Positive mental health as a moderator of the association between risk factors and suicide ideation/behavior in psychiatric inpatients.

In recent studies positive mental health has been shown as a resilience factor related to suicide ideation/behavior. It is not known if positive mental health buffers the effect of various risk factors (depression, perceived burdensomeness, hopelessness, childhood maltreatment) on suicide ideation/behavior in psychiatric inpatients-a high risk population. A total of 100 psychiatric inpatients were included in the survey. Four hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine, whether positive mental health moderates the association between the four risks factors and suicide ideation/behavior. Positive mental health was shown to moderate the association between perceived burdensomeness and suicide ideation/behavior. The association between the other three risk factors and suicide ideation/behavior was not moderated by positive mental health. Given the cross-sectional nature of the data, conclusions on causality cannot be drawn. The buffering effect of positive mental health suggests that positive mental health may improve the identification of individuals at risk of suicide ideation/behavior and may be an important area to target in the prevention and treatment of individuals at risk of suicide. Further research is needed.

Resilience to suicide ideation: A cross-cultural test of the buffering hypothesis.

Depression and suicide ideation are common in student populations across the world. The present study investigated factors buffering the association between depression and suicide ideation. A total of 2,687 Chinese students and 601 German students took part in the investigation. Social support, satisfaction with life, self-efficacy, psychosocial stress resistance, and positive mental health were considered as resilience factors moderating the association between depressive symptoms and suicide ideation within both samples. Positive mental health moderated the impact of depressive symptoms on suicide ideation in German and Chinese students. Life satisfaction moderated the impact of depressive symptoms on suicide ideation in German students. Social support moderated the impact of depressive symptoms on suicide ideation in Chinese students. No interaction effects were found for self-efficacy and psychosocial stress resistance. Positive mental health, satisfaction with life, and perceived social support seem to confer resilience and should be taken into account, when assessing individuals for suicide risk.

Differences in the dynamics of affective and cognitive processing - An ERP study.

A controversy in emotion research concerns the question of whether affective or cognitive primacy are evident in processing affective stimuli and the factors contributing to each alternative. Using electrophysiological recordings in an adapted visual oddball paradigm allowed tracking the dynamics of affective and cognitive effects. Stimuli consisted of face pictures displaying affective expressions with rare oddballs differing from frequent stimuli in either affective expression, structure (while frequent stimuli were shown frontally these deviants were turned sideways) or they differed on both dimensions, i.e. in affective expression and structure. Results revealed a defined sequence of differences in ERP amplitudes: For stimuli deviating in their affective expression only, P1 modulations ~100ms were evident, while affective differences of structure deviants were not evident before the N170 time window. All three types of deviants differed in P300 amplitudes, indicating integration of affective and structural information. These results encompass evidence for both, cognitive and affective primacy depending on stimulus properties. Specifically affective primacy is only visible when the respective facial features can be extracted with ease. When structural differences make face processing harder, however, cognitive primacy is brought forward.

Evaluative conditioning of positive and negative valence affects P1 and N1 in verbal processing.

The present study examined the effect of contextual learning on the neural processing of previously meaningless pseudowords. During an evaluative conditioning session on 5 consecutive days, participants learned to associate 120 pseudowords with either positive, neutral or negative pictures. In a second session, participants were presented all conditioned pseudowords again together with 40 new pseudowords in a recognition memory task while their event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The behavioral data confirm successful learning of pseudoword valence. At the neural level, early modulations of the ERPs are visible at the P1 and the N1 components discriminating between positively and negatively conditioned pseudowords. Differences to new pseudowords were visible at later processing stages as indicated by modulations of the LPC. These results support a contextual learning hypothesis that is able to explain very early emotional ERP modulations in visual word recognition. Source localization indicates a role of medial-frontal brain regions as a likely origin of these early valence discrimination signals which are discussed to promote top-down signals to sensory processing.

A familiar font drives early emotional effects in word recognition.

The emotional connotation of a word is known to shift the process of word recognition. Using the electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) approach it has been documented that early attentional processing of high-arousing negative words is shifted at a stage of processing where a presented word cannot have been fully identified. Contextual learning has been discussed to contribute to these effects. The present study shows that a manipulation of the familiarity with a word's shape interferes with these earliest emotional ERP effects. Presenting high-arousing negative and neutral words in a familiar or an unfamiliar font results in very early emotion differences only in case of familiar shapes, whereas later processing stages reveal similar emotional effects in both font conditions. Because these early emotion-related differences predict later behavioral differences, it is suggested that contextual learning of emotional valence comprises more visual features than previously expected to guide early visual-sensory processing.

Effects of postretrieval-extinction learning on return of contextually controlled cued fear.

Reactivation of an already consolidated memory makes it labile for a period of several hrs, which are required for its reconsolidation. Evidence suggests that the return of conditioned fear through spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, or renewal can be prevented by blockading this reconsolidation process using pharmacological or behavioral interventions. Postretrieval-extinction learning has been shown to prevent the return of cued fear in humans using fear-irrelevant stimuli, as well as cued and contextual fear in rodents. The effects of postretrieval extinction on human contextually controlled cued fear to fear-relevant stimuli remain unknown, and are the focus of the present study. The experimental design was based on 3 consecutive days: acquisition, reactivation and extinction, and re-extinction. For the fear conditioning, 2 zoo frames served as different contexts, 5 fear-relevant stimuli (aversive animal pictures) served as conditioned stimuli (CS), electric shocks served as unconditioned stimuli (UCS). Expectancy ratings and skin-conductance response (SCR) were used as measures of fear responses; spontaneous recovery and renewal were used as indicators of the return of fear. The expectancy ratings and SCR results indicated spontaneous recovery on the third day, regardless of retrieval prior to extinction. No robust renewal effect was seen. It is suggested that the use of fear-relevant stimuli, the context salience, or reactivation context may explain the lack of reconsolidation effect. Our study indicates that the beneficial effects of postretrieval-extinction learning are sensitive to subtle methodological changes.

Acquired affective associations induce emotion effects in word recognition: an ERP study.

The present study examined how contextual learning and in particular emotionality conditioning impacts the neural processing of words, as possible key factors for the acquisition of words' emotional connotation. 21 participants learned on five consecutive days associations between meaningless pseudowords and unpleasant or neutral pictures using an evaluative conditioning paradigm. Subsequently, event-related potentials were recorded while participants implicitly processed the learned emotional relevance in a lexical decision paradigm. Emotional and neutral words were presented together with the conditioned pseudowords and a set of new pseudowords. Conditioned and new pseudowords differed in the late positive complex. Emotionally and neutrally conditioned stimuli differed in an early time window (80-120 ms) and in the P300. These results replicate ERP effects known from emotion word recognition and indicate that contextual learning and in particular evaluative conditioning is suitable to establish emotional associations in words, and to explain early ERP effects in emotion word recognition.