The effect of image category and incidental arousal on boundary restriction.

People's memory for scenes has consequences, including for eyewitness testimony. Negative scenes may lead to a particular memory error, where narrowed scene boundaries lead people to recall being closer to a scene than they were. But boundary restriction-including attenuation of the opposite phenomenon boundary extension-has been difficult to replicate, perhaps because heightened arousal accompanying negative scenes, rather than negative valence itself, drives the effect. Indeed, in Green et al. (2019) arousal alone, conditioned to a particular neutral image category, increased boundary restriction for images in that category. But systematic differences between image categories may have driven these results, irrespective of arousal. Here, we clarify whether boundary restriction stems from the external arousal stimulus or image category differences. Presenting one image category (everyday-objects), half accompanied by arousal (Experiment 1), and presenting both neutral image categories (everyday-objects, nature), without arousal (Experiment 2), resulted in no difference in boundary judgement errors. These findings suggest that image features-including inherent valence, arousal, and complexity-are not sufficient to induce boundary restriction or reduce boundary extension for neutral images, perhaps explaining why boundary restriction is inconsistently demonstrated in the lab.

To Look or Not to Look: Instagram's Sensitive-Content Screens Do Not Deter Vulnerable People From Viewing Negative Content.

By blurring sensitive images and providing a warning, Instagram's sensitive-content screens seek to assist users-particularly vulnerable users-in making informed decisions about what content to approach or avoid. Yet, prior research found most people (∼85%) chose to uncover a single screened negative image (Bridgland, Bellet, et al., 2022). Here, we extended on and addressed shortcomings of this previous research. Across two studies, we presented participants with a series of sensitive-content screens covering negative content that appeared among neutral and positive images; participants could choose to uncover screens (or not). We found most participants opted to uncover the first screen they came across, and many continued to uncover screens over a series of images. We also found no evidence suggesting vulnerable people (e.g., people with higher rates of depression) are more likely to avoid sensitive content: people similarly uncovered sensitive-content screens irrespective of their vulnerabilities. Thus, sensitive-content screens may be ineffective in deterring people from exposing themselves to sensitive content. Additionally, avoidance behavior, information seeking behavior, negative affect driven behavior, and positive affect driven behavior appeared to underpin participants' decisions to uncover screened content.

A nervous wait: Instagram's sensitive-content screens cause anticipatory anxiety but do not mitigate reactions to negative content.

Online platforms like Instagram cover potentially distressing imagery with a sensitive-content screen (blurred imagery plus a content warning). Previous research suggests people typically choose to "uncover" and view screened content. In three studies, we investigated whether the presence of screens mitigates the negative emotional impact of viewing content. In Study 1, participants viewed positive and neutral images, and screens (with an option to view the negative images beneath) for a 5-minute period. In Study 2, half the participants saw a grey mask in place of the typical sensitive-content screen. In addition, each image appeared for a fixed period (5 s) and participants had no option to uncover it. Study 3 was like Study 2 except half the participants saw negative images preceded by a sensitive-content screen and half saw negative images without screens. Overall, participants reported a significant increase in state anxiety and negative affect from pre-to post task when they were exposed to sensitive-content screens, whether or not they were also exposed to the negative imagery beneath. Our data suggest sensitive-content screens cause negative responses - state anxiety and negative affect - that do not translate to an emotional benefit when people view negative content.

Exploring intrusions without awareness: A preliminary study of the characteristics and influences of meta-awareness failures.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Research shows that people can lack meta-awareness (i.e., being explicitly aware) of their trauma-related thoughts, which impacts our understanding of re-experiencing symptoms, a key symptom type in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), assessed through self-report. This preliminarily study explored differences between (meta-)aware and unaware intrusion characteristics to understand why some intrusions are not immediately apparent to individuals. METHODS: Trauma-exposed participants (N = 78) were recruited from online crowd-sourcing platforms to complete an online meta-awareness task. During a reading task, participants were intermittently probed to index the occurrence of unreported (i.e., unaware) trauma-related intrusions. Once participants indicated trauma-related intrusions were present, they then completed a questionnaire that indexed intrusion characteristics. RESULTS: Although unaware intrusions did occur in a subset of the sample, there were no fundamental differences between aware and unaware intrusions in terms of modality of experience (imagery vs. non-imagery), meaningfulness, accessibility, or other characteristics (e.g., vividness). LIMITATIONS: There was potential for lower participant engagement and attention due to the online delivery of the meta-awareness task, which may have minimized meta-awareness failure. Future research could consider using a continuous measure to index levels of meta-awareness. In addition, recruiting clinical samples (e.g., individuals with PTSD) who typically experience multiple daily intrusions would allow generalizability of the current findings to be tested. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings from this preliminary study suggest that unaware and aware intrusions show more commonality than not in their characteristics, with further research required to improve our understanding of the mechanisms leading to meta-awareness or lack of in PTSD.

Disgust and fear reactions uniquely affect intrusions and posttraumatic stress symptoms.

Disgust reactions commonly occur during/following trauma and predict posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. Yet, disgust is not mentioned in DSM-5 PTSD criteria. To investigate disgust's clinical significance in PTSD, we measured the relationship between disgust (and fear) reactions to a personal trauma, and problematic intrusion characteristics (e.g., distress) and intrusion symptom severity. We focused on intrusions because they are a transdiagnostic PTSD symptom, though we also measured overall PTS symptoms to replicate prior work. Participants (N = 471) recalled their most traumatic/stressful event from the past six months. They then rated disgust and fear reactions to this event and completed the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-5. Participants who had experienced intrusions about their event in the past month (n = 261) rated these intrusions on several characteristics (e.g., distress, vividness). We found stronger traumatic event-related disgust reactions were associated with more problematic intrusion characteristics, higher intrusion symptom severity, and higher overall PTS symptom severity. Notably, disgust reactions uniquely predicted these variables after statistically controlling for fear reactions. We conclude disgust reactions to trauma may be similarly pathological to fear reactions for intrusion and broader PTS symptoms. Therefore, PTSD diagnostic manuals and treatments should recognize disgust as a trauma-relevant emotion.

Emotional stimuli similarly disrupt attention in both visual fields.

People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant emotional distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion. Participants viewed a rapid image-stream in each visual field and reported the rotation of an embedded neutral target preceded by a negative or neutral distractor. We predicted that the degree to which negative (vs. neutral) distractors impaired target detection would be larger when targets appeared in the left than the right stream. This hypothesis was supported, but only when the distractor and target could appear in the same or opposite stream as each other (Experiments 2a-b), not when they always appeared in the same stream as each other (Experiments 1a-1b). However, this effect was driven by superior left-stream accuracy following neutral distractors, and similar left- and right-stream accuracy following negative distractors. Emotional distractors therefore override visuospatial asymmetries and disrupt attention, regardless of visual field.

I forgot that I forgot: PTSD symptom severity in a general population correlates with everyday diary-recorded prospective memory failures.

Extant research suggests a complex relationship between prospective memory (PM) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. In a general population, this relationship exists for self-report assessment but not objective, in-lab PM performance (e.g., pressing a certain key at a particular time, or when particular words appear). However, both these measurement methods have limitations. Objective, in-lab PM tasks might not represent typical everyday performance, while self-report measurement might be biased by metacognitive beliefs. Thus, we used a naturalistic diary paradigm to answer the overarching question: are PTSD symptoms associated with PM failures in everyday life? We found a small positive correlation between diary-recorded PM errors and PTSD symptom severity (r = .21). Time-based tasks (i.e., intentions completed at a particular time, or after a specified time has elapsed; r = .29), but not event-based tasks (i.e., intentions completed in response to an environmental cue; r = .08), correlated with PTSD symptoms. Moreover, although diary-recorded and self-report PM correlated, we did not replicate the finding that metacognitive beliefs underpin the PM-PTSD relationship. These results suggest that metacognitive beliefs might be particularly important for self-report PM only.

Posttraumatic stress disorder symptom severity and functional impairment in the education domain.

To comprehensively understand and treat Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), we need to accurately assess how PTSD symptoms affect people's daily functioning (e.g., in work, study, and relationships). However, the predominant use of self-report functional impairment measures-which are not validated against observable behavior-limits our understanding of this issue. To address this gap, we examined the relationship between posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms (including symptom clusters) and subjective and objective measures of functional impairment in the education domain. University students completed online self-report measures of educational impairment, PTS symptoms, intelligence and childhood trauma. We accessed participants' average grades at the end of the semester in which they participated. After controlling for IQ and childhood trauma, increased PTS symptoms were associated with both higher subjective educational impairment and lower Grade Point Average; this relationship was strongest for subjective global ratings of educational impairment, compared to educational impairment assessed according to specific examples. Our results suggest conceptual overlap between symptoms and impairment, and point to the benefit of using both objective and subjective modes of assessing impairment.

Something Distressing This Way Comes: The Effects of Trigger Warnings on Avoidance Behaviors in an Analogue Trauma Task.

Avoidance is one of the purported benefits and harms of trigger warnings-alerts that upcoming content may contain traumatic themes. Yet, previous research has focused primarily on emotional responses. Here, we used a trauma analogue design to assess people's avoidance behavior in response to stimuli directly related to an analogue trauma event. University undergraduates (n = 199) watched a traumatic film and then viewed film image stills preceded by either a trigger warning or a neutral task instruction. Participants had the option to "cover" and avoid each image. Apart from a minor increase in avoidance when a warning appeared in the first few trials, we found that participants did not overall avoid negative stimuli prefaced with a trigger warning any more than stimuli without a warning. In fact, participants were reluctant overall to avoid distressing images; only 12.56% (n = 25) of participants used the option to cover such images when given the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, we did not find any indication that trigger warning messages help people to pause and emotionally prepare themselves to view negative content. Our results contribute to the growing body of literature demonstrating that warnings seem trivially effective in achieving their purported goals.

Food for thought: Commentary on Burnette et al. (2021) "Concerns and recommendations for using Amazon MTurk for eating disorder research".

Burnette et al. aimed to validate two eating disorder symptom measures among transgender adults recruited from Mechanical Turk (MTurk). After identifying several data quality issues, Burnette et al. abandoned this aim and instead documented the issues they faced (e.g., demographic misrepresentation, repeat submissions, inconsistent responses across similar questions, failed attention checks). Consequently, Burnette et al. raised concerns about the use of MTurk for psychological research, particularly in an eating disorder context. However, we believe these claims are overstated because they arise from a single study not designed to test MTurk data quality. Further, despite claiming to go "above and beyond" current recommendations, Burnette et al. missed key screening procedures. In particular, they missed procedures known to prevent participants who use commercial data centers (i.e., server farms) to hide their true IP address and complete multiple surveys for financial gain. In this commentary, we outline key screening procedures that allow researchers to obtain quality MTurk data. We also highlight the importance of balancing efforts to increase data quality with efforts to maintain sample diversity. With appropriate screening procedures, which should be preregistered, MTurk remains a viable participant source that requires further validation in an eating disorder context.

The effects of computerised metacognitive cognitive bias modification training on the development of adaptive metacognitive beliefs and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Maladaptive metacognitive beliefs are associated with the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following trauma, however it remains unclear whether training people to adopt healthy metacognitive beliefs helps to protect against the development of PTSD symptoms. We developed and tested a new cognitive bias modification training protocol (CBMMetacog) that aimed to prevent analogue PTSD by training people to adopt healthy metacognitive beliefs prior to watching a distressing film. METHODS: Participants (N = 135) received CBMMetacog or a control CBM training and then watched a trauma film. We assessed participants' metacognitive appraisal style/beliefs, analogue PTSD symptoms, including intrusions and meta-awareness of their intrusions. RESULTS: CBMMetacog led participants to adopt healthier metacognitive beliefs relative to the control training. Importantly, CBMMetacog participants reported fewer film intrusions over a 7-day period compared to the control group. CBMMetacog did not increase participants' meta-awareness of their intrusions. LIMITATIONS: As this was the first study to manipulate metacognitive beliefs related to an analogue trauma via CBM, we chose to use a healthy participant sample. Therefore, further research is needed before these results can be generalised to clinical samples. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, these results suggest that training people to adopt healthy metacognitive beliefs, prior to trauma exposure, may help reduce vulnerability to PTSD.

Unprepared: Thinking of a trigger warning does not prompt preparation for trauma-related content.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Trigger warnings have been described as helpful-enabling people to "emotionally prepare" for upcoming trauma-related material via "coping strategies." However, no research has asked people what they think they would do when they come across a warning-an essential first step in providing evidence that trigger warnings are helpful. METHODS: Here, participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 260) completed one of two future thinking scenarios; we asked half to think about coming across a warning related to their most stressful/traumatic experience; the others thought about actual content (but no warning) related to their most stressful/traumatic experience. RESULTS: The warning condition did not produce differences in coping strategies, state anxiety, or phenomenology (e.g., vividness, valence) relative to the content condition. Only one key difference emerged: participants who imagined encountering a warning used fewer positive words, when describing how they would react. LIMITATIONS: Although measuring actual behavior was not our aim, hypothetically simulating the future may not capture what actual future behavior would look like (i.e., an intention-behaviour gap). CONCLUSIONS: One potential explanation for the consistent finding in the literature that trigger warnings fail to ameliorate negative emotional reactions is that these warnings may not help people bring coping strategies to mind. Although, further empirical work is necessary to fully substantiate this potential interpretation.

Mechanisms underlying memory enhancement for disgust over fear.

Disgust is remembered better than fear, despite both emotions being highly negative and arousing. But the mechanisms underlying this effect are not well-understood. Therefore, we compared two proposed mechanisms underlying superior memory for disgust. According to the memory consolidation mechanism, it is harder (but crucial) to remember potentially contaminating vs. threatening stimuli. Hence, disgust elicits additional memory consolidation processes to fear. According to the attention mechanism, it takes longer to establish if disgust (relative to fear) stimuli are dangerous. Hence, people pay more attention to disgust during encoding. Both mechanisms could boost memory for disgust. Ninety-eight participants encoded disgust, fear, and neutral images whilst completing a simple task to measure attention. After 10- or 45-min delay, participants freely recalled the images. We found enhanced memory for disgust relative to fear after 10- and 45-min delay, but this effect was larger after 45-min. Participants paid more attention to disgust than fear images during encoding. However, mixed effect models showed increased attention did not contribute to enhanced memory for disgust. Our results therefore support the memory consolidation mechanism.

Are Individuals Always Aware of Their Trauma-Related Intrusive Thoughts? A Study of Meta-Awareness.

Individuals are not always aware of their mental content. We tested whether lack of awareness occurs in those who have experienced trauma, with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We also examined the role of proposed cognitive mechanisms (working memory and inhibition) in explaining unnoticed intrusions. Individuals with PTSD (n = 44), and varying levels of symptoms (high posttraumatic stress [PTS]: n = 24; low PTS: n = 37) reported on intrusive thoughts throughout a reading task. Intermittently, participants responded to probes about whether their thoughts were trauma related. Participants were "caught" engaging in unreported trauma-related thoughts (unnoticed intrusions) for between 24 and 27% of the probes in the PTSD and high PTS groups, compared with 15% of occasions in the low PTS group. For trauma-related intrusions only, participants lacked meta-awareness for almost 40% of probes in the PTSD group, which was significantly less than that observed in the other groups (∼60%). Contrary to predictions, working memory and response inhibition did not predict unnoticed intrusions. The results suggest that individuals who have experienced significant trauma can lack awareness about the frequency of their trauma-related thoughts. Further research is warranted to identify the mechanisms underpinning the occurrence of unnoticed intrusions.

The cost of being absent: Is meta-awareness of mind-wandering related to depression symptom severity, rumination tendencies and trauma intrusions?

BACKGROUND: Deng, Li and Tang (2014) reported that depression symptom severity is negatively associated with dispositional mindfulness and importantly, positively associated with zone-outs (mind-wandering without meta-awareness). We replicated and extended their study by exploring possible explanations for these relationships, and by also investigating whether mind-wandering is related to (1) trait rumination subtype-brooding, depressive or reflective, and (2) trauma intrusions-a hallmark PTSD symptom, since both rumination and trauma intrusions strongly correlate with depression. We also explored if dispositional mindfulness-the opposing construct of mind-wandering-mediated these relationships. METHOD: Two hundred participants completed mindfulness tendency and depression severity measures, counterbalanced with the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART)-including thought probes to index behavioral mind-wandering (target-error frequency), subjective mind-wandering and meta-awareness-then the rumination style and trauma intrusion frequency measures. RESULTS: Depression scores positively correlated with mind-wandering with and without meta-awareness and with SART target-error rates, and negatively correlated with dispositional mindfulness. Further, trait brooding positively correlated with mind-wandering without meta-awareness. Dispositional mindfulness mediated the relationships between brooding and depression, and depression and mind-wandering, and also negatively correlated with trauma intrusion frequency. LIMITATIONS: Limitations include measurement and mind-wandering definitions, and an inability to make causal claims. CONCLUSIONS: People experiencing greater depression symptomology, and/or who have a greater tendency to brood, mind-wandered more often. Further, people who experience more trauma intrusions tend to be less mindful. These results point to potential harmful effects of mind-wandering through people's reduced propensity to be mindful, facilitating a negative self-referenced cognitive loop that may maintain or increase depression.

Danger! Negative memories ahead: the effect of warnings on reactions to and recall of negative memories.

A trigger warning is an alert that upcoming material containing distressing themes might "trigger" the details and emotion associated with a negative memory to come to mind. Warnings supposedly prevent or minimise this distress. But, do warnings really have this effect? To simulate the experience described above, here, we examined whether warning participants-by telling them that recalling a negative event would be distressing-would change characteristics associated with the immediate and delayed recall of a negative event (such as phenomenology e.g., vividness, sense of reliving), compared to participants who we did not warn. Generally, we found that time helps to heal the "emotional wounds" associated with negative memories: negative characteristics-such as emotion, vividness etc.-faded over time. However, the event's emotional impact (the frequency of experiences related to the event such as "I had trouble staying asleep"), subsided less over a two-week delay for participants who were warned in the first session. Our findings suggest that warning messages may prolong the negative characteristics associated with memories over time, rather than prepare people to recall a negative experience.

The role of belief in memory amplification for trauma events.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Trauma survivors often report trauma events inconsistently over time. Many studies, for example, have found that people report having experienced trauma events that they initially failed to report or remember, a phenomenon called "memory amplification." Other studies have found the opposite: people report experiencing fewer events over time. Nahleen, Nixon, and Takarangi (2019) asked participants at two time-points, with a six-month delay, whether they had experienced 19 sexual assault events on a yes/no scale. Participants reported fewer events over time, that is, memory for sexual assault did not amplify overall. In the current study, we assessed whether inconsistency in reports of trauma exposure over time may be attributed to changes in participants' belief that certain events were experienced. METHODS: We replicated Nahleen et al. (2019), but rather than respond to a yes/no trauma exposure scale, participants were required to rate the likelihood that each trauma event occurred on an 8-point scale (1 = definitely did not happen; 8 = definitely did happen). RESULTS: We found that participants believed that they were less likely to have experienced the sexual assault events at follow-up compared to initial assessment. LIMITATIONS: We could not corroborate trauma experiences or determine causality with our design. Further, not all of our findings were consistent with Nahleen et al. (2019). CONCLUSIONS: Sexual assault memories did not amplify over time, perhaps because, compared to other types of trauma, the idea of experiencing additional sexual assault events that were not actually experienced is less believable.

Right Hemisphere Memory Bias Does Not Extend to Involuntary Memories for Negative Scenes.

Attention is unequally distributed across the visual field. Due to greater right than left hemisphere activation for visuospatial attention, people attend slightly more to the left than the right side. As a result, people voluntarily remember visual stimuli better when it first appears in the left than the right visual field. But does this effect-termed a right hemisphere memory bias-also enhance involuntary memory? We manipulated the presentation location of 100 highly negative images (chosen to increase the likelihood that participants would experience any involuntary memories) in three conditions: predominantly leftward (right hemisphere bias), predominantly rightward (left hemisphere bias), or equally in both visual fields (bilateral). We measured subsequent involuntary memories immediately and for 3 days after encoding. Contrary to predictions, biased hemispheric processing did not affect short- or long-term involuntary memory frequency or duration. Future research should measure hemispheric differences at retrieval, rather than just encoding.

Why the COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic stressor.

The COVID-19 pandemic does not fit into prevailing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) models, or diagnostic criteria, yet emerging research shows traumatic stress symptoms as a result of this ongoing global stressor. Current pathogenic event models focus on past, and largely direct, trauma exposure to certain kinds of life-threatening events. Yet, traumatic stress reactions to future, indirect trauma exposure, and non-Criterion A events exist, suggesting COVID-19 is also a traumatic stressor which could lead to PTSD symptomology. To examine this idea, we asked a sample of online participants (N = 1,040), in five western countries, to indicate the COVID-19 events they had been directly exposed to, events they anticipated would happen in the future, and other forms of indirect exposure such as through media coverage. We then asked participants to complete the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-5, adapted to measure pre/peri/post-traumatic reactions in relation to COVID-19. We also measured general emotional reactions (e.g., angry, anxious, helpless), well-being, psychosocial functioning, and depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. We found participants had PTSD-like symptoms for events that had not happened and when participants had been directly (e.g., contact with virus) or indirectly exposed to COVID-19 (e.g., via media). Moreover, 13.2% of our sample were likely PTSD-positive, despite types of COVID-19 "exposure" (e.g., lockdown) not fitting DSM-5 criteria. The emotional impact of "worst" experienced/anticipated events best predicted PTSD-like symptoms. Taken together, our findings support emerging research that COVID-19 can be understood as a traumatic stressor event capable of eliciting PTSD-like responses and exacerbating other related mental health problems (e.g., anxiety, depression, psychosocial functioning, etc.). Our findings add to existing literature supporting a pathogenic event memory model of traumatic stress.

Does emotional or repeated misinformation increase memory distortion for a trauma analogue event?

In general, memory of highly negative and even traumatic events can distort. However, the effect of misinformation exposure on such memories requires further investigation given the inconsistent past findings. With two experiments, we investigated: (1) whether misinformation distorts memory for highly negative analogue events, (2) whether memory distortion is increased for more emotional and potentially traumatic details compared to unemotional details, and (3) whether repeated misinformation exposure further increases memory distortion for highly negative events compared to single exposure, a possibility that has not been investigated to our knowledge. In both experiments, participants viewed a trauma analogue film with some scenes removed. Twenty-four hours later, they were given three "eyewitness" reports describing the film's events. To manipulate misinformation repetition, either zero, one, or all three of the reports described removed scenes. To determine whether memory distortion is increased for emotional details, half of the removed scenes were more traumatic than the other half. Participants exposed to misinformation falsely remembered more removed scenes compared to participants who were not exposed to misinformation. Further, memory distortion was increased for emotional (vs. unemotional) aspects of the film. Repeated misinformation exposure, however, did not lead to significantly higher error rates compared to single exposure. The lack of perceptual overlap between our written misinformation and film test items may have limited false memories even with repeated misinformation. Alternatively, the repeated vs. single misinformation effect may exist but be very small, as suggested by our raw means and effect sizes.