Biomedical subjects

T Dalgleish

Publications and source records attributed to T Dalgleish.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed1996

A dual representation theory of posttraumatic stress disorder.

A cognitive theory of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is proposed that assumes traumas experienced after early childhood give rise to 2 sorts of memory, 1 verbally accessible and 1 automatically accessible through appropriate situational cues. These different types of memory are used to explain the complex phenomenology of PTSD, including the experiences of reliving the traumatic event and of emotionally processing the trauma. The theory considers 3 possible outcomes of the emotional processing of trauma, successful completion, chronic processing, and premature inhibition of processing We discuss the implications of the theory for research design, clinical practice, and resolving contradictions in the empirical data.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1996

Rhythm and blues: the theory and treatment of seasonal affective disorder.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a depressive disorder which occurs during the winter and remits in the spring and summer. It differs from non-seasonal depression in its seasonal variation and in the presence of neurovegetative symptoms such as increased appetite and hypersomnia. This review is aimed at clinical practitioners and presents a detailed description of the syndrome before discussing the assessment of SAD and the current treatment of choice of phototherapy. Particular attention is paid to the impotant issue of differential diagnosis during assessment and the practicalities involved in the administration of light therapy during treatment.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Cognitive-behavioural treatment of shoplifting in a depressed female.

This paper describes the successful treatment of a depressed shoplifter, using cognitive therapy combined with exposure, an approach not previously described in the literature for this problem. Definitions of shoplifting behaviour are discussed, and other treatment methods examined.

Adult↗

PubMed1995

Autobiographical memory and depression.

Findings addressing the issue of whether depressed individuals more readily recall negative than positive aspects of their past have been conflicting (Moore, Watts & Williams, 1988; Williams & Scott, 1988). A more consistent finding has been a tendency for depressed individuals to retrieve 'overgeneral' autobiographical memories (Brittlebank, Scott, Williams & Ferrier, 1993; Williams & Scott, 1988). In the current study depressed patients and non-depressed controls were asked to generate specific memories in response to a series of positive and negative cue words. No latency bias in recalling memories to negative cues over memories to positive cues was found. However, the more consistent finding that depressed patients have difficulty generating specific memories was supported.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

The relationship between anxiety and memory biases for material that has been selectively processed in a prior task.

Despite evidence for a broad range of processing biases for threat-related material associated with anxiety, there is relatively little research which demonstrates such biases in memory in anxious individuals. The present paper reports two methodologies which demonstrate selective processing of threat-related stimuli in anxious subjects. These are a homophone spelling task and an anagram solution task. Both paradigms require subjects to somehow 'generate' the threat-related material. Despite such selective processing, subsequent recall and recognition memory tests for the same material revealed no evidence of a memory bias. The clinical and theoretical implications of the data are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Information processing in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Previous research has established that patients suffering from anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibit a cognitive bias that selectively favours the processing of threat material. This information processing bias has frequently been demonstrated by subjects' performance on the Stroop colour-naming task. The current experiment investigated the selective processing of threat information in people with PTSD using a modified Stroop procedure. Subjects were 13 ferry disaster survivors with high PTSD symptomatology, 20 survivors of the same disaster with low PTSD symptomatology, and 12 non-traumatized control subjects. All were asked to colour-name five types of words: ferry disaster words, general threat words, neutral semantically-unrelated words, neutral semantically-related words, and positive words. The disaster survivors with high levels of PTSD symptomatology evidenced a significantly longer response latency for colour-naming disaster-related words than for other word types. The results of the low-PTSD survivors and non-traumatized controls showed no significant difference between response latencies for general threat words and disaster word, although all 3 groups showed increased latencies for threat words compared with neutral words. The mechanisms proposed to underlie this response pattern are discussed, and clinical implications are considered.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Memory deficit in clinical depression: processing resources and the structure of materials.

Resource theory predicts that the relative memory deficit shown by depressed patients should be greater with unstructured than structured material. Previous data using semantic categories word lists supports this, but lists approximating to text have produced the opposite result. Both types of structure were studied in this experiment. The prediction from resource theory was found to hold only when comparing medium and high levels of structure, and to hold more clearly for word lists approximating to text than for semantic categories lists. When word lists of low and medium levels of structure were compared, depressed patients showed relatively greater deficit with the more structured material. Ways in which this could be accommodated in a revised version of resource theory are discussed.

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↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Memory bias for emotional information in children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder: a preliminary study.

Studies with adult participants with emotional disorders have revealed an explicit memory bias in favor of recalling negative emotional information, particularly if the information is related to the participants' emotional concerns. This process was investigated in a preliminary study with children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder and control participants. Participants were presented with sets of negative, neutral, and positive words and asked to recall them after a short retention interval. Posttraumatic stress disorder participants showed poorer overall memory performance compared with control participants. They also showed a bias in favor of recalling negative information, but there was no evidence of any specificity beyond this for threat-related material. Regression analyses revealed no relationship between mood, memory bias, and age. Results are discussed in terms of the adult literature and with respect to issues of the developmental continuity of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Adolescent↗