Coping with Huntington's Disease in Patients and At-Risk Individuals.

Background: Huntington's disease (HD) presents patients and individuals at risk for HD with significant levels of stress. However, relatively little research has examined how individuals cope with stress related to the disease or the association of specific coping strategies with psychological symptoms. Objective: This study examined the ways in which HD patients and at-risk individuals cope with HD-related stress using a control-based model of coping and the association of coping strategies with symptoms of depression and anxiety. Methods: HD patients (n = 49) and at-risk individuals (n = 76) completed the Responses to Stress Questionnaire - Huntington's Disease Version to assess coping strategies in response to HD-related stress, as well as standardized measures of depression and anxiety symptoms. Patient health records were accessed to obtain information related to disease characteristics. Results: Patients and at-risk individuals reported using comparable levels of primary control coping, secondary control coping, and disengagement coping strategies. In linear regression analyses, only secondary control coping was significantly associated with lower depression (ß= -0.62, p < 0.001) and anxiety (ß= -0.59, p < 0.001) symptoms in patients and at-risk individuals (ß= -0.55, p < 0.001 and ß= -0.50, p < 0.001, respectively). Conclusions: Secondary control coping may be beneficial for both HD patients and at-risk individuals. Future research using the control-based model of coping in longitudinal studies with the HD population is needed, and future interventions could test the effects of cognitive reframing and acceptance as coping strategies for families affected by HD.

Parental Involvement in Adolescent Psychological Interventions: A Meta-analysis.

Psychological interventions for adolescents have shown mixed efficacy, and including parents in interventions may be an important avenue to improve treatment outcomes. Evidence from meta-analyses examining the role of parents in interventions for youth is inconsistent and has typically combined findings for both children and adolescents together. No prior meta-analysis has examined the specific role of parents in adolescent interventions as compared with interventions focused solely on adolescents across several disorders. To address this gap, systematic literature reviews were conducted utilizing a combination of searches among keywords including (parent * OR family) AND (intervention OR therap * OR treatment OR prevent*) AND (adolescen*). Inclusion criteria were (1) a randomized controlled trial of an individual psychological intervention compared to the same intervention with a parental component, and (2) adolescents must have at least current symptoms or risk to be included. Literature searches identified 20 trials (N = 1251). Summary statistics suggested that interventions involving parents in treatment have a significantly greater impact on adolescent psychopathology when compared to interventions that targeted adolescents alone (g = - 0.18, p < .01, 95% CI [- 0.30, - 0.07]). Examination with symptom type (internalizing or externalizing) as a moderator found that the significant difference remained for externalizing (g = - 0.20, p = .01, 95% CI [- 0.35, - 0.05]) but not internalizing psychopathology (p = .11). Findings provide evidence of the importance of including parents in adolescent therapy, particularly for externalizing problems.

The representation of emotional experience from imagined scenarios.

One of the key unresolved issues in affective science is understanding how the subjective experience of emotion is structured. Semantic space theory has shed new light on this debate by applying computational methods to high-dimensional data sets containing self-report ratings of emotional responses to visual and auditory stimuli. We extend this approach here to the emotional experience induced by imagined scenarios. Participants chose at least one emotion category label among 34 options or provided ratings on 14 affective dimensions while imagining two-sentence hypothetical scenarios. A total of 883 scenarios were rated by at least 11 different raters on categorical or dimensional qualities, with a total of 796 participants contributing to the final normed stimulus set. Principal component analysis reduced the categorical data to 24 distinct varieties of reported experience, while cluster visualization indicated a blended, rather than discrete, distribution of the corresponding emotion space. Canonical correlation analysis between the categorical and dimensional data further indicated that category endorsement accounted for more variance in dimensional ratings than vice versa, with 10 canonical variates unifying change in category loadings with affective dimensions such as valence, arousal, safety, and commitment. These findings indicate that self-reported emotional responses to imaginative experiences exhibit a clustered structure, although clusters are separated by fuzzy boundaries, and variable dimensional properties associate with smooth gradients of change in categorical judgments. The resultant structure supports the tenets of semantic space theory and demonstrates some consistency with prior work using different emotional stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).