory to argue that this enemy relation is obscured by a distorted love. At the heart of this distorted love is what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. In short, I argue that racial reconciliation work fails insofar as Christians embrace an idea of love that confuses good feelings with good relations and, in doing so, are unable to confront the racial enemy relation with faithful love.
Second, I give a Christian theological account of faithful love that can guide intervention into the distorted love of white supremacy and promote a constructive approach to love of the racial enemy. In conversation primarily with black, womanist, and feminist theologies, I argue for a notion of faithful love as the embrace of the lover’s need for the beloved, while holding such love accountable to self-love, love for God, and God’s love for those who suffer. I ground this account of love in an understanding of divine love as driven by God’s need for creation, including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that in confronting the racial enemy, Christians are called to embrace their need for their enemy and to pursue that need toward conditions of mutuality in their broader society.
Item Open Access More Than a Feeling: How the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Reformed the Passions(2020) Rogers, Hannah LeeBy the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, however, the passions returned with a vengeance — as indicated by the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the Brontë sisters. What we now call “the emotions” had suddenly slipped out from under the control of individual reason and become a force of nature. As such, they could be held responsible both for keeping the individual alive and for the species’ ability to prosper and expand in number. Michel Foucault has offered perhaps the clearest articulation of how the century that followed developed new forms of government that both taught individuals to manage themselves by observing disciplinary regimens and regulated the unruliness of entire populations by means of biopolitical policies. But while, like Hirschman, Foucault links the redefinition of sexuality and how behaviors and effects were classified and managed directly to the emergence of industrial capitalism, neither he nor Hirschman consider the novel instrumental in their respective accounts of the passions. Novels, as the self-anointed discourse of personal experience, were ideally positioned to respond both critically and creatively to the disruptions of daily life that began in the late eighteenth century. In the decades that followed, I will show, the novel successively updated the causes and effects of emotional experience to accommodate the transition to an industrial society from an agrarian way of life supported by commerce and early colonization.
From Jane Eyre to Daniel Deronda, the novel features a protagonist whose biographical destiny depends on a form of yearning well in excess of the prevailing social classification system. This unnamable sense of belonging elsewhere is indeed so in excess of then existing codes of conduct and self-expression that it escapes the confines of the individual and pervades each habitat it enters with a sense of lack and constriction. The natural principles Charles Darwin first discovered during his landmark Voyage of the Beagle gave him the grounds, by 1872, to conclude that just as any species, man or animal, must physically adapt to its environment, so too must its feelings. Darwin understood that these affects — a term I use for feelings that have not been codified as one of the then recognized emotions — allow the species to develop new relations among themselves to enable survival. Over the century, the novel followed this same principle perhaps more so than any other form of writing, as it sought to alter the basis of human feeling to accommodate the material conditions of existence. My introduction explains how the novel carried out this project by capturing and reforming feelings in excess of accepted social roles and reworked both feelings and roles to form emotional ties capable of sustaining domestic life: first, during the early decades of the nineteenth century as inherited land lost its status as the coin of the realm, then in the economic crisis called the Hungry Forties, and finally during the period when England’s economy shifted from the English countryside to the imperial metropole.
Item Open Access People who expect to enter psychotherapy are prone to believing that they have forgotten memories of childhood trauma and abuse.(Memory, 2010-07) Rubin, David C; Boals, AdrielWe asked 1004 undergraduates to estimate both the probability that they would enter therapy and the probability that they experienced but could not remember incidents of potentially life-threatening childhood traumas or physical and sexual abuse. We found a linear relation between the expectation of entering therapy and the belief that one had, but cannot now remember, childhood trauma and abuse. Thus individuals who are prone to seek psychotherapy are also prone to accept a suggested memory of childhood trauma or abuse as fitting their expectations. In multiple regressions predicting the probability of forgotten memories of childhood traumas and abuse, the expectation of entering therapy remained as a substantial predictor when self-report measures of mood, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder symptom severity, and trauma exposure were included.Item Open Access Self-discrepancy theory as a transdiagnostic framework: A meta-analysis of self-discrepancy and psychopathology.(Psychological bulletin, 2019-04) Mason, Tyler B; Smith, Kathryn E; Engwall, Allison; Lass, Alisson; Mead, Michael; Sorby, Morgan; Bjorlie, Kayla; Strauman, Timothy J; Wonderlich, StephenSelf-discrepancy theory (SDT) is a model of the relations between the self and affect which has been applied to the study of different types of psychopathology including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. Although the theory itself is compatible with a transdiagnostic perspective on psychopathology, to date no systematic review of the literature has examined that possibility. We conducted a meta-analysis that synthesized the literature on self-discrepancy and psychopathology across a heterogeneous range of 70 studies. Results showed a small-to-medium association between self-discrepancy and psychopathology that was highly robust and similar in magnitude across domains. Furthermore, self-discrepancy was related to higher levels of a range of negative emotions and lower levels of a range of positive emotions. Meta-regression models showed that the effects were greater for actual:ideal discrepancy compared with actual:ought discrepancy for both depression and anxiety, which was contrary to the tenets of SDT which suggests specific associations between actual:ideal discrepancy and depression and actual:ought discrepancy and anxiety. Measurement type (i.e., idiographic vs. nomothetic) was a significant predictor of the effects for depression and anxiety, such that nomothetic measures evidenced greater associations compared with idiographic measures. Our findings could suggest that self-discrepancy represents a contributory factor related to a number of psychiatric disorders. However, the tenet of SDT suggesting unique associations between actual:ideal and actual:ought discrepancy and anxiety and depression respectively was not supported. Implications are discussed for future research on self-discrepancy and psychopathology including the study of mechanistic frameworks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).