New Research From Clinical Psychological Science

Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science:

Jenny Yiend, Andrew Mathews, Tom Burns, Kevin Dutton, Andrés Fernández-Martín, George A. Georgiou, Michael Luckie, Alexandra Rose, Riccardo Russo, and Elaine Fox

Studies examining anxiety-related attention bias have found differences in orienting mechanisms such as engagement and disengagement of attention for targets; however, much of this research has been conducted with subclinical samples. Participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), participants with subclinical levels of anxiety, and control participants completed measures of anxiety and depression and an attentional task that included images of people displaying happy, angry, and neutral expressions. Participants with GAD and participants displaying subclinical levels of anxiety disengaged from angry stimuli in different ways, suggesting caution is needed when generalizing findings from subclinical to clinical populations.

ICD-11 Complex PTSD in U.S. National and Veteran Samples: Prevalence and Structural Associations With PTSD

Erika J. Wolf, Mark W. Miller, Dean Kilpatrick, Heidi S. Resnick, Christal L. Badour, Brian P. Marx, Terence M. Keane, Raymond C. Rosen, and Matthew J. Friedman

The proposed revision to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) recommends restricting the definition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and adding a new diagnosis of complex PTSD (CPTSD). Community participants and trauma-exposed military veterans were surveyed on the symptoms associated with the proposed PTSD and CPTSD diagnoses. Up to half of the participants with CPTSD also met the criteria for PTSD, and modeling of the data indicated that although PTSD and CPTSD groups differed in symptom severity, they did not differ in terms of the type of psychopathology they reported, raising concerns about the inclusion of both diagnoses in the ICD-11.

Temporal Dynamics of Attentional Bias

Ariel Zvielli, Amit Bernstein, and Ernst H. W. Koster

Attention bias (AB) is often thought of as a stable individual-difference variable, but recent studies have suggested that there may be more within- and across-person variation in AB than previously thought. The authors tested a new method of calculating AB scores called trial-level bias scores (TL-BS). Instead of providing one overall AB score, TL-BS provides a series of AB estimates. TL-BS analysis of an attention-bias task using participants with and without a spider phobia found fluctuating changes in participants’ AB toward and away from the spider images over several trials. The patterns of TL-BS were found to differentiate between spider-phobic and nonphobic participants, indicating that TL-BS may provide a better conceptualization of AB than traditionally used measurement techniques.

Pursuit of Psychoplasty? Psychological Health and Aims of Aesthetic Surgery Patients

Jürgen Margraf, Andrea H. Meyer, and Kristen L. Lavallee

Although many people opt to undergo cosmetic surgery, there is little systematic data regarding the mental health of such individuals and their reasons for undergoing surgery. Participants who had elected to undergo cosmetic surgery, participants who were interested in but had not yet undergone cosmetic surgery, and a comparison group were assessed for their levels of psychopathology, well-being, and perceived attractiveness. They were also asked about their goals for the cosmetic procedure. Although people who had already undergone or who were interested in cosmetic surgery placed more importance on body image, reported less perceived attractiveness, and reported less life satisfaction than the comparison participants, there was no indication that they were less psychologically or physically healthy than the general population.