Depressive rumination - a central characteristic of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) - is a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy that prolongs sad mood and depressive episodes. Considerable research demonstrates the emotional and behavioral consequences of depressive rumination, yet few studies investigate its effect on neuroendocrine functioning. The current study examined the effect of an e...

Three studies provide preliminary support for an emotion dysregulation model of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In study 1, students with GAD reported heightened intensity of emotions, poorer understanding of emotions, greater negative reactivity to emotional experience, and less ability to self-soothe after negative emotions than controls. A composite emotion regulation score significantly...

Previous research has suggested that emotion regulation improves with age. This study examined both age and individual differences in online emotion regulation after a negative mood induction. We found evidence that older adults were more likely to rapidly regulate their emotions than were younger adults. Moreover, older adults who rapidly regulated had lower trait anxiety and depressive sympto...

BACKGROUND This study examines emotion regulation strategies used by children of mothers with childhood-onset depression (COD) and children of never-depressed mothers (NCOD). METHODS Participants were 49 COD offspring (ages 4-7) and 37 NCOD offspring (ages 4-7) and their mothers. Emotion regulation strategies were assessed observationally during a laboratory mood induction paradigm. RESULTS...

This study investigated M. Linehan's (1993) theory that individuals meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) have high biological vulnerability to emotion dysregulation, including high baseline emotional intensity and high reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli. Twenty individuals with BPD, 20 age-matched individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD), and 20 ...

Objective: Two common mood induction procedures (MIPs) use autobiographical recall (AR) or video clips. The first relies upon internal generation of states whereas the second presents external information to elicit emotion. Often new clips are created for each experiment. However, no study has examined efficacy and specificity a freely available clip compared AR in other studies.Method: In pres...

While major depressive disorder has been shown to be a significant mental health issue for school-age children, recent research indicates that depression can be observed in children as early as the preschool period. Yet, little work has been done to explore the neurobiological factors associated with this early form of depression. Given research suggesting a relation between adult depression an...

This study examined neural activation during the experience of compassion, an emotion that orients people toward vulnerable others and prompts caregiving, and pride, a self-focused emotion that signals individual strength and heightened status. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) were acquired as participants viewed 55 s continuous sequences of slides to induce either compassion or prid...

Psychological stressors reliably trigger systemic inflammatory activity as indexed by levels of proinflammatory cytokines. This experiment demonstrates that one's specific emotional reaction to a stressor may be a significant determinant of whether an inflammatory reaction occurs in response to that stressor. Based on extant correlational evidence and theory, a causal approach was used to deter...