[Trauma, Resilience, and Emotion Regulation]. / Trauma, Resilienz und Emotionsregulation.

Background: History of childhood abuse and neglect is considered to be a relevant risk factor for adult psychopathology. A functional emotion regulation (ER) can account for resilience despite of traumatic experiences in childhood. Materials & Methods: This study compares the habitual use of specific ER strategies among mentally healthy individuals with (n=61) and without (n=52) experience of childhood abuse and neglect by using the self-rating instrument Heidelberg Form for Emotion Regulation Strategies (H-FERST). SCID-I, ADP-IV, SCL-27, and BDI-II were used for assessment of psychopathological distress. Results: We found no group difference in the habitual use of ER strategies. Healthy individuals with childhood abuse and neglect showed significantly more subjective distress symptoms. Discussion & Conclusion: Considering the significantly higher psychopathological distress reported by the trauma group, the functional habitual use of ER strategies could serve as a path to explain the resilient development of adult individuals after childhood abuse and neglect.

Treatment of avoidant personality traits in a German armed forces inpatient psychiatric setting.

Military duty places high demands on the soldiers' social adaptability and competences. Avoidant personality traits can lead to interpersonal conflicts and at least to mental disorders. 192 German Armed Forces soldiers were treated in a multimodal inpatient psychiatric treatment setting at a Bundeswehr hospital between 2007 and 2010. 129 of these patients received a social skills group training (group training of social competence [GSC]) as part of this setting. A comparison group (n=63) did not participate but got unspecific treatment elements instead. The Symptom Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R) and the Inventory on Competence and Control Beliefs (Fragebogen zu Kompetenz- und Kontrollüberzeugungen [FKK]) were applied. Symptom severity in the SCL-Global Severity Index, sum scale of the SCL-90-R and the four primary scales of the FKK showed significant improvements both immediately after treatment and at follow-up. No significant influence of the form of treatment (with/without GSC), age, gender, diagnosis, and deployments on the treatment result was established in the analysis of covariance. The data suggest that an inpatient psychiatric treatment setting focused on avoidant personality traits has a favorable effect on psychiatric symptom severity in military personnel. Social skills group training as a treatment component does not seem to be significantly superior to the standard setting.

Exercise and physical activity in mental disorders.

Exercise (EX) and physical activity (PA) have been shown to prevent or delay the onset of several mental disorders and to have therapeutic effects in different groups of psychiatric disorders. This review focuses on studies investigating EX as therapeutic intervention in anxiety disorders, affective disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders. Despite EX being discussed as a potential therapy for several decades, adequately powered randomized, controlled trials are sparse in most disorder groups. Nevertheless, evidence points toward disorder-specific benefits that can be induced by EX/PA. Mechanisms of the therapeutic effects of EX/PA are summarized, including metabolic and physiological as well as psychological aspects. Finally, implications for research and therapeutic practice are illustrated.

Neural correlates of processing stressful information: an event-related fMRI study.

Recent neuroimaging studies investigating neural correlates of psychological stress employ cognitive paradigms that induce a significant hormonal stress response in the scanner. The Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) is one such task that combines challenging mental arithmetic with negative social evaluative feedback. Due to the block design nature of the MIST, it has not been possible thus far to investigate which brain areas respond specifically to the key components of the MIST (mental arithmetic, failure, negative social evaluation). In the current study, we developed an event-related MIST (eventMIST) in order to investigate which neural activation patterns are associated with performing mental arithmetic vs. processing of social evaluative threat. Data was available from twenty healthy university students. The eventMIST induced a significant stress response in a subsample of subjects, called the responders (n=7). Direct comparison between brain activity changes in responders vs. non-responders, in response to challenging math, revealed increased activity bilaterally in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), left temporal pole, and right dorsolateral PFC. In response to negative social evaluation, responders showed reduction of brain activity in limbic system regions (medial orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus), which was largely lacking in non-responders. Direct comparison between the groups for this contrast did not reveal any significant difference, probably due to small number of events available. This is the first study to use an event-related paradigm to investigate brain activity patterns in relation to challenging math and social evaluative threat separately.