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Biomedical subjects

J Kentish

Publications and source records attributed to J Kentish.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Effect of psychological treatment on cognitive bias in generalized anxiety disorder.

Measures of attention and implicit memory for threatening words were obtained from anxious patients before and after psychological treatment, and compared with data from non-anxious control Ss collected over the same period. Findings confirmed the expectation that the presence of threatening distractors would be associated with greater interference with the performance of anxious patients than with that of controls, in both color-naming and attentional search tasks, but failed to confirm the previous finding of related differences in priming on a word completion task. Treatment significantly reduced selective interference effects in anxious patients, and abolished evidence of differences between the treated patients and controls. It is suggested that cognitive bias effects in anxiety may either depend on state factors alone, or may represent a more enduring individual difference that becomes apparent only when vulnerable individuals are primed by mood state or stressful events.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Effect of stress management on blood pressure in mild primary hypertension.

OBJECTIVE: To establish whether stress management had a larger effect than a control treatment on resting blood pressure, ambulatory blood pressure, and left ventricular mass. DESIGN: A 12 week baseline period of habituation to measurement of blood pressure was followed by randomisation to either stress management or mild exercise for six months and follow up six months later. SETTING: General practice, district general hospital, and medical school. PATIENTS: Of the 184 patients aged under 60 with mild primary hypertension who entered the baseline habituation period, 88 were excluded because they failed to meet the entry criteria or they withdrew from the study. The remaining 46 men and 50 women underwent treatment. INTERVENTIONS: 10 clinical sessions and daily practice at home of either stress management based on relaxation or non-aerobic stretching exercises. Mildly stressful 15 minute interviews before and after treatment. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Diastolic and systolic blood pressure in the clinic and during 12 hours of ambulatory recording, and left ventricular mass measured by echocardiography. RESULTS: The patients' blood pressure fell during habituation (systolic pressure from 152 mmHg to 140 mmHg, diastolic pressure from 98 to 93 mm Hg), but neither resting nor ambulatory blood pressure was changed by the treatments. Left ventricular mass was also unchanged. Blood pressure rose during the stressful interview, but this rise was reduced by stress management (systolic pressure rose by 7.4 mmHg before treatment and by 3.7 mmHg after treatment). CONCLUSION: Stress management of a type advocated for treating mild primary hypertension is ineffective in lowering blood pressure in patients who are well habituated to measuring blood pressure.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Effects of anxiety and awareness on colour-identification latencies for emotional words.

A modified Stroop task was used to examine the interference effects of subliminal and supraliminal emotional words on the colour-identification latencies of high and low trait anxious subjects. The subjects were randomly allocated to either an anxiety or relaxation mood induction procedure (MIP) before the modified Stroop task. Increased trait anxiety was associated with relatively greater interference in colour-identification latencies for subliminal threat stimuli. Reduced state anxiety was associated with relatively more interference of subliminal positive stimuli (mood-congruent effect), but also with greater interference of supraliminal threat stimuli (mood-incongruent effect). The results suggest that mood-congruent effects may be mediated by automatic processes, whereas controlled processes may give rise to mood-incongruent effects.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The directed forgetting task: application to emotionally valent material.

Three experiments are reported which investigate the application of the directed forgetting task to emotionally valent material and to different mood states. In this task, some subjects are told when halfway through an intentional or incidental learning task that the trials presented so far are to be forgotten because they were merely practice. However, at the end of the subsequent list, the subjects are then asked to recall all of the previous items including those that they were instructed to forget. The results typically show that significantly fewer directed forgetting items are recalled whether the task is an intentional or incidental learning one. In the first experiment, normal and 'depressed' students rated positive and negative material for pleasantness; although directed forgetting effects were obtained, there were no differential effects of mood state nor of valence of the material. In order to investigate this effect further, a variant of this task was used in Experiment 2 in which the positive and negative material had to be processed in relation to the self. The results showed that differential forgetting now occurred; healthy students recalled more positive than negative information, but this positive bias was not obtained for 'depressed' students who showed an even-handed level of recall. In Experiment 3, groups of clinically depressed, clinically anxious, and normal controls were presented with the directed forgetting task. The key finding showed that the depressed subjects showed a retrieval facilitation for to-be-forgotten negative adjectives, an effect that was not present for the other two groups. It is concluded therefore, that the directed forgetting task could be usefully extended to investigate cognition-emotion interactions in clinical populations.

Adult↗