This paper examines the effects of parental concordance for affective disorders and psychopathology among the 219 offspring of probands with major depression and normal controls. The lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders was significantly higher among the spouses of depressed probands as compared to those of normal controls. The spouses of 37% of the normals and 69% of the depressed prob...

It is currently unknown whether elevated cytokine levels in depression are confined to any specific subgroup of depressive patients. In this study, medical out-patients presenting with cardiovascular risk factors (N = 356) were assessed for both cognitive-affective and physical symptoms of depression using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Maastricht questionnaire (MQ), r...

Associations between self-blame and anxiety and depression symptoms in a sample of 76 women with breast cancer were investigated. At diagnosis, behavioral self-blame was associated with increased distress; at 3 months postdiagnosis, characterological self-blame was positively associated with affective symptoms and behavioral self-blame approached significance (p = .07); and at 6 months, behavio...

BACKGROUND Medically unexplained dyspnea (MUD) refers to a condition characterized by a sensation of dyspnea and is typically applied to patients presenting with anxiety and hyperventilation without cardiopulmonary explanations for their dyspnea. The diagnosis is difficult. We investigated whether descriptors of dyspnea and associated symptoms of MUD are differentially diagnostic. METHODS A r...

Depressive symptoms are associated with both the presence of negative subjective experiences and relative absence of positive subjective experiences. A similar affective profile of high negative affect and low positive affect (PA) has been associated with excessive social anxiety (SA). This initial cross-sectional study evaluated the incremental effects of social interaction anxiety on hedonic ...

OBJECTIVE Previous studies testing the hypothesis that symptoms of anxiety and depression increase blood pressure (BP) levels show inconsistent and limited findings. We examined the association between those symptoms across adult life and BP in late middle age. METHODS Using data from 1683 participants from the MRC NSHD, we investigated associations between affective symptoms at ages 36, 43, ...

BACKGROUND Although reward processing is considered an important part of affective functioning, few studies have investigated reward-related decisions or responses in young people with affective disorders. Depression is postulated to involve decreased activity in reward-related affective systems. METHODS Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined behavioral and neural res...

Binge eating disorder (BED) presents with substantial psychiatric comorbidity. This latent structure analysis sought to delineate boundaries of BED given its comorbidity with affective and anxiety disorders. A population-based sample of 151 women with BED, 102 women with affective or anxiety disorders, and 259 women without psychiatric disorders was assessed with clinical interviews and self-re...

Background: Reports of anxiety disorder characteristics among youth in clinical settings typically include descriptions of patients who have been specifically referred for anxiety treatment. At odds with a large body of evidence which demonstrates these disorders to be most common among young people, prevalence studies in samples referred to general psychiatry for multiple causes are scarce and...