Do You Like Me? Differences in Learning Social Cues in Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

The pathways to the documented increased social and emotional difficulties in individuals with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are unclear. We explored whether differences in social evaluation could account for social and emotional difficulties in adolescents with DLD using a computerized social evaluation task. Twenty-four adolescents with DLD were matched with twenty-six adolescents with typical language development (TLD) (M = 13.

The effects of isolated game elements on adherence rates in food response inhibition training.

Food response inhibition training (food-RIT) is found to aid weight loss and reduce snacking of foods high in sugar, salt and fat. However, these interventions suffer from a lack of adherence, with gamification proposed as a solution to increase engagement. The effect of gamification is unclear, however, with a lack of research investigating the effects of single game elements in improving adherence to interventions.

Personalised psychotherapy in primary care: evaluation of data-driven treatment allocation to cognitive-behavioural therapy versus counselling for depression.

Background: Various effective psychotherapies exist for the treatment of depression; however, only approximately half of patients recover after treatment. In efforts to improve clinical outcomes, research has focused on personalised psychotherapy - an attempt to match patients to treatments they are most likely to respond to.

Aim: The present research aimed to evaluate the benefit of a data-driven model to support clinical decision-making in differential treatment allocation to cognitive-behavioural therapy versus counselling for depression.

Relationship between change in social evaluation learning and mood in early antidepressant treatment: A prospective cohort study in primary care.

Background: Antidepressants are proposed to work by increasing sensitivity to positive versus negative information. Increasing positive affective learning within social contexts may help remediate negative self-schema. We investigated the association between change in biased learning of social evaluations about the self and others, and mood during early antidepressant treatment.

Trajectories of depression and generalised anxiety symptoms over the course of cognitive behaviour therapy in primary care: an observational, retrospective cohort.

Background: Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression and anxiety. However, most research has focused on the sum scores of symptoms. Relatively little is known about how individual symptoms respond.

Depression screening using a non-verbal self-association task: A machine-learning based pilot study.

Background: Effective screening is important to combat the raising burden of depression and opens a critical time window for early intervention. Clinical use of non-verbal depression screening is nascent, yet a promising and viable candidate to supplement verbal screening. Differential self- and emotion-processing in depression patients were previously reported by non-verbal behavioural assessments, corroborated by neuroimaging findings of distinct neuroanatomical markers.

Beyond online participant crowdsourcing: The benefits and opportunities of big team addiction science.

Participant crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., MTurk, Prolific) offer numerous advantages to addiction science, permitting access to hard-to-reach populations and enhancing the feasibility of complex experimental, longitudinal, and intervention studies.

Self-processing in relation to emotion and reward processing in depression.

Background: Depression is characterised by a heightened self-focus, which is believed to be associated with differences in emotion and reward processing. However, the precise relationship between these cognitive domains is not well understood. We examined the role of self-reference in emotion and reward processing, separately and in combination, in relation to depression.

Effects of go/no-go training on food-related action tendencies, liking and choice.

Inhibitory control training effects on behaviour (e.g. 'healthier' food choices) can be driven by changes in affective evaluations of trained stimuli, and theoretical models indicate that changes in action tendencies may be a complementary mechanism.

The early impact of COVID-19 on primary care psychological therapy services: A descriptive time series of electronic healthcare records.

Background: There are growing concerns about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. With government-imposed restrictions as well as a general burden on healthcare systems, the pandemic has the potential to disrupt the access to, and delivery of, mental healthcare.

Methods: Electronic healthcare records from primary care psychological therapy services (Improving Access to Psychological Therapy) in England were used to examine changes in access to mental health services and service delivery during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Reduced Self-Positive Belief Underpins Greater Sensitivity to Negative Evaluation in Socially Anxious Individuals.

Unlabelled: Positive self-beliefs are important for well-being, and are influenced by how others evaluate us during social interactions. Mechanistic accounts of self-beliefs have mostly relied on associative learning models. These account for choice behaviour but not for the explicit beliefs that trouble socially anxious patients.

Effective dose 50 method as the minimal clinically important difference: Evidence from depression trials.

Objective: Previous research on the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) for depression and anxiety is based on population averages. The present study aimed to identify the MCID across the spectrum of baseline severity.

Study Design And Settings: The present analysis used secondary data from 2 randomized controlled trials for depression (n = 1,122) to calibrate the Global Rating of Change with the PHQ-9 and GAD-7.

How much change is enough? Evidence from a longitudinal study on depression in UK primary care.

Background: The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7) are widely used in the evaluation of interventions for depression and anxiety. The smallest reduction in depressive symptoms that matter to patients is known as the Minimum Clinically Important Difference (MCID). Little empirical study of the MCID for these scales exists.

Effect of acute citalopram on self-referential emotional processing and social cognition in healthy volunteers.

Background: Depression is characterised by negative views of the self. Antidepressant treatment may remediate negative self-schema through increasing processing of positive information about the self. Changes in affective processing during social interactions may increase expression of prosocial behaviours, improving interpersonal communications.

Inhibitory control of positive and negative information and adolescent depressive symptoms: a population-based cohort study.

Background: Large population-based cohort studies of neuropsychological factors that characterise or precede depressive symptoms are rare. Most studies use small case-control or cross-sectional designs, which may cause selection bias and cannot test temporality. In a large UK population-based cohort, we investigated cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between inhibitory control of positive and negative information and adolescent depressive symptoms.

Emotional recognition training modifies neural response to emotional faces but does not improve mood in healthy volunteers with high levels of depressive symptoms.

Background: There is demand for new, effective and scalable treatments for depression, and development of new forms of cognitive bias modification (CBM) of negative emotional processing biases has been suggested as possible interventions to meet this need.

Methods: We report two double blind RCTs, in which volunteers with high levels of depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory ii (BDI-ii) > 14) completed a brief course of emotion recognition training (a novel form of CBM using faces) or sham training. In Study 1 (N = 36), participants completed a post-training emotion recognition task whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural correlates of CBM.

The clinical effectiveness of sertraline in primary care and the role of depression severity and duration (PANDA): a pragmatic, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised trial.

Background: Depression is usually managed in primary care, but most antidepressant trials are of patients from secondary care mental health services, with eligibility criteria based on diagnosis and severity of depressive symptoms. Antidepressants are now used in a much wider group of people than in previous regulatory trials. We investigated the clinical effectiveness of sertraline in patients in primary care with depressive symptoms ranging from mild to severe and tested the role of severity and duration in treatment response.

Variation in recognition of happy and sad facial expressions and self-reported depressive symptom severity: A prospective cohort study.

Objective: Cognitive theories suggest people with depression interpret self-referential social information negatively. However, it is unclear whether these biases precede or follow depression. We investigated whether facial expression recognition was associated with depressive symptoms cross-sectionally and longitudinally.

Effects of exposure to bodies of different sizes on perception of and satisfaction with own body size: two randomized studies.

Body dissatisfaction is prevalent among women and associated with subsequent obesity and eating disorders. Exposure to images of bodies of different sizes has been suggested to change the perception of 'normal' body size in others. We tested whether exposure to different-sized (otherwise identical) bodies changes perception of own and others' body size, satisfaction with body size and amount of chocolate consumed.

Exposure to childhood adversity and deficits in emotion recognition: results from a large, population-based sample.

Background: Emotion recognition skills are essential for social communication. Deficits in these skills have been implicated in mental disorders. Prior studies of clinical and high-risk samples have consistently shown that children exposed to adversity are more likely than their unexposed peers to have emotion recognition skills deficits.

A randomised controlled trial assessing the severity and duration of depressive symptoms associated with a clinically significant response to sertraline versus placebo, in people presenting to primary care with depression (PANDA trial): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

Background: Depressive symptoms are usually managed within primary care and antidepressant medication constitutes the first-line treatment. It remains unclear at present which people are more likely to benefit from antidepressant medication. This paper describes the protocol for a randomised controlled trial (PANDA) to investigate the severity and duration of depressive symptoms that are associated with a clinically significant response to sertraline compared to placebo, in people presenting to primary care with depression.

Logical and Methodological Issues Affecting Genetic Studies of Humans Reported in Top Neuroscience Journals.

Genetics and neuroscience are two areas of science that pose particular methodological problems because they involve detecting weak signals (i.e., small effects) in noisy data.