Grief is a reaction to loss that is observed across human cultures and even in other species. While the particular expressions of grief vary significantly, universal aspects include experiences of emotional pain and frequent remembering of what was lost. Despite its prevalence, and its obvious nature, considering grief from a functional perspective is puzzling: Why do we grieve? Why is it painful?

INTRODUCTION Relapse rates in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD) are particularly high following inpatient treatment. Innovative strategies should specifically target the transitional gap between completion of inpatient treatment and uptake of standard continuing care. This study aimed to determine whether Appstinence, a digital approach that combines a smartphone app intervention with adjunct

INTRODUCTION Coronary heart disease (CHD) has serious implications for patients´ quality of life (QoL). Psychological distress affects 15 to 40% of patients with CHD and is robustly associated with poorer prognosis. Blended collaborative care (BCC), a telephone-delivered intervention involving non-physician care managers that address both psychological and medical factors can be applied for secondary

OBJECTIVE Depressed patients often experience interpersonal distress. Understanding how interpersonal distress and depressive symptoms are associated may have implications for understanding the etiology and maintenance of depression, as well as for treatment. In this naturalistic psychotherapy study, we explored whether change in depressive symptoms predicted subsequent change in interpersonal distress

OBJECTIVE This study investigated two proposed change mechanisms in preference accommodation, thought to improve psychotherapy outcomes: a direct effect of a match between clients' initial preferences and their subsequent experiences of the therapy activities, or a mediated "matching effect" operating through the working alliance. Furthermore, the study explored whether the effect of a preference-experience

OBJECTIVE This individual participant data meta-analysis aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy with a trauma focus (CBT-TF) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, we examined the effect of moderators on PTSD symptom severity. METHOD This study included randomized controlled trials comparing CBT-TF to an inactive or active comparison group for adults

OBJECTIVE Mindfulness interventions (MIs) train nonjudgmental attention to present-moment experience and aim to improve mental health and well-being. The evidence for their effect on interpersonal relationships is promising but uncertain. This study examines the effect of MIs on couple relationship satisfaction (RS). METHOD Randomized controlled trials of MIs including RS were selected based on systematic

Manipulation plays a critical role in working memory, wherein understanding how items are represented during manipulation is a fundamental question. Previous studies on manipulation have primarily assumed independent representations by default (independent hypothesis). Here, we propose the ensemble hypothesis to challenge this conventional notion, suggesting that items are represented as ensembles

Causal explanations are a key component of human cognition. While we possess certain causal models of the world that offer satisfactory explanations for a range of phenomena, our cognitive capacities have their limits when dealing with the complexities of the world, leaving the causes of many events elusive. In this article, I integrate ethnographic and historical evidence to show that, despite our

A fundamental question in the psychological sciences is the degree to which culture shapes core cognitive processes-perhaps none more foundational than how we perceive the world around us. A dramatic and oft-cited "case study" of culture's power in this regard is the Müller-Lyer illusion, which depicts two lines of equal length but with arrowheads pointing either inward or outward, creating the illusion

The self had a central role in early theories of psychopathology and has long been of interest to mental health practitioners. However, these early theories typically made what we consider to be two key errors: they conceptualized mental ill-health as constituting discrete categories of illness, and they conceptualized the self as inherently individualized and stable. There is a growing recognition

This comprehensive mixed-method review synthesised the trauma-eating disorder (trauma-ED) research across six objectives addressing; prevalence and risk, covariates, clinical characteristics, theories, lived experience, and intervention.

Human concept learning is known to be impaired by conceptual complexity: Simpler concepts are easier to learn, and more complex ones are more difficult. However, the simplicity bias has been studied almost exclusively in the context of deterministic concepts defined over Boolean features and is comparatively unexplored in the more general case of probabilistic concepts defined over continuous features

OBJECTIVE This study aims at improving dropout and treatment nonresponse prevention by optimizing the performance of models for their prediction through the integration of item-level data. METHOD Routine data from 1,277 patients (Mage = 36.95, SDage = 13.64; 64.77% female) treated at Osnabrück University was used to train and evaluate 20 machine-learning algorithms and five ensemble models. Measures

According to chunking theories, children discover their first words by extracting subsequences embedded in their continuous input. However, the mechanisms proposed in these accounts are often incompatible with data from other areas of language development. We present a new theory to connect the chunking accounts of word discovery with the broader developmental literature. We argue that (a) children

Introduction Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe and prevalent psychiatric disorder. Mentalization-based therapy (MBT) is an evidence-based intervention for BPD, which is often delivered as a long-term psychotherapy program for BPD. We previously published a randomized clinical trial assessing short-term versus long-term MBT for BPD 16 months after randomization as the primary follow-up

BACKGROUND Stress-related disorders such as adjustment disorder (AD) and exhaustion disorder (ED) are associated with substantial suffering and high societal costs. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a promising treatment for symptom reduction but has not been rigorously compared with other active treatments. This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of CBT compared to an active control treatment

Mental disorders are highly prevalent worldwide. Unfortunately, most people with these disorders do not receive any treatment. This is due in part to a large set of barriers that impede treatment delivery. An initial barrier is the perception that one does not need treatment. Perceived need for treatment (PNFT) refers to whether an individual sees a need to obtain an intervention for their mental health

Autistic meltdowns are fits of intense frustration and often physical violence elicited by sensory and cognitive stressors. Despite the high prevalence of meltdowns among autistic individuals, the neural mechanisms that underlie this response are not yet well understood. This has thus far hampered progress toward a dedicated therapeutic intervention-beyond traditional medications-that limits their

Anhedonia is a lack or loss of pleasure in daily life. This is the first systematic review to investigate anhedonia in mental health research with a focus on experience sampling methodology (ESM). The review aimed to identify how anhedonia is conceptualized and measured in ESM research, how it is experienced during daily life, and the quality of reporting in the published literature. To generate a

Chronic illness (CI) burdens both the patient and their romantic partner. CI management has been viewed as a dyadic process by theorists and clinical practitioners. Dyadic coping (DC) refers to the processes where one partner aids the other or both partners work together to cope with stress. We used the meta-analytical actor–partner interdependence model and its extension of actor–partner interdependence

A comprehensive understanding of specific factors contributing to variability in responsiveness of children with autism to interventions is paramount for making evidence-based clinical and policy decisions. This meta-analysis examined child and family characteristics, as well as intervention design factors, associated with outcomes of behavioral interventions for children with autism. A systematic

Bereavement can lead to complicated grief reactions including clinically significant symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress (PTSS) post-loss. Gaining insight into specific and shared risk factors for these complicated grief reactions can help identify individuals needing support.

OBJECTIVE Inhibitory learning models emphasize the central role of threat expectancy violation during exposure therapy. However, exposure is often implemented alongside cognitive restructuring, which reduces threat expectancies before exposure, reducing the potential for expectancy violation. This study examined whether the timing of expectancy violation (before/during exposure) and magnitude of expectancy

OBJECTIVE The growing demand for emergency department (ED) care for suicidal ideation and attempts in adolescents calls for effective interventions preventing post-ED recurrence of suicidal crises. Parents are tasked with implementing postdischarge suicide prevention recommendations, often with little support. To address this need, this study examined a parent-facing texting intervention targeting

OBJECTIVE To investigate if Sessions 1-4 Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) scores are associated with treatment outcome and if there is a differential effect between person-centered experiential therapy (PCET) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). METHOD A secondary data analysis of a prospectively registered and ethically approved pragmatic, noninferiority randomized controlled trial comparing

Traditionally, psychotherapy distinguishes between "common factors" and "specific mechanisms." Common factors can be defined as "unrecognized factors in any therapeutic situation-factors that may be even more important than those being purposely employed." Specific mechanisms, by contrast, are deliberately targeted by given therapeutic approaches as the primary drivers of change. This distinction is

We propose that a state of psychological predeath precedes death by suicide, and that this phenomenon results from the undermining of subjectively experienced contingency and thus of agency (i.e., the death of agency). A consequence of the death of agency is not the dulling of awareness overall, but rather, specifically of one's subjective sense of existence (i.e., the feeling of subjective existence)

The working alliance is one of the most robust predictors of outcomes in adult psychotherapy. Since the alliance is often challenging to establish and maintain in psychotherapy with adolescents, conducting high-quality assessments of the alliance using sound measures in this population is critical. Still, measurement instruments developed for adults cannot be directly transferred to adolescent samples

INTRODUCTION Psycho-spiritual distress remains one of the most prevalent and pressing concerns throughout the cancer survivorship journey, impacting their existential integrity. Various yoga interventions have been examined for their potential to alleviate this distress, but their effects in cancer patients varied. METHODS We searched seven databases (PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled

Verbal working memory is supported by semantic knowledge. One manifestation of this is the rich pattern of semantic similarity effects found in immediate serial recall tasks. These effects differ from the effects of similarity on other dimensions (e.g., phonological similarity), which renders them difficult to explain. We propose a comprehensive mechanistic explanation of semantic similarity effects

In this article, we advance the thesis, called the cultural continuity hypothesis, which states that heritage culture retention represents an important psychological motivation that underlies a wide array of human behaviors and that is important for positive psychosocial functioning. Cultural continuity entails the purposeful preservation of salient features of one's heritage culture across time and

Self-regulation is a goal-directed behavior involving adaptive decision making. It consists of multiple cognitive and motor skills, is shaped by complex sociocultural environments, and has short- and long-term consequences for child outcomes. However, most of what we know about the development of self-regulation comes from research conducted among communities that are unrepresentative of most of the

Cognition is a complex system of interacting components. Late-life cognitive decline is often explained as a degradation of the interconnectivity among these components. Evidence from the aging mental lexicon corroborates this interpretation, as older adults produce higher entropy responses in free association tasks, appear to have sparser free association networks, and judge objects to be less similar

Nearly 30 years ago, Steele and Aronson (1995) proposed the concept of stereotype threat. Despite the rich literature on the topic, the robustness and significance of stereotype threat effects face scrutiny due to unsuccessful replications and meta-analyses. This article moves beyond methodological issues to address potential conceptual challenges that may underlie these difficulties in assessing stereotype

Engagement in healthy and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours are related to a range of mental health outcomes. Most existing research has focussed on individual lifestyle behaviours, so it is not clear the extent to which clusters of healthy lifestyle behaviours relate to mental health outcomes. Therefore, this study aimed to systematically review and quantitatively synthesise research which have examined

INTRODUCTION Emotion dysregulation is prevalent in autistic adults without intellectual disability, whereby it has been associated with heightened non-suicidal self-injury and suicidal behaviours. Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) has shown to be feasible and preliminary findings suggest that it might reduce emotion dysregulation in this population. Yet studies evaluating the efficacy of DBT in this

INTRODUCTION Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is an established treatment for refractory major depressive disorder (MDD), but treatment outcomes vary substantially from person to person. Recent evidence suggests that incorporating neuroimaging-based targeting may help improve clinical outcomes. Here, we report the initial clinical

A recent line of research has shown that humans and rodents can monitor errors in their timing behavior in individual trials. This ability is called temporal error monitoring (TEM). Electrophysiological studies showed that TEM-related neural signals of error are present before the timing behavior is manifested. These results have crucial implications for the function and modeling of TEM as they show

Memory is formed through repeated action and perception. The primitive manifestation of this type of memory in infants has been observed through a procedure called mobile paradigm. Three-month-old infants can retain behavioral changes during interaction with a mobile for a week without reminders, and this retention can be prolonged for 2-4 weeks with reminders. However, precisely what infants can remember

Dispositional mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions have been linked to emotion regulation and may reduce anger and aggression. The present set of four meta-analyses examined and quantified correlational relationships between trait mindfulness, trait anger, and trait aggression, as well as the effects of experimental mindfulness-based interventions on anger and aggression. These meta-analyses

McIntyre et al. (2024) conducted a systematic review of mental imagery measures in emotional disorders using the COSMIN framework. While their work is a valuable contribution, several methodological issues raise concerns about the validity of their conclusions. This commentary discusses three key issues: (1) potential misinterpretation of scale construct definitions, (2) inconsistencies in study selection

Several meta-analyses on hand preference in mental and neurodevelopmental disorders have been published in the last decade. Some disorders, like schizophrenia, have been associated with increased rates of atypical hand preference (i.e., non-right-, left-, or mixed-hand preference)-but others, like depression, have not. To identify overarching patterns between hand preference and psychopathology and

Humans often face moral dilemmas posing a conflict between two motives: deontology (rule-following, e.g., "thou shalt not kill") and utilitarianism (greater-good-maximization, e.g., sacrificing one for many). A long-standing debate concerns the influence of cognitive processing on moral judgments in such dilemmas. One popular dual process account suggests that intuition favors "deontological" judgments

The upsurge in the prevalence of contested, ambiguous, and difficult-to-diagnose illnesses presents challenges for clinicians who too often respond by invalidating patients' symptoms. Although numerous qualitative studies have reported the effects of invalidation on patients' psychological and behavioral outcomes, this body of research has not been systematically reviewed. Informed by Linehan's (1993)

Reduced autobiographical memory (AM) specificity, characterized by difficulty recalling specific past events, is a feature of multiple psychiatric disorders. While meta-analyses indicate that reduced AM specificity can predict future symptom severity, its role as a premorbid risk factor for mental illness onset in young people remains unclear. Our preregistered individual participant data meta-analysis

Extinction learning refers to a reduction in fear to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that previously signaled a threat, but now occurs without the expected threat. This mechanism is core to exposure-based treatments for anxiety-related disorders. Enhancing the generalization of extinction learning is crucial for improving treatment outcomes, as it helps reduce fear across a range of generalization stimuli

Models are often evaluated when their behavior is at its closest to a single, sometimes averaged, set of empirical results, but this evaluation neglects the fact that both model and human behavior can be heterogeneous. Here, we develop a measure, g-distance, which considers model adequacy as the extent to which models exhibit a similar range of behaviors to the humans they model. We define g as the

The efficacy of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatments might be hampered by individual differences. In order to maximize treatment efficacy in existing and newly developed interventions, controlling for individual variables is essential in treatment research. Given the marked physiological correlates of PTSD, biomarkers represent a promising solution. Throughout the PTSD literature, biomarkers

The use of medicinal cannabis to improve mental health is increasing globally, both in clinical settings and through self-medication. This involves a variety of products containing ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD), THC + CBD combinations, or derivatives. This review provides an up-to-date overview of the positive and negative effects of medicinal cannabis on mental health diagnoses

INTRODUCTION Brief concentrated exposure and response prevention (cERP) has shown promise as an efficacious treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with higher response and remission rates compared to the first-line treatment. However, the mechanisms driving this success remain unclear. METHODS This longitudinal study included 56 patients with OCD who underwent cERP (Bergen 4-day treatment)

Serious parental physical or mental illness significantly increases the risk of adverse adjustment outcomes in adolescents and young adults. This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluates the efficacy of psychosocial interventions targeting this vulnerable group. Eligible randomized control trials (RCTs) were searched through the Medline, Web of Science, PsycINFO, PsycArticles, Cinahl, and ProQuest

Interpersonal problems are a fundamental feature of depression, but study-level meta-analyses of their association with treatment outcome have been limited by heterogeneity in primary studies' analyses and reported results. We conducted a pre-registered individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) to examine this relationship for adult depression. This meta-analytic strategy can reduce variability

OBJECTIVE Depression is an ongoing public health issue impacting over 5 million American adolescents. Although prevention has been shown to be an effective strategy in reducing the incidence of depressive symptoms, depression prevention programs have been developed and tested in largely White populations. Thus, the effects of such programs in diverse groups are understudied, though research shows adapted

OBJECTIVE To explore which cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) self-help app usage predicted depression during a selective prevention trial. METHOD A recent controlled trial (ECoWeB-PREVENT) randomized young people aged 16-22, at increased risk for depression because of elevated worry/rumination, negative appraisals, and/or rejection sensitivity but without past or current history of major depression

OBJECTIVE Depression and anxiety are major mental health concerns for college students, and accessible, low-cost interventions are urgently needed. Although traditional treatments focus on negative emotions, there is growing support for the efficacy of positive emotion-focused interventions. We extended this prior work by developing a peer-delivered brief promoting positive emotion (BPPE) intervention