psychopathology-and-treatment.
44 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-428 | How effective psychological treatments work: mechanisms of change in cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond | A history-and-argument paper. It separates common factors from mechanisms of change, holds that a treatment’s success does not validate its theory, and proposes one mechanism for all effective therapy: the person, “stuck” in an exaggerated negative meaning (Theory A) maintained by their own reactions, builds and tests a less threatening alternative (Theory B), a meaning-making flexibility. The proposal is argued from clinical examples and cited trials. The paper itself says mechanism research has not yet met Kazdin’s standards. | Read |
| NOTE-429 | The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review | Gross’s founding review. Emotions are modulable response tendencies. Regulation, defined as influencing which emotions one has, when, and how they are experienced and expressed, is split from coping, mood regulation and defense, and sorted into five families by where it acts in emotion generation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation. The paper’s own open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Read |
| NOTE-430 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | RFT stated for clinicians. Human relating is bidirectional and arbitrarily applicable, a generalized operant under contextual control, with mutual and combinatorial entailment and transformation of function. Relating relations explains metaphor, rules are networks whose coordination with events regulates behaviour, and the self is content, process and context. These are offered as the reason direct-contingency behaviour therapy is “inadequate”, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT readings explicitly labelled heuristic. | Read |
| NOTE-431 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | The ACT model, read in an early manuscript. Psychopathology is psychological inflexibility: cognitive fusion (fed by literality, reason-giving and emotional control) supports experiential avoidance, and both displace present-moment contact and values. Six processes restore flexibility. The manuscript’s evidence: AAQ correlations with distress (21 studies), component studies of acceptance and defusion, mediation in seven trials, and weighted outcome effect sizes (d = .49 post and .69 follow-up against active treatments). | Read |
| NOTE-432 | Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness | Psychiatric etiology is multilevel, non-aggregative and full of causal loops, so law-based explanation fails and so do both hard reduction and hard emergence. Mechanistic explanation proceeds by local decomposition and difficult reassembly. Following Marr, biology implements the functions psychology describes and does not replace them. The argument is philosophical, illustrated by an alcohol-dependence sketch and cited findings; it reports no data of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-435 | A Network Theory of Mental Disorders | Borsboom states the network theory as five principles: complexity, symptom-component correspondence, direct causal connections between symptoms, disorders as tightly coupled symptom clusters, and hysteresis. Disorder is an alternative stable state of a strongly connected network that outlasts its trigger; health is the stable state of a weakly connected one. Treatment is symptom, external-field or network intervention. The evidence offered is indirect, and the theory is presented as an organizing framework, not a fitted model. | Read |
| NOTE-436 | Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health | A narrative review that defines psychological flexibility by four dynamic abilities (adapting to situations, reconfiguring resources, shifting perspective, balancing domains). Flexible regulation beats any fixed strategy (Bonanno 2004; Cheng 2001). Inflexibility marks depression and anxiety, and cardiac vagal control may integrate its forms. Causal direction is open. It recommends experience sampling and multi-informant measures over global self-report. | Read |
| NOTE-437 | The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy | A programme paper. Thirty years of DSM-linked trials never turned syndromes into diseases, so evidence-based therapy should target theory-derived, empirically supported processes of change with procedures shown to move them. Its distinctive commitments are a falsification rule for models of change, moderated mediation as a basis for a new nosology, and an idiographic, functional-analytic diagnosis. It offers predictions and cited examples, not new data. | Read |
| NOTE-439 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Needs in SDT are innate psychological nutriments, identified functionally by the costs of their thwarting, not by individual differences in their strength. The three needs organize findings on intrinsic motivation and internalization, predict that both the “why” (autonomous vs controlled regulation) and the “what” (intrinsic vs extrinsic aspirations) of goals affect well-being, and explain need substitutes and rigid defences when needs are thwarted. Autonomy is self-organization, defended as an evolved, domain-general design feature. | Read |
| NOTE-440 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | The authors set out nine criteria a basic psychological need must meet, separate need frustration from mere lack of satisfaction, review need frustration’s costs (ill-being, compensatory behaviour, need substitutes) and propose it as transdiagnostic, review the interplay with sleep, food, sex and safety, map need-supportive and need-thwarting practices on a circumplex, and argue that the needs are universal in their effects (“output side”) while the practices that satisfy them vary (“input side”). Novelty, morality and beneficence are weighed as fourth needs and not yet admitted. | Read |
| NOTE-442 v2 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | SDT’s canonical short statement. Social contexts that support competence, autonomy and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation and let people internalize and integrate extrinsic regulations; controlling, rejecting or overchallenging contexts undermine intrinsic motivation and leave regulations external or introjected. Autonomy is graded: four kinds of extrinsic motivation lie on a continuum of relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell’s quasi-simplex). Basic needs are defined by their consequences for well-being, and need-deprivation is offered as a principal source of distress and psychopathology. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-453 | Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model | Schwartz’s short statement of the IFS model. A person is “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, parts forced into managerial, exiled or firefighting roles by experience, which can return to valuable roles. At the core is a Self with leadership qualities (the eight Cs), reached when parts “step back”, as in the founding case of “Diane”. The Self is an active healer, not a witness. A practitioner’s essay; its evidence is clinical experience. | Read |
| NOTE-457 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Chapter 1 only. Schwartz tells how IFS grew out of structural and strategic family therapy. Clients with bulimia described warring “parts”. Coercing parts made matters worse, and curiosity revealed that they protected the client. When interfering parts were asked to “step back”, a calm, compassionate “Self” appeared that needed no development. The chapter ends with eight essentials: ecological respect for protectors, Self-leadership, unblending, attention to polarizations, non-pathologizing burdens, movement between system levels, and innate self-healing. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-703 | Forssten et al. — One Giant Leap from Mouse to Man | A narrative review, by employees of a probiotics manufacturer, of the microbiota–gut–brain axis in mood. The routes in rodents are well documented. Faecal transplant from depressed humans partly transfers the phenotype to rodents. Human trials are mixed: some reductions in subjective stress in healthy volunteers, and several clean nulls for strains with strong preclinical records. It documents its own translational failures and ends more optimistically than they warrant. | Read |
| NOTE-766 | Linson et al. — Impaired context disambiguation in post-traumatic psychopathology | An active-inference model of PTSD as lost context disambiguation. An overly precise prior that one is in a harmful context makes the exploratory policy look uninformative. The agent attenuates its periphery, never gets the evidence that would correct the prior, and the belief sustains itself. Shown only in illustrative simulations, which also contrast exposure that restores context sensitivity with a precision-lowering drug that removes symptoms until it stops. | Read |
| NOTE-1000 | Seth — Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | An opinion article that extends predictive coding to interoception. Felt emotion is the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals. Prediction errors are registered in the anterior insula, and are also cancelled by autonomic action under attenuated precision. The experience of body ownership is the same inference run over interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. The evidence is indirect and cited: insula anticipation and error responses, false cardiac feedback, interoceptive sensitivity predicting rubber-hand susceptibility, and a heartbeat-synchronous virtual hand owned more. No direct test is claimed. | Read |
| NOTE-1094 | Psychopathy as a Clinical and Empirical Construct | The PCL-R’s items form four correlated factors, Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial, which pair into Factors 1 and 2 and are explained by one superordinate factor. Psychopathy is dimensional, its antisocial features belong to it as much as its affective ones, and the authors deny that any one component is its essence. Cleckley’s 1941/1976 profile is a clinical synopsis from an unrepresentative sample, not the standard the measure should be judged by. | Read |
| NOTE-1096 | Flayelle et al. — A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours | A narrative review and a taxonomy. Design features of six kinds of online service are linked, mostly by cross-sectional, qualitative or indirect evidence, to loss of control. They are sorted by the learning and control process each exploits. Model-free: reinforcement schedules and personalized triggers. Model-based: overvaluation, interference with deliberation, partial goal fulfilment, cognitive biases. Providers select features by their effect on use and revenue, and personalize them under informational asymmetry. For the record it maps closely onto the parts of the potential account: features that strengthen a cue-keyed ranking, move its reference course, falsify the user’s reading of progress, or pre-empt the other perspectives. | Read |
| NOTE-1101 | The current status of research on the structure of evaluative space | The evaluative space model restated by its authors. Positivity and negativity are separable systems whose combined output is a bipolar approach–avoid predisposition. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together. Coactivation is ambivalence, which is rare, arousing and behaviourally indeterminate, and gives the same net output as neutrality. Negativity has the higher gain and positivity the higher intercept, and both recalibrate with context. Evaluation is heterarchical, with higher levels able to override lower. | Read |
| NOTE-1102 | Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology | A commentary. Control theory adds to goal talk the need to perceive the present state and compare it with the goal. Psychopathology arises where the loop’s input, reference value, comparison or output is extreme or biased. The five factors are sensitivities to classes of goals. Valence tracks the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value, so approach and avoidance can each produce either sign. Confidence, doubt and disengagement lie outside the loop, in expectancy-value theory. | Read |
| NOTE-1109 | Berridge and Robinson — Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction | An invited review of the incentive-sensitization theory by its authors. ‘Wanting’ and ‘liking’ have dissociable brain systems. Drugs can sensitize the ‘wanting’ system so that it is lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts while ‘liking’ stays flat or falls. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose cognitive desire, run without report, and grow in abstinence, and the theory is being extended, on weak evidence, to behavioural addictions. For the record it is a mechanism for proxy-keyed potential in persons. It also shows that the addict case CLAIM-433 settles holds only if the sign of valence is read along the proxy. | Read |
| NOTE-1120 | Brown, Price & Dombrovski — Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty | A narrative review and theoretical proposal, with no new data and no simulation. Computational learning studies of anxiety (seven, not a systematic search) find altered adjustment of learning rate to kinds of uncertainty, mostly with aversive outcomes, rather than inflated threat learning or valuation. The authors propose that in aversive environments avoidance of uncertain states keeps their uncertainty high and so perpetuates itself, that anxiety amplifies this by misreading noise as change, and that exposure works by reducing the uncertainty, not the threat. It covers fear-based disorders and says it does not explain GAD. | Read |
| NOTE-1121 | Edwards et al. — Skills homework and phone coaching in a DBT intensive outpatient programme | A chart review of 56 of 88 patients in a Yale DBT intensive outpatient programme, kept because they finished a four-month cycle and gave enough diary-card data. Homework completion in months 1–3 correlated with larger drops in suicide and substance-use urges (r ≈ .35), and phone coaching with a larger drop in self-harm urges (r = .31); neither correlated with change in how often the behaviours occurred. Patients with no target behaviour in month 4 had completed more homework (91% against 80%); the coaching difference was not significant. Correlational, uncorrected for multiple comparisons. | Read |
| NOTE-1123 | De Kleine et al. — Impaired action-safety learning and excessive relief during avoidance | A cross-sectional comparison of 47 healthy controls with 139 treatment-seeking patients (33 OCD, 40 panic disorder with agoraphobia, 66 PTSD) in a picture-based avoidance task. OCD and PTSD patients pressed the avoidance button more to the safety cue and kept a higher expectancy of the aversive picture after effective avoidance; PDA and PTSD patients reported more relief when it was omitted. Relief was already higher before avoidance was available, and patients rated the pictures as more aversive. That low confidence in avoidance makes omissions surprising and the relief reinforces avoidance is the authors’ interpretation, not something the study tested. | Read |
| NOTE-1127 | Chou, Wilson & Smith — The influence of anxiety on exploration | A narrative review of computational modelling studies of anxiety and exploration, almost all in reward tasks and sub-clinical samples. In bandit tasks, directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety; random exploration shows no link; in foraging tasks, and in one task with a predator to check for, anxiety goes with less exploration. Results are inconsistent across tasks and measures and none has been replicated. | Read |
| NOTE-1128 | Goodson et al. — The standalone effect of safety behavior manipulations | A PROSPERO-registered review of 26 studies (2,048 participants, mean age 24.9, 26.6% male) that manipulated safety behaviours outside exposure; 19 entered four meta-analyses. Against control, reducing safety behaviours reduced them (d = 0.52 after one outlier was removed) and reduced symptoms (d = 0.43, k = 16; 0.31 after trim-and-fill, with significant Egger asymmetry). Instructed increases, all in non-treatment experiments, raised safety behaviours (d = 2.96) and symptoms (d = 0.65, five studies). The literature is mostly appearance concerns and social anxiety in young, non-clinical or subclinical samples. | Read |
| NOTE-1134 | Mancinelli & Bach — A systematic review of human avoidance learning | A PRISMA systematic review, not a meta-analysis, of 116 studies of avoidance learning in healthy humans with shock or noise (1939–2024). Avoidance is learned without terminating the CS, transfers by inference to stimuli never paired with harm, and persists when it can be performed, longest when it is most effective; this contradicts two-factor theory and favours expectancy and inference. But some avoidance persists after the US is visibly removed, which a purely inferential account does not predict. No clinical samples were included. | Read |
| NOTE-1136 | Zorowitz, Momennejad & Daw — Anxiety, avoidance, and sequential evaluation | A decision-theoretic argument with simulations, no data. In sequential evaluation the ability to avoid danger later should make it less threatening now. An agent that computes values as if it will fail to avoid later (a β-pessimistic Bellman equation, weight w) spreads negative value to states far from the threat and avoids early, which reproduces qualitatively exaggerated threat appraisal, generalization, earlier cash-out in risk tasks and aversive pruning, and predicts a reduced free-choice premium. The misbelief concerns the agent’s own future control, not the danger. | Read |
| NOTE-1137 v2 | Craske et al. — Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach | A clinical translation, not a study. It summarizes evidence that extinction leaves the original threat association intact and adds a competing inhibitory one, so fear can return. It argues that exposure should aim to violate expectancies, not to reduce fear within a session, and that fear reduction during exposure does not predict outcome. It sets out strategies for strengthening and retrieving inhibitory learning, with five invented case examples. Cognitive restructuring before or during exposure is held to blunt learning by lowering expectancy. The evidence on safety behaviours is reported as mixed. | Read |
| NOTE-1250 | Trauma, prejudice, large-group identity and psychoanalysis | A memorial lecture at the Freud Museum. Large-group identity is a tent’s canvas worn over each person’s individual identity, fixed in childhood through what parents deposit and unchangeable after adolescence. In two decades of unofficial dialogues, Volkan saw participants who felt their large-group identity threatened turn, with emotion, to an injury their ancestors suffered centuries ago. The shared image of such an event, real or mythologized, changes function across generations and becomes an identity marker: a chosen trauma. It feeds entitlement to recover what was lost and, in a “time collapse”, makes the old event feel recent, as with Kosovo 1389 under Milošević. The Holocaust is not a chosen trauma: it is recent, its stories are alive, and it is mourned rather than kept as a wound for revenge. | Read |
| NOTE-1291 | Surviving Early Childhood Trauma: Effects of the Holocaust on Survivors’ Psychological and Physiological Well-Being | Four studies of one registry-drawn Israeli sample: 32 female child survivors who lost both parents, 33 matched women who left Europe with their parents before the war, and 79 daughters. Survivors, now about 77, reported more dissociation and less life satisfaction, scored lower on cognition, and had higher diurnal cortisol and an anomalous response to a laboratory stressor, the last two only in ADRA2B wildtype carriers in an exploratory analysis. Daughters did not differ on any psychological, cognitive, health or cortisol measure. Only an exploratory split found lower cortisol in daughters of more dissociative survivors. The thesis restates its promotors’ meta-analyses: no secondary or tertiary traumatization in non-clinical samples with adequate designs. | Read |
| NOTE-1296 | Inter- and transgenerational inheritance of behavioral phenotypes | A review from Mansuy’s laboratory. In rodents, parental trauma, stress, drugs of abuse and in-utero insults pass behavioural phenotypes to offspring, in the MSUS model “up to the third or even the fourth generation”; paternal environmental enrichment passes benefits and can prevent trauma’s transmission. IVF and sperm-RNA injection show germline dependence, and non-coding RNAs are the best candidate carriers. Human descendants of genocide survivors show more psychopathology; the review’s own table calls these intergenerational. How a stimulus reaches the germline, and how effects pass beyond the first generation, “remains unknown”. Germline reprogramming is not mentioned. | Read |
| NOTE-1307 | Multigenerational legacies of trauma: Modeling the what and how of transmission | 422 adult children of Holocaust survivors, recruited on the web through survivor and Jewish organizations, rated their parents’ post-war styles, their own “reparative adaptational impacts” and their family’s history. In a path model, parents’ wartime experiences, chiefly internment, were linked to the children only through the parents’ victim style (stuck in the loss, overprotective, volatile), with indirect effects of .05 to .06. Post-war family milieu weighed more: living in Israel, surviving grandparents, larger families and religious continuity went with milder impacts. Broken generational linkages, rarely thinking of one’s murdered grandparents as one’s own, had the largest total effect (.21) and the only direct one. There was no comparison group, and the child reported every measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1310 | The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings | A short narrative review of human studies of parental trauma and offspring DNA methylation. Two parent–child studies: Rwandan mothers pregnant during the genocide and their children, with higher NR3C1 methylation and lower cortisol than a group abroad (25 and 25); and Holocaust survivors (32) and offspring (22) against 8 controls and their 9 offspring, with FKBP5 intron 7 methylation higher in survivors and lower in their offspring. Three studies of stress in pregnancy link it to NR3C1 methylation in newborns and adolescents. The authors call the evidence accumulating but preliminary, and use “transgenerational” for any parent-to-child effect. | Read |
| NOTE-1353 v2 | Guida, Minutola and Presti — Propagation, not aggregation | A conceptual paper with no data. Organizational flexibility is put as a pattern of coordinated, values-consistent action that is retained and spread or absorbed and extinguished, not as the mean of members’ flexibility. Whether a rise in a member’s flexibility propagates is said to depend jointly on that member’s leverage over the consequences colleagues meet and on whether the culture reinforces or penalizes values-consistent action; Bond’s (2018) leader-based route is the high-leverage special case. Five propositions, a factorial design and two measures that do not yet exist are set out. | Read |
| NOTE-1358 v2 | Lynch et al. — RefraMED trial of RO DBT for refractory depression | In a three-centre British trial, 250 adults with chronic or treatment-resistant depression were randomised 162 to RO DBT plus usual care and 88 to usual care. RO DBT was 5.40 HRSD points better at 7 months, at the end of therapy, but 2.15 and 1.69 points at the 12-month primary end-point and at 18 months were not significant; flexibility (AAQ-II) and emotional coping were significantly better at 12 and 18 months, not at 7, and suicidal ideation and social support never differed. All eight possibly related serious adverse reactions were in the RO DBT arm. | Read |
| NOTE-1421 | Lynch et al. — RefraMED, the NIHR EME monograph | The full report of RefraMED. Beyond the BJP paper it gives the trial’s mechanism design and its failure: RO DBT participants were also randomised to a therapy room, written feedback and mode of reimbursement, as instruments for sessions attended, alliance and DBT skills, and the instruments were too weak to use. Without them, the decomposition of the 7-month effect is implausible, and the planned analyses of temporal order are not reported. Its adverse-event test, p < 0.01 for eight reactions in the RO DBT arm against none, does not reproduce (about 0.029), and differs from the BJP paper’s 0.004. | Read |
| NOTE-1425 | Morrison, Madden, Odum, Friedel & Twohig — Altering impulsive decision making | Thirty undergraduates who discounted steeply were randomized to one 60–90 minute acceptance-and-values session or a waitlist. A week later the trained group discounted hypothetical money less (interaction p = .04), while the AAQ-II and distress tolerance did not change relative to control. Pooling pre- and post-training data, discounting (d = .57) and distress tolerance improved and the AAQ-II approached significance. The waitlist group’s own post-training change in discounting was not significant. | Read |
| NOTE-1440 | Rung & Madden — Experimental reductions of delay discounting | A systematic review and category-wise meta-analysis of 92 papers that tried to lower delay discounting without drugs or lesions. Most kinds of manipulation worked, learning-based ones such as bundling and delay fading best. Clinical interventions moved discounting little, and mindfulness and ACT, two studies, only at trend level (g = 0.32, p = .06). Mediation was almost never tested, so how any manipulation lowers discounting is unknown. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1442 | Fulford, Johnson, Llabre & Carver — Pushing and coasting | A 21-day experience-sampling study of 24 people (12 with bipolar I disorder in remission) found that progress ahead of expectation on a self-chosen goal was followed by less effort on it (b = −0.34) and progress behind expectation by more (b = −0.25 on the undershoot vector), and that the bipolar group coasted less. It restates Carver 2003’s thesis that positive affect lets a goal take lower priority, but measured neither affect nor any shift of effort to other goals, so it bears on that thesis only through the behaviour it predicts. | Read |
| NOTE-1456 | Stockton et al. — Mechanisms of change in ACT | Twelve mediation studies (2006–2015) of ACT against an active treatment. Psychological flexibility mediated mental-health outcomes in four of five, and acceptance was the one process to mediate across kinds of outcome and distinctly for ACT. Defusion and committed action mediated in both treatments. Present-moment contact and values were tested once each and the self as context never. All twelve studies were of moderate quality, and only three showed the mediator changing before the outcome. | Read |
| NOTE-1510 | Levine et al. — Need frustration, negative affect and depressive symptoms | Two cross-lagged panel studies of university students: three waves over the 2018–19 academic year (N = 379) and two waves six weeks apart at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 235). Need frustration (the nine dissatisfaction items of the BMPN) predicted later depressive symptoms (β = .13 and .17; .18) and later negative affect, while negative affect predicted neither later depression nor, at the first lag, need frustration; depression predicted later need frustration at the first lag of Study 1 (β = .20). Other-reported depression was predicted marginally (β = .14, p = .074). Self-report, single-construct outcome, no random intercepts in the reported models. | Read |
| NOTE-1533 | Campbell et al. — Need frustration as a transdiagnostic process | In Belgian adolescents, a cross-sectional study (N = 284; the abstract says 248) and a two-wave study six months apart (N = 608) model need frustration, measured by the twelve BPNSFS frustration items, as the mediator between self-critical perfectionism and depressive and eating disorder symptoms. Cross-sectionally the depression–eating correlation falls from .50 to .42 with perfectionism and to a non-significant .18 with frustration added. In latent change models, correlated change of the two symptoms falls from .43 to .39 and then .24. This is the study LIT-561 cites as showing need frustration “predicted” the symptoms and “largely accounted for their co-occurrence and co-evolution across time”; it is mediation of correlated change between two waves, not temporal precedence. | Read |