Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on health and well-being worldwide and there is increasing recognition of the need to understand the psychological impact of COVID-19 experiences and stress in addition to the physical health consequences. Methods The present study examined how experiences related to COVID-19 and associated stress impact, anxiety, depression, and functional impairment in a convenience sample of 565 American adults (57.9% male) recruited through MTURK. Results COVID-19 experiences were consistently associated with higher odds of probable anxiety and depression diagnoses (ORs ≥ 3.0). COVID-19 associated stress also predicted large proportions of variance (R 2 ≥ 30) in anxiety, depression, health anxiety, and functional impairment in latent variable analyses. Conclusions These findings highlight that personal experiences related to the diagnosis of COVID-19, mortality in acquaintances, and COVID-19 associated stress is associated with a greatly elevated risk of emotional disorder symptomatology and that the COVID-19 pandemic may result in increased demand for mental health services.

Highlights COVID-19 psychological factors may be risk factors for substance use initiation. COVID-19-related worry is specifically related to using substances to cope during the pandemic. COVID-19-related psychological factors may require specific clinical attention.

Highlights COVID-19 and its impact on psychological symptoms and disorders, addiction, and health behavior is substantial and ongoing. An integrative COVID-19 stress-based model could be used to guide research focused on the pandemic's stress-related burden. This work could provide a theoretical and empirical knowledge base for future pandemics.

Introduction: There is mixed evidence in the literature on the role of inflammation in major depressive disorder. Contradictory findings are attributed to lack of rigorous characterization of study subjects, to the presence of concomitant medical illnesses, to the small sample sizes, and to the limited number of cytokines tested.Methods: Subjects aged 18-70 years, diagnosed with major depressive disorder and presenting with chronic course of illness, as well as matched controls (n = 236), were evaluated by trained raters and provided blood for cytokine measurements. Cytokine levels in EDTA plasma were measured with the MILLIPLEX Multi-Analyte Profiling Human Cytokine/ Chemokine Assay employing Luminex technology. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to compare cytokine levels between major depressive disorder subjects and healthy volunteers, before (interleukin [IL]-1β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor-α) and after Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (IL-1α, IL-2, IL-3, IL-4, IL-5, IL-7, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12(p40), IL-12(p70), IL-13, IL-15, IFN-γ-inducible protein 10, Eotaxin, interferon-γ, monotype chemoattractant protein-1, macrophage inflammatory protein-1α, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor and vascular endothelial growth factor).Results: There were no significant differences in cytokine levels between major depressive disorder subjects and controls, both prior to and after correction for multiple analyses (significance set at p ⩽ 0.05 and p ⩽ 0.002, respectively). Conclusion:Our well-characterized examination of cytokine plasma levels did not support the association of major depressive disorder with systemic inflammation. The heterogeneity of major depressive disorder, as well as a potential sampling bias selecting for non-inflammatory depression, might have determined our findings discordant with the literature.

The Tularosa study was designed to understand how defensive deception-including both cyber and psychological-affects cyber attackers. Over 130 red teamers participated in a network penetration task over two days in which we controlled both the presence of and explicit mention of deceptive defensive techniques. To our knowledge, this represents the largest study of its kind ever conducted on a professional red team population. The design was conducted with a battery of questionnaires (e.g., experience, personality, etc.) and cognitive tasks (e.g., fluid intelligence, working memory, etc.), allowing for the characterization of a "typical" red teamer, as well as physiological measures (e.g., galvanic skin response, heart rate, etc.) to be correlated with the cyber events. This paper focuses on the design, implementation, data, population characteristics, and begins to examine preliminary results.

Objectives: Opioid misuse constitutes a significant public health problem and is associated with a host of negative outcomes. Despite efforts to curb this increasing epidemic, opioids remain the most widely prescribed class of medications. Prescription opioids are often used to treat chronic pain despite the risks associated with use, and chronic pain remains an important factor in understanding this epidemic. Cannabis is another substance that has recently garnered attention in the chronic pain literature, as increasing numbers of individuals use cannabis to manage chronic pain. Importantly, the couse of substances generally is associated with poorer outcomes than single substance use, yet little work has examined the impact of opioid-cannabis co-use. Methods: The current study examined the use of opioids alone, compared to use of opioid and cannabis co-use, among adults (n ¼ 450) with chronic pain on mental health, pain, and substance use outcomes. Results: Results suggest that, compared to opioid use alone, opioid and cannabis co-use was associated with elevated anxiety and depression symptoms, as well as tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and sedative use problems, but not pain experience. Conclusions: These findings highlight a vulnerable population of polysubstance users with chronic pain, and indicates the need for more comprehensive assessment and treatment of chronic pain.

Rates of suicide and major depressive disorder (MDD) are currently at the highest point in the history of the United States (US). However, these rates are not distributed evenly among the population and Latinos show disproportionately high rates of both suicide and MDD. Yet, past research has infrequently explored factors related to suicide and MDD in primary care settings that serve as the major community portal for mental health among the Latino population. Thus, the current study investigated sociodemographic variables (marital status, nativity, education, employment, primary language, age, and gender) in terms of their relations with suicidal ideation, suicide risk, MDD, and MDD symptom severity among Latino primary care patients in a Federally Qualified Health Center (N = 634, M = 39.46, SD = 11.46, 87.1% female). Results indicated that gender and Nativity were associated with suicidal ideation, older age was associated with suicide risk, and higher education and having a partner were negatively associated with MDD and depressive symptom severity. These results provide novel insight into the role of sociodemographic factors predicting suicide and MDD among Latinos in primary care, and suggest greater scientific and clinical attention can be focused on certain sociodemographic factors to offset mental health disparities among this group.

Background:The opioid epidemic is a significant public health crisis, and this problem is particularly prevalent among individuals with chronic pain. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for interventions to mitigate the risk for opioid misuse and opioid use disorder among people with pain. Given that mental health problems, specifically anxiety, are common among people who misuse opioids, it is important to examine factors that link mental health problems with opioid misuse to ultimately inform the development of novel interventions. Anxiety sensitivity, a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor, may be one important mechanism in elevated opioid misuse among persons with chronic pain.Method: Therefore, the current cross-sectional study examined anxiety sensitivity (and construct sub facets) as a predictor of opioid misuse among adults with chronic pain.Results: Results indicated that anxiety sensitivity was associated with multiple aspects of opioid misuse, and the magnitude of effects ranged from medium to large. Results were observed over and above the variance accounted for by age, sex, income, education, perceived health, and pain severity. Conclusion:These findings suggest that future research should continue to explore the explanatory relevance of anxiety sensitivity in opioid misuse among individuals with chronic pain.