with respect to internal consistency, factorial validity, and gender differences. Both measures demonstrated high internal reliability in the full student sample. Significant differences between the mean BDI and BDI-II scores necessitated the development of new cutoffs for analogue research on the BDI-n. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that a 2-factor solution optimally summarized the data for both versions of the inventory and accounted for a cumulative 41% and 46% of the common variance in BDI and BDI-II responses, respectively. These factor solutions were reliably cross-validated, although the importance of each factor varied by gender. The authors conclude that the BDI-II is a stronger instrument than the BDI in terms of its factor structure.Over the past few decades, there has been an impetus toward objectifying the assessment of depression in the hope of improving research and clinical practice. This movement has promoted a growing number of psychometric instruments that allow for a quick assessment of depression based on self-report (Bech,

Cognitive therapy is a system of psychotherapy with a powerful theoretical infrastructure, which has received extensive empirical support, and a large body of research attesting to its efficacy for a wide range of psychiatric and medical problems. This article provides a brief overview of the conceptual and practical components of cognitive therapy and highlights some of the empirical evidence regarding its efficacy. Cognitive therapy (often labeled generically as cognitive behavior therapy) is efficacious either alone or as an adjunct to medication and provides a prophylaxis against relapse and recurrence.

Cognitive theorists describe mindfulness as a form of attention-awareness in which thoughts can be observed in non-judging, de-centered, and non-attached ways. However, empirical research has not examined associations between mindfulness and responses to negative automatic thoughts, such as the ability to let go of negative cognition. In the first study reported in this article, measures of dispositional mindfulness were negatively correlated with negative thought frequency and perceptions of the ability to let go of negative thoughts in an unselected student sample. In the second study reported, these associations were replicated in a treatment-seeking student sample, where participation in a mindfulness meditation-based clinical intervention was shown to be associated with decreases in both frequency and perceptions of difficulty in letting-go of negative automatic thoughts. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

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This study investigated information processing and cognitive organization in clinical depression. The specificity of various cognitive mechanisms to depression was also examined. Twenty-six depressed/anxious individuals, 24 pure depressives, 25 never-depressed anxious controls, and 25 nonpsychiatric controls completed a modified Stroop task, the Self-Referent Encoding Task, and two tasks designed to assess cognitive structure. Comorbid depressed/anxious, depressed, and anxious groups performed similarly to one another but differed significantly from nonpsychiatric controls, on the processing and organization of negative content. Specificity to depression was also obtained, as both depressed groups endorsed and recalled less positive information and organized positive self-relevant information with less interconnectedness than anxious individuals and nonpsychiatric controls. These results suggest that depressed individuals have an interconnected negative self-representational system and lack a well-organized positive template of self. These findings are discussed in terms of cognitive models of depression and the tripartite model of depression and anxiety.

Seventy six individuals with a principal diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) were randomly assigned to receive either an MI pretreatment or no pretreatment (NPT), prior to receiving CBT. Significant group differences favoring the MI-CBT group were observed on the hallmark GAD symptom of worry and on therapist-rated homework compliance, which mediated the impact of treatment group on worry reduction. Adding MI pretreatment to CBT was specifically and substantively beneficial for individuals with high worry severity at baseline. There was evidence of relapse at 6-month follow-up for high severity individuals who received MI-CBT, but significant moderator effects favoring the high severity MI-CBT group were again apparent at 12-months posttreatment. Pending replication in a more controlled test, these findings suggest that MI may be a promising adjunct to CBT for GAD for those of high severity, a group which has been less responsive to CBT in past research.

Two decades of research conducted to date has examined selective visual attention to threat and reward stimuli as a function of individual differences in anxiety using the dot-probe task. The present study tests a connectionist neural-network model of meta-analytic and key individual study results derived from this literature. Attentional bias for threatening and reward-related stimuli is accounted for by connectionist model implementation of the following clinical psychology and affective neuroscience principles: 1) affective learning and temperament, 2) state and trait anxiety, 3) intensity appraisal, 4) affective chronometry, 5) attentional control, and 6) selective attention training. Theoretical implications for the study of mood and anxiety disorders are discussed.Key Words: Dot-Probe Task, Selective Attention, Threat, Reward, Anxiety, Depression, Connectionism, Neural Network, Amygdala. A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTSelective Attention for Reward & Threat 3 Selective Attention to Threat versus Reward: Meta-analysis and Neural-Network Modeling of the Dot-Probe TaskTheoretical constructs and research methodologies derived from cognitive psychology figure prominently in current emotion research, including investigations into the nature and function of anxiety. For example, cognitive researchers have been studying how individuals visually attend to threatening stimuli, and how between-subject variability in the functioning of attentional systems may correlate with individual differences in anxiety-related traits and disorders (e.g., Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Matthews, 1997).Evolutionary models of emotion and attention hypothesize that nature may have programmed the visual-attention system to attend selectively to stimuli of biological significance, including both to cues of possible impending threat (e.g., predators), on the one hand, and to cues of potential reinforcement-reward value (e.g., food, mates), on the other (e.g., LeDoux, 1996;Panksepp, 1998;Rolls, 1999). Attentional mechanisms procuring the rapid detection of sources of potential environmental threat are therefore presumed to afford an obvious survival-facilitating mechanism (A. Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998;A. Mathews, Mackintosh, & Fulcher, 1997;. However, an equally integral attentional function to the biological fitness of organisms is to orient toward stimuli of potential reward-value in their environments (Panksepp, 1998;Rolls, 1999).It may be that reward-and threat-detection are performed by distinct attentional systems 1 . Specifically, threat detection attentional mechanisms may represent secondary interrupt programs that continuously perform a background analysis of stimuli regarding their likelihood of representing a source of danger, attaining foreground and conscious significance only to the extent that this analysis results in the detection of relatively significant sources of danger (e.g., LeDoux, 1996). Otherwise, the default and primary orientation of attention may be toward reward-relevant stimuli...

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