Interpersonal risk for suicide in social anxiety: The roles of shame and depression.

Though research indicates that individuals with social anxiety disorder may experience elevated levels of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness, two interpersonal risk factors critical for the development of suicidal desire, it remains unclear why. The current investigation considered how shame and depression may help to explain the relationship between social anxiety and interpersonal suicide risk factors. Participants (N=259), recruited using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, completed measures of social anxiety, interpersonal suicide risk factors, shame, and depression. Social anxiety was associated with greater thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness. In addition, shame partially explained the association between social anxiety and thwarted belongingness, though the indirect effect was no longer significant after considering depression as a moderator. As predicted, shame was found to fully explain the association between social anxiety and perceived burdensomeness and this indirect effect was most pronounced among individuals with high comorbid depression. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

The importance of assessing clinical phenomena in Mechanical Turk research.

Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website provides a data collection platform with quick and inexpensive access to diverse samples. Numerous reports have lauded MTurk as capturing high-quality data with an epidemiological sample that is more representative of the U.S. population than traditional in-person convenience samples (e.g., undergraduate subject pools). This benefit, in combination with the ease and low-cost of data collection, has led to a remarkable increase in studies using MTurk to investigate phenomena across a wide range of psychological disciplines. Multiple reports have now examined the demographic characteristics of MTurk samples. One key gap remains, however, in that relatively little is known about individual differences in clinical symptoms among MTurk participants. This paper discusses the importance of assessing clinical phenomena in MTurk samples and supports its assertions through an empirical investigation of a large sample (N = 1,098) of MTurk participants. Results revealed that MTurk participants endorse clinical symptoms to a substantially greater degree than traditional nonclinical samples. This distinction was most striking for depression and social anxiety symptoms, which were endorsed at levels comparable with individuals with clinically diagnosed mood and anxiety symptoms. Participants' symptoms of physiological anxiety, hoarding, and eating pathology fell within the subclinical range. Overall, the number of individuals exceeding validated clinical cutoffs was between 3 and 19 times the estimated 12-month prevalence rates. Based on the current findings, it is argued that MTurk participants differ from the general population in meaningful ways, and researchers should consider this when referring to this sample as truly representative. (PsycINFO Database Record

State Rumination: Associations with Emotional Stress Reactivity and Attention Biases.

Within dysphoria, rumination has been identified as a particularly maladaptive emotion regulation strategy linked to prolonged negative affect and the onset of depressive episodes. Until now, the majority of research assessing naturally occurring rumination has utilized trait rumination measures; however, additional information may be obtained by assessing state rumination. The current study examined the association between state rumination and participants' emotional recovery from stress. In addition, biased attention toward emotional information was investigated as a mechanism that might underlie state rumination. Participants completed the exogenous cuing task to assess attentional engagement and disengagement from emotional facial expressions followed by a psychosocial stressor. State rumination and self-reported sadness were measured during the recovery period. As expected, state rumination was associated with less recovery in sadness scores, even after controlling for trait rumination and depressive symptoms. Moreover, within the high dysphoria group, participants who had more difficulty disengaging from emotional expressions reported higher levels of rumination in response to the stressor. Results highlight an important association between state rumination and individuals' recovery from stress, and suggest that difficulty disengaging attention from emotional expressions might be one mechanism underlying state rumination in dysphoria.