Red State, Blue State, Purple State; Higher and Increasing Blue COVID-19 Anxiety Rate.

The present study investigated COVID-19 Anxiety Scale (CAS) scores for participants from blue states, red states, and purple states across 276 days ranging from April 18, 2020 to January 23, 2021. The CAS scores increased with knowing and caring for an individual with COVID-19, following social distancing guidelines, hours talking and thinking about COVID-19, hypochondria, neuroticism, depression, anxiety, stress, negative PANAS, and time, whereas they decreased with positive PANAS. More importantly, the CAS scores were higher for participants from blue states than for participants from purple states, and the positive relation between CAS scores and time was only significant for participants from blue states. We connected media events that occurred concurrently for high CAS scores overall and for high CAS scores for participants from blue states. The spikes in CAS ratings occurred along with COVID-19 contagion, partisan reactions to protests for slain African Americans (e.g., George Floyd), and the 2020 presidential election.

Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder Symptoms Predict Grief Interview Emotions.

This study examined persistent complex bereavement disorder (PCBD) symptoms' ability to predict emotional reactions of 69 bereaved adults who participated in grief interviews. The results supported the predictive validity of PCBD symptoms for both self-report and behavioral observation measures of sadness but with only one behavioral measure of happiness. Furthermore, PCBD symptoms uniquely predicted sadness in all but one measure of that emotion while accounting for symptoms of depression, posttraumatic stress, and separation anxiety. Because interviews are the primary method of psychological evaluation for clinicians, these findings collectively support the validity of the PCBD construct.

Spirituality Influences Emotion Regulation During Grief Talk: The Moderating Role of Prolonged Grief Symptomatology.

A growing body of research demonstrates that religion greatly affects people's adjustment to loss. However, little is known about the influence of religiosity on emotion regulation during grief. The present study attempts to fill this void in the literature by examining the predictive relationship between variables assessing facets of religiosity and emotion regulation during an interview about loss in a sample of bereaved adults. The results demonstrated that religiousness, spirituality, and negative religious coping were correlated with emotion reactivity following an interview. Spirituality's influence was also found to be moderated by prolonged grief symptoms, as spirituality predicted more adaptive emotion regulation among those with low-to-mild levels of prolonged grief symptomatology, but not among participants with elevated prolonged grief disorder (PGD) symptoms. These findings support the beneficial effects of religion in bereavement adjustment as well as its limits.

Rehearsal and Event Age Predict the Fading Affect Bias across Young Adults and Elderly in Self-Defining and Everyday Autobiographical Memories.

The faster fading of unpleasant affect than pleasant affect is known as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB). The FAB generalizes across cultures and event types, it is positively related to rehearsals and healthy outcomes, and it is negatively related to unhealthy outcomes. Experiment 1 Objective, Sample/Population, and Method: We examined the importance of different rehearsal types for the FAB across self-defining and everyday events in 58 college age participants using a self-guided questionnaire procedure in Experiment 1. Experiment 1 Results: We found robust FAB effects across event types, FAB increased with both event age and event sharing (number of people), and rehearsals mediated these relations. Moreover, event sharing and talking about the event combined to predict the FAB. Experiment 2 Objective, Sample/Population, and Method: In Experiment 2, we used the self-guided questionnaire procedure from Experiment 1 for 31 college students and 12 elderly participants 68 to 84 years old, as well as an interview procedure with 13 elderly participants 68 to 94 years old. Experiment 2 Results: We combined the elderly data because both groups showed similar FAB patterns. We found robust FAB effects across both event types, the FAB increased with event age and participant age, and it increased with talking rehearsals. Conclusions: The results extend the FAB to self-defining events and the elderly, they emphasize the importance of various rehearsal types, and they are in line with FAB research, age research, and research on several emotion regulation models.

Incremental validity of coronaphobia: Coronavirus anxiety explains depression, generalized anxiety, and death anxiety.

The adverse psychological effects of COVID-19 have increased globally. Moreover, the psychological toll may be worsening for this health crisis due to the growing numbers of mass deaths and unemployment levels. Coronaphobia, a relatively new pandemic-related construct, has been shown to be strongly related to functional impairment and psychological distress. However, the extent to which coronaphobia is uniquely accountable for the psychological distress experienced during the COVID-19 crisis has not been systematically investigated. The current study examined this question of incremental validity using online data from 453 adult MTurk workers in the U.S. The results of a series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that coronaphobia explained additional variance in depression, generalized anxiety, and death anxiety, above sociodemographics, COVID-19 factors, and the vulnerability factors of neuroticism, health anxiety, and reassurance-seeking behaviors. These findings suggest that health professionals should be aware of coronaphobia as this expression of pandemic-related stress has reliably demonstrated incremental validity in accounting for major indicators of psychological distress.

Videogame play and events are related to unhealthy emotion regulation in the form of low fading affect bias in autobiographical memory.

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is faster fading of unpleasant affect than pleasant affect. The FAB is negatively related to unhealthy outcomes and positively related to healthy outcomes. As videogames elicit strong emotions in players, we used retrospective methodology to examine the relation of the FAB to healthy and unhealthy variables for videogame and non-videogame events. We found robust FAB effects that were negatively related to unhealthy variables, which supported contemporary emotion regulation theories. Furthermore, the FAB was larger for non-videogame events than for videogame events, and frequent videogame play related to low FAB for videogame events; these results connected videogame play with poor emotion regulation. Unexpectedly, high levels of both gaming addiction and depression yielded high FAB. The complex FAB effects and the fact that rehearsal mediated them replicated past FAB findings across various events, and they extended these results to the context of videogames.

Grief and Avoidant Death Attitudes Combine to Predict the Fading Affect Bias.

The fading affect bias (FAB) occurs when unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect. To detect mechanisms that influence the FAB in the context of death, we measured neuroticism, depression, anxiety, negative religious coping, death attitudes, and complicated grief as potential predictors of FAB for unpleasant/death and pleasant events at 2 points in time. The FAB was robust across older and newer events, which supported the mobilization-minimization hypothesis. Unexpectedly, complicated grief positively predicted FAB, and death avoidant attitudes moderated this relation, such that the Initial Event Affect by Grief interaction was only significant at the highest 3 quintiles of death avoidant attitudes. These results were likely due to moderate grief ratings, which were, along with avoidant death attitudes, related to healthy outcomes in past research. These results implicate complicated grief and death avoidant attitudes as resiliency mechanisms that are mobilized during bereavement to minimize its unpleasant effects.

The fading affect bias shows positive outcomes at the general but not the individual level of analysis in the context of social media.

Unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect (e.g., Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997); this effect is referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB; Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003a). Research shows that the FAB is consistently related to positive/healthy outcomes at a general but not at a specific level of analysis based on event types and individual differences (e.g., Gibbons et al., 2013). Based on the positive outcomes for FAB and negative outcomes for social media (Bolton et al., 2013; Huang, 2010), the current study examined FAB in the context of social media events along with related individual differences. General positive outcomes were shown in the form of robust FAB effects across social media and non-social media events, a larger FAB for non-social media events than for social media events, negative correlations of FAB with depression, anxiety, and stress as well as a positive correlation of FAB with self-esteem. However, the lack of a negative correlation between FAB and anxiety for social media events in a 3-way interaction did not show positive outcomes at a specific level of analysis. Rehearsal ratings mediated the 3-way interaction. Implications are discussed.

School and religious factors impact the neuroticism-grief link in adolescents.

Researchers have long recognized neuroticism as a risk factor for complicated grief. However, the mediating influences of school belongingness and negative religious coping have not been examined. To explore these connections, adolescents from two high schools and a choir group were recruited to complete a brief survey. Data from 99 students revealed that both factors independently partially mediated the impact of neuroticism on persistent complex bereavement symptoms. Findings suggest that social isolation and spiritual struggles contribute adversely to the grief of some emotionally sensitive students. The results also support the efficacy of a biopsychosocial-spiritual approach to studying adolescent grief.

Testing the fading affect bias for healthy coping in the context of death.

Affect fades faster for unpleasant events than for pleasant events (e.g., Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997 ), which is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB; Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003 ). Although research has generally shown that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism, this same finding has not been demonstrated at a specific level of analysis accounting for particular event types and related individual differences (e.g., Gibbons et al., 2013 ). Given the strong unpleasant emotions associated with death (Rask, Kaunonen, & Paunonen-Ilmonen, 2002 ), the current study examined FAB in the context of death events and participant attitudes toward death. General healthy coping was shown by robust FAB across death and control (i.e., everyday) events and by a negative correlation between negative religious coping and FAB. Although healthy coping at a specific level of analysis was supported by increased FAB for participants who held accepting attitudes toward death when they recalled everyday events, it was not supported by decreased FAB for the same participants when they recalled death events. This effect was mediated by rehearsal ratings, not depression. Implications are discussed.

The Fading Affect Bias shows healthy coping at the general level, but not the specific level for religious variables across religious and non-religious events.

The research on fading emotions has shown that unpleasant emotions fade more over time than pleasant emotions, which is a phenomenon referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB). Based on the negative relation between the FAB and dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), some researchers have argued that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism (Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003). As religious variables are related to positive emotions and emotional coping (e.g., Cohen, 2002; Pargament, Smith, Koenig, & Perez, 1998), we examined the FAB as a healthy coping mechanism at the general and specific levels of analysis in the context of religion. General healthy coping was supported by (1) FAB effects across both religious events (REs) and non-religious events (NREs) and (2) a positive relation for spirituality and the FAB. However, specific healthy coping was not supported by a small FAB for (1) REs at high levels of positive religious coping (PRC) for NREs, (2) NREs at low levels of PRC for NREs, and (3) purely REs relative to REs involving spirituality. Other implications are discussed.

Visuo-cognitive skill deficits in Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body disease: A comparative analysis.

Dementia is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive cognitive loss. Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the Lewy body disease are the two most common causes of age-related degenerative dementia. Visuo-cognitive skills are a combination of very different cognitive functions being performed by the visual system. These skills are impaired in both AD and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). The aim of this review is to evaluate various studies for these visuo-cognitive skills. An exhaustive internet search of all relevant medical databases was carried out using a series of key-word applications, including The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, PSYCHINFO, EMBASE, CINAHL, AMED, SportDiscus, Science Citation Index, Index to Theses, ZETOC, PEDro and occupational therapy (OT) seeker and OT search. We reviewed all the articles until March 2013 with key words of: Visual skills visual cognition dementia AD, but the direct neurobiological etiology is difficult to establish., Dementia of Lewy body disease. Although most studies have used different tests for studying these abilities, in general, these tests evaluated the individual's ability of (1) visual recognition, (2) visual discrimination, (3) visual attention and (4) visuo-perceptive integration. Performance on various tests has been evaluated for assessing these skills. Most studies assessing such skills show that these skills are impaired in DLB as compared with AD. Visuo-cognitive skills are impaired more in DLB as compared with AD. These impairments have evident neuropathological correlations, but the direct neurobiological etiology is difficult to establish.

The fading affect bias across alcohol consumption frequency for alcohol-related and non-alcohol-related events.

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is the tendency for unpleasant emotions to fade more over time than pleasant emotions (Walker, Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). The FAB is negatively related to dysphoria (Walker, Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Thompson, 2003), which led researchers to suggest that the FAB is a healthy coping mechanism that improves the overall positivity of life (Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003). The FAB may also reinforce certain maladaptive behaviors, such as drinking alcohol, as the unpleasant emotions associated with those behaviors quickly fade from memory, and increase the likelihood of those behaviors in the future. If the FAB increases the likelihood of maladaptive alcohol consumption, the FAB should be greatest for ordinary events at low alcohol consumption levels, whereas the FAB should be greatest for alcohol events at high alcohol consumption levels. The results of two studies provided support for the hypotheses. The implications are discussed.

Why people rehearse their memories: frequency of use and relations to the intensity of emotions associated with autobiographical memories.

People may choose to rehearse their autobiographical memories in silence or to disclose their memories with other people. This paper focuses on five types of memory rehearsal: involuntary rehearsal, rehearsal to maintain an event memory, rehearsal to re-experience the emotion of an event, rehearsal to understand an event, or rehearsal for social communication. A total of 337 participants recalled event memories, provided estimates of how often each event was rehearsed and for what reason, and rated the affective characteristics of the events. Rehearsal frequency was highest for social communication and lowest for rehearsals aimed at understanding events. For many rehearsal types, rehearsal was more frequent for positive than negative events. Frequently rehearsed events tended to show less affective fading. The pattern changed when events were socially rehearsed. For positive events, increased social rehearsal was related to a reduction in affective fading. For negative events, increased social rehearsal was associated with increased affective fading.

Enumeration produces poor primacy for tactile presentation relative to visual and auditory presentation as the only modality effect.

Methodological biases may help explain the modality effect, which is superior recall of auditory recency (end of list) items relative to visual recency items. In 1985 Nairne and McNabb used a counting procedure to reduce methodological biases, and they produced modality-like effects, such that recall of tactile recency items was superior to recall of visual recency items. The present study extended Nairne and McNabb's counting procedure and controlled several variables which may have enhanced recall of tactile end items or disrupted recall of visual end items in their study. Although the results of the present study indicated general serial position effects across tactile, visual, and auditory presentation modalities, the tactile condition showed lower recall for the initial items in the presentation list than the other two conditions. Moreover, recall of the final list item did not differ across the three presentation modalities; modality effects were not found. These results did not replicate the findings of Nairne and McNabb, or much of the past research showing superior recall of auditory recency items. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Influence of recall procedures on the modality effect with numbers and enumerated stimuli.

Experiment 1 extended J. S. Nairne and W. L. McNabb's (1985) counting procedure for presenting numerical stimuli to examine the modality effect. The present authors presented participants with dots and beeps and instructed participants to count the items to derive to-be-remembered numbers. In addition, the authors presented numbers as visual and auditory symbols, and participants recalled items by using free-serial written recall. Experiment 1 demonstrated primacy effects, recency effects, and modality effects for visual and auditory symbols and for counts of dots and beeps. Experiment 2 replicated the procedure in Experiment 1 using strict-serial written recall instead of free-serial written recall. The authors demonstrated primacy and recency effects across all 4 presentation conditions and found a modality effect for numbers that the authors presented as symbols. However, the authors found no modality effect when they presented numbers as counts of beeps and dots. The authors discuss the implications of the results in terms of methods for testing modality effects.