Emotion suppression in borderline personality disorder: an experience sampling study.

This study examined the effects of suppressing emotions in the natural environment among individuals who were high (high-BPD; n = 30) and low (low-BPD; n = 39) in borderline personality disorder (BPD) features. Participants responded to prompts from a personal data assistant eight times per day over a four-day period. The first day was a baseline day, followed by instructions to observe emotions on the second day, suppress emotions on the third day, and observe emotions on the fourth day. Findings ran counter to the notion that emotion suppression is a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy for individuals with BPD features, and also contradict some laboratory research in this area. Specifically, high-BPD participants reported higher positive emotions on the suppress day compared with the observe days, and lower urges to engage in impulsive behavior on the suppress day compared with both the baseline and observe days. On the contrary, for low-BPD participants, negative emotions were higher on the suppress day than they were on the observe or baseline days. Overall, findings indicate the need to further examine when and how emotion suppression leads to positive versus negative effects for persons with BPD features.

Impulsivity and emotion dysregulation in Borderline Personality Disorder.

This study examined the association of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and negative emotional states with impulsivity in the laboratory. Undergraduate participants who were high in BPD features (high-BPD; n = 39) and controls who were low in BPD features (low-BPD; n = 56) completed measures of negative emotional state before a laboratory measure of impulsivity--a passive avoidance learning task. Controlling for psychopathology, high-BPD participants committed a greater number of impulsive responses than did low-BPD participants. Negative emotional state moderated the effect of BPD on impulsive responses. High-BPD participants who were in a negative emotional state committed fewer impulsive responses than high-BPD participants who were low in negative emotional state. Fear, nervousness, and shame negatively correlated with impulsivity among high-BPD participants but not among low-BPD participants. In addition, high-BPD participants reported greater emotion dysregulation in a variety of domains, compared with low-BPD participants.

Predicting inept discipline: The role of parental depressive symptoms, anger, and attributions.

Relations among parents' psychological difficulties (i.e., depressive symptoms, overt anger), dysfunctional attributions for child misbehavior, and inept discipline were investigated in a representative community sample of 451 mothers and 449 fathers. Depressive symptoms and anger were hypothesized to relate to discipline via their link with parents' attributions. Path analyses revealed that depressive symptoms predicted parent-centered causal attributions (i.e., stable, global, and dispositional), which, in turn, related to laxness. Depressive symptoms also predicted child-centered responsibility attributions (i.e., controllable, intentional, and negative), which, in turn, related to overreactivity. Anger predicted overreactivity directly. The patterns of relations were similar for fathers and mothers. The importance of addressing parents' psychological difficulties and dysfunctional attributions in interventions for families with disruptive children is discussed.

Do support groups help people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia? A comparison of active and inactive members.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the benefits and problems of a chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and fibromyalgia (FM) support organization as reported by its participants. METHODS: Active members (n = 32) and inactive members or dropouts (n = 135) of a regional support organization for people with CFS and FM completed a 26 item questionnaire by telephone interview or by self-completion and postal return. RESULTS: The most frequently endorsed benefits of membership were illness legitimization (67.8%), finding out helpful new information (66.4%), and feeling understood by others (62.2%). Lower frequency endorsements were given to: helped to find (35.0%) or deal with (38.5%) doctors, and helped to improve my illness (36.4%). The most frequently reported reasons for dropping out were inconvenient location (37.8%) or time (37.0%), too much negative talk or complaining (33.3%), too sick to attend (28.8%), and illness or coping improvement (29.6% each). The active-member group showed significantly higher (p < 0.04) symptom severity scores and less illness improvement (p < 0.01) in comparison to the inactive/dropout group. CONCLUSION: This cross-sectional study suggests that support groups for CFS are viewed as helpful by participants on a number of illness related issues. On the other hand, active members reported greater symptom severity and less illness improvement than inactive members or dropouts.

Oblivious remote state preparation.

We characterize the class of remote state preparation (RSP) protocols that use only forward classical communication and entanglement, deterministically prepare an exact copy of a general state, and do so obliviously-without leaking further information about the state to the receiver. We prove that any such protocol can be modified to require from the sender only a single specimen of the state, without increasing the classical communication cost. This implies Lo's conjectured lower bound on the cost for these protocols. We relate our RSP protocols to the private quantum channels and establish a one-to-one correspondence between them.

Locking classical correlations in quantum States.

We show that there exist bipartite quantum states which contain a large locked classical correlation that is unlocked by a disproportionately small amount of classical communication. In particular, there are (2n+1)-qubit states for which a one-bit message doubles the optimal classical mutual information between measurement results on the subsystems, from n/2 bits to n bits. This phenomenon is impossible classically. However, states exhibiting this behavior need not be entangled. We study the range of states exhibiting this phenomenon and bound its magnitude.