Objective We examined the concurrent associations between multiple cognitive vulnerabilities to depression featured in Hopelessness Theory, Beck’s Theory, and Response Styles Theory and depressive symptoms and diagnoses in a sample of early adolescents. We also examined the specificity of these cognitive vulnerabilities to depression versus anxiety and externalizing psychopathology, controlling for co-occurring symptoms and diagnoses. Method Male and female, Caucasian and African-American, 12–13 year old adolescents were assessed in a cross-sectional design. Cognitive vulnerabilities of hopelessness, inferential style, rumination, and self-referent information processing were assessed with self-reports and behavioral tasks. Symptoms and diagnoses of depressive, anxiety, and externalizing disorders were assessed with self-report questionnaires and diagnostic interviews. Results Hopelessness exhibited the greatest specificity to depressive symptoms and diagnoses, whereas negative inferential styles, rumination, and negative self-referent information processing were associated with both depressive and anxiety symptoms and diagnoses and, in some cases, with externalizing disorders. Conclusions Consistent with cognitive theories of depression, hopelessness, negative inferential styles, rumination, and negative self-referent information processing were associated with depressive symptoms and diagnoses. However, with the exception of hopelessness, most of the remaining cognitive vulnerabilities were not specific to depression. With further maturation of our sample, these cognitive vulnerabilities may become more specific to depression as cognitive styles further develop and consolidate, the rates of depression increase, and individuals’ presentations of psychopathology become more differentiated.

Emotions are highly influential to many psychological processes. Indeed, research employing emotional stimuli is rapidly escalating across the field of psychology. However, challenges remain regarding discrete evocation of frequently co-elicited emotions such as amusement and happiness, or anger and disgust. Further, as much contemporary work in emotion employs college students, we sought to additionally evaluate the efficacy of film clips to discretely elicit these more challenging emotions in a young adult population using an online medium. The internet is an important tool for investigating responses to emotional stimuli, but validations of emotionally evocative film clips across laboratory and webbased settings are limited in the literature. An additional obstacle is identifying stimuli amidst the numerous film clip validation studies. During our investigation, we recognized the lack of a categorical database to facilitate rapid identification of useful film clips for individual researchers' unique investigations. Consequently, here we also sought to produce the first compilation of such stimuli into an accessible and comprehensive catalog. We based our catalog upon prior work as well as our own, and identified 24 articles and 295 film clips from four decades of research. We present information on the validation of these clips in addition to our own research validating six clips using online administration settings. The results of our search in the literature and our own study are presented in tables designed to facilitate and improve a selection of highly valid film stimuli for future research.Keywords Emotion . Film . Stimuli . Emotion elicitationThe study of emotion in relation to cognition, behavior, and health has grown exponentially over the last several decades. Indeed, emotion responses and emotion regulatory strategies are increasingly recognized as central to many, if not most, psychological processes. As such, there is a growing reliance on laboratory paradigms employing emotional stimuli to induce, alter, or simulate emotional contexts for investigation across the social sciences and, most notably, in psychology. Although there are currently a variety of methods used including emotional images (e.g., International Affective Picture System: Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008), music (Koelsch, 2010;Logeswaran & Bhattacharya, 2009), and personal recollection (e.g., Lench & Levine, 2005;Papa & Bonanno, 2008), there is an increasing reliance on emotional film clips. For example, a search for Bemotion elicitation^and Bfilm clips^on Google Scholar and on psychology-specific databases (e.g., APA) yielded over 1,000 results. The use of film clips for emotion elicitation has many advantages. Clips are easily standardized and therefore reliable as compared to idiographic methods (e.g., personal recollection; see Mills & D'Mello 2014;Salas, Radovic, & Turnbull, 2012). Film clips readily engage participants for extended periods and allow for an ecologically valid induction, progression, and assessment o...

Recent work has identified Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity as a risk factor for the first onset and recurrence of mood episodes in bipolar disorder, but little work has evaluated risk factors for depression in individuals at risk for, but without a history of, bipolar disorder. The present study evaluated cognitive styles and the emotion-regulatory characteristics of emotional clarity and ruminative brooding as prospective predictors of depressive symptoms in individuals with high versus moderate BAS sensitivity. Three separate regressions indicated that the associations between dysfunctional attitudes, self-criticism, and neediness with prospective increases in depressive symptoms were moderated by emotional clarity and brooding. Whereas brooding interacted with these cognitive styles to exacerbate their impact on depressive symptoms, emotional clarity buffered against their negative impact. These interactions were specific to high-BAS individuals for dysfunctional attitudes, but were found across the full sample for self-criticism and neediness. These results indicate that emotion-regulatory characteristics and cognitive styles may work in conjunction to confer risk for and resilience against depression, and that some of these relationships may be specific to individuals at risk for bipolar disorder.

We tested the association of 2 versions of the Reading Span Task of working memory capacity, a conventional neutral version (RSPAN-N) and an adapted task with incidental negative content (RSPAN-E), for predicting objective indicators (behavioral displays; autonomic activation) of negative emotion regulation during a laboratory provocation, as well as reported negative emotion in daily life experience sampling. Across 2 samples, both tasks demonstrated utility as es timates of spontaneous negative emotion regulation capacity, predicting down-regulation of negative emotion in da ily life and during a Jab challenge. In addition, scores from both tasks appear to be independent of self-reported distress, a confound often present in studies of emotion regulation. There was some incremental evidence that the RSPAN-E may have advantages over the RSPAN-N for predicting some indices of emotion processing. Together these findings provide further evidence for the role of working memory (among other executive-control abilities) in emotion regulatory processing and suggest that RSPAN tasks may have considerable potential as tools in research on emotion processing and emotion regulation in psychological health and adjustment.

Genetic variation in the serotonergic system within the brain has been a significant focus of psychiatric research over the last several decades. In particular, the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene (SLC6A4) has been tied to early emotion processing biases. However, a clear understanding of how genetic variation of SLC6A4 may influence clinically salient emotional phenomena is still elusive. In this investigation, we focused on examining variation in the 5-HTT-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR; including the single nucleotide polymorphism rs25531 which alters genotype interpretation) and real-time emotion responses evoked in the laboratory using a paradigm designed to spontaneously induce emotion regulation. Across 2 studies we show that for healthy individuals with 2 copies of the functional short (S=) allele there is weakened downregulation of negative emotion. In addition, we found greater electrodermal responses as well as both negative and positive emotion in association with the S= allele in 1 of the 2 samples. These findings provide evidence that the S= allele may promote system-wide heightened emotional reactivity in healthy subjects. Both phenomena, observed here in a healthy population, are strongly linked to the development of psychiatric disease. As such, these findings have implications for S= carriers' vulnerability to affective disorders, as well as suggest potential targets for future clinical investigation.