Individuals who report eating disorder symptoms also exhibit a disrupted fading affect bias in autobiographical memory.

We examined symptoms of disordered eating in the context of autobiographical memory via a phenomenon termed the Fading Affect Bias (FAB). The FAB is the tendency for the affect elicited by thinking about positive past events to fade slower than the affect elicited by thinking about negative past events. In Study 1 via an online survey procedure (Event N = 714), and via a booklet laboratory procedure in both Study 2 (Event N = 916) and Study 3 (Event N = 516) each participant described six (Studies 1 & 3) and four (Study 2) autobiographical events. They rated each event's affect at occurrence, affect at recall, and event rehearsal frequency. Participants also reported their own symptoms of eating concerns. Across studies, eating, shape, and weight concerns each moderated the FAB: above-average ratings were associated with a small FAB or no FAB. In all studies, restrictive eating ratings did not moderate the FAB. These results remained while controlling for event rehearsal frequency. The results clarify the relation between subclinical disordered eating and emotion regulation via the FAB during reminiscence about ordinary life events. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of our findings.

Contralateral Breast Cancer Event Detection Using Nature Language Processing.

To facilitate the identification of contralateral breast cancer events for large cohort study, we proposed and implemented a new method based on features extracted from narrative text in progress notes and features from numbers of pathology reports for each side of breast cancer. Our method collects medical concepts and their combinations to detect contralateral events in progress notes. In addition, the numbers of pathology reports generated for either left or right side of breast cancer were derived as additional features. We experimented with support vector machine using the derived features to detect contralateral events. In the cross-validation and held-out tests, the area under curve score is 0.93 and 0.89 respectively. This method can be replicated due to the simplicity of feature generation.