INTRODUCTION Although a plethora of studies have delineated the relationship between childhood trauma and onset, symptom severity, and course of depression and anxiety disorders, there has been little evidence that childhood trauma may lead to interpersonal problems among adult patients with depression and anxiety disorders. Given the lack of prior research in this area, we aimed to investigate...

This study examined the relations among loneliness, friendship, and emotional functioning in adults (N = 108) with autism spectrum disorders. Participants completed self-report measures of symptoms of autism spectrum disorders, loneliness, number and nature of friendships, depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, and self-esteem. The results indicated that loneliness was associated with increase...

BACKGROUND Although the burden of emotional disorders is very high, mental health care is only available to a minority of patients. The literature suggests that self-help strategies, both bibliotherapy and self-help groups alike, are effective for various, less serious complaints but it is unclear whether available data support a role for self-help in treatment protocols for patients with clini...

INTRODUCTION Post-stroke emotional incontinence and bipolar disorder are two disorders that involve the dysfunction of brain structures responsible for emotional regulation. The objective of this work is to study the links between these disorders through a clinical case. CASE REPORT We present the case of a 43-year-old man without previous psychiatric history who experienced emotional inconti...

The current research examines individual differences in flexible emotional attention. In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between individual differences in cardiac vagal tone and top-down and bottom-up processes associated with emotional attention. To help determine the role of cortical and subcortical mechanisms underlying top-down and bottom-up emotional attention, fearful fa...

Humans have the ability to mentally time travel through past, present, and future. But can a disruption in emotion characteristic of emotional disorders cause this ability to unwind, leaving people "stuck" in the present emotional moment? Two studies are presented that examine emotional time-perspective in a disorder (mania) characterized by present-oriented tendencies, including impulsivity an...

There are high rates of overlap between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Emotional impairment in the two disorders, however, has not been directly compared using event-related potentials (ERPs) that are able to measure distinct temporal stages in emotional processing. The N170 and N400 ERP components were measured during presentation of emotion...

Evolutionary psychiatry emerged from the conceptual successes of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It will need to avoid the many mistakes that biology-free Evolutionary Psychology has been prey to. It should not ignore the wealth of information that exists between the phenotypic expression of symptoms and the genotypic sources of core brain/mind processes that are disrupted in psychiat...

Although excessive fear has been central to traditional conceptualisations of the anxiety disorders, recent research suggests that disgust may also play a role in the development of some anxiety disorders. While dysregulation of emotion may confer risk for the development of anxiety disorders, it remains unclear if there are differences in the extent to which fear and disgust can be effectively...