key: cord-0070395-ys0ekes5
authors: nan
title: Top Ranked Abstracts from the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Society for Affective Science
date: 2021-11-23
journal: Affect Sci
DOI: 10.1007/s42761-021-00063-9
sha: c2c3a96d3feb4b08a4eeefa2e387098b29120a43
doc_id: 70395
cord_uid: ys0ekes5

nan

Introduction Previous research has found shared and unique abnormalities across the schizophrenia spectrum, including those related to emotion experiences and regulation (e.g., Li et al., 2019) . However, many of these findings come from the confines of the lab environment, leaving it unclear the extent to which they generalize to daily life. At the same time, research on emotional abnormalities specifically associated with schizotypal personality disorder traits is particularly limited. These gaps in the literature limit our ability to develop effective, targeted interventions for these presumably pervasive and chronic abnormalities.

The current study has the following aims: Aim 1: Evaluate the frequency of positive and negative emotion experiences in daily life. We hypothesize that high schizotypal traits will be predictive of a higher average number of negative emotion experiences. Aim 2. Measure how frequently and effectively 20 positive ER strategies and 20 negative ER strategies are used. We hypothesize that high schizotypal traits will predict the use of ER strategies and will predict the use of less effective ER strategies on average. Aim 3: Assess the motivation(s) for using ER strategies. We hypothesize that high schizotypal traits will predict different motivations for selecting various ER strategies.

Methods This study will be preregistered through the Open Science Framework before data collection begins. Participants will be recruited from a large public university based on high scores on the Five Factor Schizotypal Index (Edmundson et al., 2011) as well as through random selection following participation in a related study. All participants will be instructed on how to download and use TigerAware™, a smartphone app specifically designed for ecological momentary assessment (EMA) collection. Participants will be randomly prompted 4x/day for 7 days to answer a survey on their emotion experiences within the past 3 hours. In each survey, the following will be reported: global mood rating, positive and negative emotion experiences and triggers, use and efficacy of 20 positive and negative ER strategies, motivation(s) for ER, and success of achieving emotion goals based on reported ER strategy efficacy and motive for ER (Heiy & Cheavans, 2014; Tamir, 2016) . Following previous research (Heiy & Cheavans, 2014) , hierarchical linear modelling will be used to assess the relations between high schizotypal traits and the frequency of positive and negative emotion experiences in daily life, the frequency and efficacy of both positive and negative ER strategies used in response to positive and negative emotion experiences (respectively), and the most frequent motivations for using specific ER strategies. We will analyse how Level 1 predictors (global mood rating, positive and negative emotion experiences, positive and negative ER strategies, and ER motivations) relate to individual differences (e.g., schizotypal traits; Level 2 predictors).

The current study will be the first to provide important insights regarding the relations between some important emotion constructs and schizotypal traits. These data will add to our understanding of emotional abnormalities across the schizophrenia spectrum by extending work to a real-world setting and laying the groundwork for future intervention development.

Introduction. The dysregulation of emotions can disrupt mental and physical health in day-to-day life and is linked to some of the more debilitating symptoms of mood disorders. Recent evidence suggests that the instability, variability, and sustained intensity of emotions over time can be informative for diagnosing and assessing risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) 1-2 . Despite the clinical importance of understanding temporal characteristics of emotion, few studies have addressed the brain mechanisms that support transitions between emotional states over time and their relevancy for affective behaviors. Aims. We aim to 1) determine if time-varying brain patterns are associated with emotion transitions in response to a movie and 2) test if brain activation patterns that track emotion fluctuations are modulated by phenotypic variation in self-reported mood and affect. An existing fMRI dataset with film will be used as a way of observing the relationship between fMRI data and the emotional states that the film induced over time. We predict that atypical mood and affect will be associated with poorer model performance within fronto-insular, subcortical, cortical-midline and medial prefrontal brain structures.

Methods/Analyses planned. fMRI and phenotype data from the Child Mind Institute Healthy Brain Network 3 dataset will be used for this study (N = 103). An independent, age-matched group of participants will report changes in their emotional responses to the ten-minute clip from Despicable Me that was used during fMRI. Hidden markov modelling (HMM) will be used to assess regions in which time-varying patterns of voxelwise brain activation mirror emotion transitions. Group-based HMMs will then be fit to each participants brain data and multiple regression will be used to test the association between model performance and individual scores on questionnaires that capture mood and affect (Mood Frequency Questionnaire and PANAS).

Predicted results. We hypothesize that time-varying brain activation patterns in the insula, ACC, PCC, precuneus, inferior parietal lobule (IPL), superior temporal sulcus (STS), ventral striatum, VMPFC/OFC and DMPC will track emotion transitions during film viewing. We further predict that HMM fit within these regions will be associated with differences in phenotypes related to mood disorders (i.e. higher scores on the MFQ and negative affect subscale of the PANAS).

Our results will provide a multivariate, temporal account of emotional responding in the brain. By relating emotionally-relevant brain patterns to individual differences in affective behaviors, the findings may establish a novel relationship between brain functioning and phenotypes relevant for mental health, paving the way to employ such paradigms as tools for diagnosing heterogenous patient populations and developing new treatment targets. Introduction Children with anxiety display biases in emotion perception, including the increased tendency to label emotional facial affect as negative or threatening (Reeb-Sutherland et al., 2015) . Cross-sectional studies have shown that anxious children also exhibit greater activation in emotional neurocircuitry when viewing fearful faces than non-anxious children, including in the bilateral amygdala, ventral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (McClure et al., 2007) . Perceiving social cues as threatening can undermine interpersonal interactions and further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. However, longitudinal designs permit for examination of the developmental course of emotional difficulties in anxiety, which are known to have their onset during middle childhood when neural networks underlying emotion processing are developing. We therefore plan to test longitudinal effects of aberrations in emotion processing during this sensitive developmental period on anxiety symptoms in early adolescence.

Aims This study will test whether increased activation of threat circuitry to emotional facial affect during middle childhood (8-12 years) prospectively predicts anxiety symptoms in early adolescence, allowing examination of the developmental time course of this association. We measured neural response to fearful and happy faces varying in emotional intensity (e.g., 0%, 33%, 67%, 100% fearful) in four anatomically-defined brain regions implicated in emotion processing (amygdala, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex [vlPFC] , ventromedial prefrontal cortex [vmPFC], ACC). Predicted findings: We hypothesize that the degree of intensity-modulated signal in these regions to fearful (but not happy) expressions will (1) be positively associated with concurrent anxiety and, (2) prospectively predict anxiety symptoms two years later, controlling for concurrent anxiety.

Methods At Wave 1, 49 girls (Mage = 10.0 + 2.3 years) completed an implicit emotion task adapted from Blair et al. (2001) , during which they labeled the gender of 10 actors' happy and fearful face emotion pictures at 0%, 33%, 67%, and 100% emotion intensities while undergoing fMRI scanning. At Wave 1 and two years later, at Wave 2, children and their parents reported on children's anxiety symptoms on the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach, 1991) . Wave 1 data has been collected but not analyzed. Wave 2 data collection is in progress, with 71% of families having completed participation.

Proposed Analyses W1 hemodynamic response to emotional facial affect was collected in each brain region (amygdala, vlPFC, ACC). Following standard preprocessing using fMRIprep (Esteban et al., 2019) , neural response will be parametrically modulated as a function of emotion intensity for each emotion spectrum (fear, happy). We will test the longitudinal association between neural response to emotional facial affect at Wave 1 and anxiety symptoms at Wave 2 via multiple linear regression. For each brain region, multiple linear regression modeling will be performed with emotion intensity-modulated neural response (fear, happy) as predictors and Wave 2 anxiety symptoms as the dependent variable, controlling for Wave 1 anxiety symptoms.

Finding early neural markers that predict anxiety may have important implications for preventing anxiety across the lifespan. Summary Using language to distance oneself from negative stimuli (e.g., less use of the word "I" and present-tense verbs) is associated with effective emotion regulation. Using a large corpus of psychotherapy transcripts (N = 6,229), we find that linguistic distance increases over time in treatment and correlates with within-person fluctuations in internalizing symptoms. Linguistic distance may reflect improving emotion regulation in treatment.

Keywords · Language · linguistic distance · treatment outcomes · internalizing symptoms · psychotherapy Name: enook@g.harvard.edu Introduction People feel better if they adopt a distanced perspective on distressing stimuli (Kross, Davidson, Weber, & Ochsner, 2009 ). Merely distancing one's language by reducing use of the word "I" and present-tense verbs can increase psychological distance and down-regulate negative emotions (Nook, Schleider, & Somerville, 2017) . In fact, the extent to which people distance their language correlates with how successfully they regulate their emotions via cognitive reappraisal. Given that internalizing disorders like anxiety and depression are characterized by maladaptive emotion regulation (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010), linguistic distance may be a diagnostic marker of severity of depression and anxiety symptoms (i.e., internalizing symptoms) in naturalistic assessments of patients' speech. If so, linguistic distance may be a measure of progress in therapy.

We tested whether linguistic distance increases over time in treatment and correlates with within-person changes in internalizing symptoms.

Methods Data are a large corpus of exchanges between clients and their therapists on Talkspace, a message-based psychotherapy platform. Data were split into exploratory (N = 3,729) and validation (N = 2,500) datasets, with all analyses preregistered prior to replication in the validation dataset. PHQ-8 and GAD-7 were administered every 3 weeks and summed to form a measure of internalizing symptoms. Two linguistic distancing measures were formed from clients' texts: temporal distance (proportion of verbs not in the present tense) and social distance (proportion of pronouns that were not first-person singular). Mixed-effects models tested whether: (i) internalizing symptoms decreased over time in therapy, (ii) whether client linguistic distance increased over time in therapy, and (iii) whether client linguistic distance was related to internalizing symptoms both within-and between-person.

In both the exploratory (e subscripts) and

validation (v subscripts) datasets, clients' internalizing symptoms decreased over time, be = -.29, pe < .001, bv = -.29, pv < .001, client linguistic distance increased over time, and internalizing symptoms tracked fluctuations in linguistic distance both within-person and betweenperson. However, effect sizes for linguistic results were very small, |.02| < bs < |.16| (see Fig 1) . Conclusions These findings provide evidence that linguistic distance is a reliable though modest marker of internalizing symptom severity and treatment progress in real-world therapy transcripts.

The degree to which one employs psychological distancing via language, known as linguistic distancing, has previously been shown to be positively associated with health and well-being (Nook et al., 2017; Shahane & Denny, 2019) . However, no research has investigated sub-tactics of linguistic distancing-objectivity or spatial/temporal distanceand how they relate to negative affect and health.

Aims In Study 1, we aimed to develop novel machine learning algorithms to identify the degree to which linguistic patterns reflect two types of psychological distancing, namely objective and spatial/temporal distancing. In Study 2, we examined if a previously established linguistic distancing composite metric and the novel algorithms predicted improvements in health at baseline and longitudinally.

In Study 1, using sentence rating data from 50 participants (i.e., Rice University students), we developed two algorithms using spaCy, a Python package for advanced natural language processing: one that captures the degree to which one's language is objective and another that captures the degree to which one's language is spatially/temporally distant. We compared this against the previously used linguistic distancing composite metric (LDCM), which encompasses language-based psychological distancing as a whole. In Study 2, 110 participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group assigned to use objective language, the second group assigned to use spatially/temporally distant language, and the third group instructed to respond naturally when transcribing their thoughts about negative and neutral images. Then, participants rated how they felt. We collected physiological (i.e., heart rate variability and heart rate data) and mental health questionnaire data (i.e., symptoms of depression, perceived stress, difficulties in emotion regulation, and negative affect) from all participants.

Across the psychological distancing groups, we found that the objective and far algorithms outperformed the composite metric to predict taskbased self-reported negative affect at session 1 (objective: z = 2.15, p = .016, far: z = 1.85, p = .032) as well as change in affect reports over time from sessions 1 to 5 (objective: z = 2.06, p = .020, far: z = 2.15, p = .016). We further found that the composite metric and the objective algorithm predicted change in heart rate variability (b = .18, SEb = .08, t(68) = 2.26, p = .027) and heart rate ( 

The present studies describe novel algorithms to index lexical markers of psychological distancing and suggest that these algorithms may be useful in predicting stress and health within and among individuals.

Introduction Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been shown to benefit students' SE skill development, boost academic achievement, and reduce behavioral problems (Durlak et al., 2011) . During the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence of SEL as a protective agent would suggest that it is more necessary than ever in supporting educators, students, and families through challenging and uncertain times (Cipriano et al., 2020) . Children with learning differences often face additional social and emotional challenges, including loneliness, low self-esteem and lack of acceptance among peers (NCLD, 2017). These challenges have been exacerbated by the pandemic and distance learning. Further, teachers' own well-being and social and emotional competencies are fundamental in being able to support students (Schonert-Reichl, 2017). With school closures, and learning moved to virtual spaces, relationships have been transformed and educators have adapted.

• Understand the emotional experiences of special educators during the COVID-19 pandemic • Identify the challenges to and successes of distance learning with students with learning differences • Understand how special educators have been using SEL to cope during this time Methods In July 2020, a national sample of educators were invited to take part in interviews and focus groups. Thirty professionals who work with diverse learners participated (10 general educators, 14 special educators, 1 social worker, 2 reading specialists, 1 Principal, and 2 counselors). We conducted 60-minute semi-structured interviews and focus groups via Zoom and followed up with participants using a subset of multiple choice and open-ended items from the Educator Well-Being and SEL Practices Survey to further understand how their schools are planning to serve students this year, and dive deeper into their emotions and factors that elicit these feelings at school during this time.

Proposed Analyses A synthesis of quantitative and qualitative findings will address our hypotheses. Drawing upon four main themes that were identified during first cycle exploratory coding by two independent researchers, we hypothesize that: 1) SEL acted as a protective factor for both educators and students during the challenges of distance learning 2) Relationships were strengthened between educators and their colleagues, students and families 3) Educators who use SEL practices will express more positive emotional experiences 4) There will be a relationship between the valence of an educator's emotional experiences and their school's plans for the year (i.e., in-person, hybrid, fully remote or unknown) Hypotheses will be tested using thematic coding of the focus group and open-ended survey questions in Dedoose version 8.3.35. Correlation and regression analyses will be conducted in SPSS 16.0 to explore the relationship between educator's emotional experiences, SEL use, and school plans for this school year.

We will discuss the findings in the context of how to best support educators who work with students with learning differences and utilizing social and emotional learning to manage the challenges of distance learning.

(ER) are found across psychopathology, including in psychotic disorders (Khoury & Lecomte, 2012) . Existing research on ER in schizophrenia (SZ) has found that SZ select maladaptive strategies more often than adaptive strategies, that they are less effective at implementing strategies, and that they regulate more often and at lower levels of negative affect than controls (CN) (Visser, Esfahlani, Sayama, & Strauss, 2018) . However, much of this research has relied on trait self-report that can lack specificity in how ER is abnormal and may fail to represent important state-level variability. The Extended Process Model can be used to understand ER as an unfolding process and how it is associated with psychopathology (Sheppes, Suri, & Gross, 2015) .

The present study aimed to use ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to investigate abnormalities in the selection stage of ER in SZ. It was hypothesized that: 1) the SZ group would select maladaptive strategies (e.g., distraction, avoidance, and suppression) at a greater rate than adaptive strategies (e.g., reappraisal, interpersonal) and all strategies at a greater rate than CN; 2) SZ would exert greater effort in ER compared to CN; 3) adaptive strategies would be more effective at regulating affect and symptoms compared to maladaptive strategies in SZ.

Methods Participants were 50 SZ and 53 CN who completed six days of EMA. SZ and CN groups were matched on age, sex, parental education, and race; however, the SZ group had lower personal education and adherence. Participants were trained to identify five regulation strategies: Reappraisal, interpersonal, distraction, situation modification, and expressive suppression. EMA surveys assessed affect, ER, and symptoms eight times per day between 9am and 9pm. As data was nested, all analyses used multilevel models.

There were significant effects of Group and Strategy on selection rate, see Figure 1A . Separate models indicated significant effects of Strategy and Group X Strategy on ER effort, see Figure 1B .

Significant effects of Strategy were found on change in negative affect, positive affect, negative symptoms, and delusions such that application of any strategy generally improved affect and symptoms over time.

Conclusions While SZ may select strategies at a greater rate and with less effectiveness than CN, their selected strategies are effective and adaptive in the short-term. This suggests that clinical interventions may focus on helping SZ select contextually appropriate strategies to enhance implementation success. Future research should address long-term effects of selection.

Introduction Cognitive models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have emphasized the importance of attentional and memory biases in understanding how PTSD symptoms arise and persist (Buckley, Blanchard, and Neill, 2000) . However, limited investigations have empirically assessed the hypothesized link between attentional biases favoring negative emotional information and stronger memory for this information for individuals with PTSD within the same paradigm. An examination of this link will help advance our understanding of the cognitive factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of PTSD symptomatology, and inform treatments intervening with such biases. Aims We predicted slower reading and color naming of negative verses neutral words in the full-attention and divided-attention tasks. We predicted more accurate recall of words presented in full-attention verses divided-attention condition. In the full-attention condition, we also predict more accurate recall for negative verses neutral words due to greater time at encoding. We predicted that greater severity of PTSD symptoms would be associated with slower reading and more accurate recall of negative verses neutral words on the full-attention task in which attention is fully engaged during encoding.

We manipulated attention during encoding of trauma-irrelevant negative and neutral words and examined the differential relationship of their encoding and recall with PTSD symptoms. Responders to the World Trade Center disaster (N=392) performed tasks in which they read negative and neural words (full-attention) and reported the color of another set of such words (divided-attention). Subsequently, participants used word stems to aid retrieval of words shown earlier.

Results PTSD symptoms were associated with slower performance for negative verses neutral words in full-attention (r=0.170) but not divided-attention tasks. Furthermore, greater PTSD symptoms severity was associated with more accurate recall of negative verses neutral words, irrespective of whether words were presented on full-attention or divided-attention tasks (F=4.11, p=0.044, ηp2=0.018).

Conclusions Overall, PTSD symptoms in a traumaexposed population are related to encoding of traumairrelevant negative information when attention is fully deployed and to subsequent recall of negative information, irrespective of whether attention was fully deployed. Aims The present study attempts to investigate the longitudinal association between parental emotion socialization, youths' dysregulated levels of cortisol at awakening (a surrogate neuroendocrine marker of poor mental health; Hoyt et al., 2015) , and youths' problematic behaviors (Achenbach, 1991) during the pandemic of Covid-19 in a clinical sample of Italian adolescents.

Methods Participants were 80 family triads (mothers [mean age = 49.25; SD = 5.52]; fathers [mean age = 50.14; SD = 5.80]; youths [with depressive, anxiety, conduct, and learning disorders; mean age = 15.06, SD = 2.28; 44,4% girls]). T1 parent-reported socialization strategies in response to their children's anger and sadness was assessed with the Emotion as a Child Scale (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007) . Preliminary factorial analyses showed two factors related to supportive (e.g., reward) and unsupportive (e.g., neglect, magnify, punish) parental emotional socialization strategies. T1 youths' cortisol awakening response (CAR; the increase in cortisol levels within 30 minutes after awakening; Stalder et al., 2016) was assessed with validated procedure reported in Carnevali et al. (2020) . Parentreported T1 and T2 (about 11 months later and after the COVID-19 pandemic started) youths' behavioral problems were assessed aggregating the internalizing and the externalizing problem scores via CBCL (Achenbach, 1991) . Average alpha was .74. Hierarchical regressions were run to examine the longitudinal associations among youth gender (Step 1), T1 youth problematic behaviors (Step 2), T1 youth CAR (Step 3), T1 parental emotion socialization (PES) strategies (Step 4), and interactions between youth gender and PES, youth gender and CAR, youth CAR and PES (Step 5); the dependent variable was T2 youth problematic behaviors.

Results showed a significant effect of the stability of the outcome (B = -.73, p<.01), of the interaction between youths' CAR and unsupportive maternal emotion socialization strategies (B = -.35, p<.05), and of the interaction between youth gender and unsupportive paternal emotion socialization strategies (B = .39, p<.05). Specifically, it emerged that higher youth behavioral problems emerged for those youths with higher CAR and who were exposed to higher maternal unsupportive attempts in response to their negative emotional reactions, than those who were exposed to lower corresponding maternal attempts and had lower CAR. Moreover, higher youth behavioral problems emerged for girls exposed to higher paternal unsupportive attempts in response to their negative emotional reactions, than boys who were exposed to lower corresponding paternal attempts outcome.

This study suggests a potential interplay between parental emotions socialization and youths' CAR profile on youth emotion development in a clinical sample of adolescents (Eisenberg et al., 1998) . Specifically, these results are in line with previous studies suggesting an association between unsupportive parental emotion socialization and youth problematic behaviors (Morris et al., 2017) , as well as an association between larger CAR and acute and chronic life stress (Adam et al., 2010) . These results highlight the importance to invest in fostering parental skills in effectively support their adolescent children' emotional development.

Introduction Empirical literature on the relationship between multisensory processing and trauma is virtually non-existent, although more general differences in perceptual processing have been linked to the levels of psychological distress in response to both lived traumatic experiences and analogue traumas (e.g., Hagenaars, Engelhard & Putman, 2016; Iyadurai et al., 2018) , which suggests that differences in perceptual processing can influence how adaptively an individual responds to trauma. Additionally, there is evidence of a multisensory bias towards overprocessing threat-related information in high trait anxiety (Koizumi et al., 2011) , which suggests that differences in multisensory perception could contribute to dysfunctional affective processing, including in the response to trauma. Aims Our main aim was to determine whether the extent to which individuals integrate audiovisual emotional cues would be predictive of psychological distress following exposure to the VR stressor. Consistent with research on the link between anxiety severity and multisensory emotion perception, we hypothesized that a specific tendency towards enhanced multisensory integration of threat cues would predict increased intrusions.

Methods Participants were 56 undergraduate students.

We excluded individuals who were particularly susceptible to the effects of stress, including those with current low mood or existing PTSD symptoms. Participants completed a task where they made judgements about the emotion expressed in faces and voices as either happy, sad or angry, in different modalities (visual, audio, audiovisual congruent, audiovisual incongruent) . Data relating to multiple behavioural outcomes was obtained in this task, and these served as predictors in the analyses. This included 'Multisensory Facilitation', the perceptual benefit through multisensory integration of congruent face and voice cues, which was calculated as the difference between accuracy on audiovisual congruent trials and trials in the most accurate unimodal condition. After the multisensory emotion task, participants experienced an audiovisual VR simulation showing a car accident from the perspective of the front passenger. Participants recorded intrusive memories related to the analogue trauma over the seven days immediately following the VR simulation. Intrusion frequency was the main outcome variable

Stepwise negative binomial regression resulted in one significant model for predicting intrusion frequency, 

The findings suggest that a tendency towards greater multisensory integration of angry faces and voices was predictive of a greater number of intrusions following exposure to an analogue trauma. This is consistent with findings that enhanced multisensory threat-processing predicts high trait anxiety. Given that traumatic events and VR exposure therapies used with PTSD patients are almost always multisensory experiences, this highlights the need for further research to pinpoint the multisensory mechanisms that are altered in PTSD and to explore the cognitive effects of these differences.

Ellie Xu 1 , Elise Cardinale 1 , Katharina Kircanski 1 , Ellen Leibenluft 1 , and Julia Linke 1 Introduction Irritability, defined as an increased proneness to anger, is a transdiagnostic symptom dimension in youth. Proximal processes associated with irritability include not only prediction error signals in response to blocked rewards, but also impaired control of subsequent emotional and behavioral responses (Kircanski et al., 2019) . In the present study, we used a bifactor statistical approach to parse impaired regulation of negative emotional states (expected shared factor) from unique aspects of irritable and non-irritable negative affect. These latent variables were validated on a neurobiological level through associations with the microstructure of white matter tracts previously implicated in prediction error processing (anterior thalamic radiation, ATR), control of emotional (genu of the corpus callosum, CC; uncinate fasciculus, UF) and behavioral responses (corticospinal tract, CST), and negative affect (body of the CC).

AimsWe aimed to investigate whether a bifactor statistical approach could be used to parse a shared aspect of emotion regulation from unique aspects of irritable and non-irritable affect.

Methods A transdiagnostic sample of 174 youth (M age =13.1; 62.6% male) enriched for irritability underwent diffusion tensor imaging and completed the Affective Reactivity Index measuring irritability and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale assessing the control of negative emotional states and corresponding behavioral impulses. Parent-and youthratings from both questionnaires served as input to the bi-factor model calculated in MPlus, and resulting latent factors were correlated with FA of the tracts of interest, controlling for age.

The bi-factor model fit well (CFI=0.990, TLI=0.987, RMSEA=0.038). The model indicated a shared factor and four unique factors: youth-and parent-reported irritability and youth-and parentreported negative affect. The shared latent factor was negatively associated with FA in the right UF, CC genu, bilateral CST, and right ATR. The youthreported irritability latent factor was negatively associated with FA in the bilateral ATR. The youthreported negative affect latent factor was negatively associated with FA in the CC body. We did not observe meaningful associations between FA and the parent-reported latent factors. 

The COVID-19 outbreak has been declared a global pandemic. The consequences of this pandemic, among them changes in routine, school closures and more, place children with SN and their families at risk of severe emotional distress (Battle, 2015;  Peek & Stough, 2010). Nevertheless, there are factors that can promote resilience in the face of a crisis, and ER is one of them (Jungmann & Witthöft, 2020) .

Aims The aim of the study was to examine whether the use of ER strategies (reappraisal and suppression) moderates the link between parent group (parents of child with SN vs parents of a TD child) and emotional distress during the COVID19 pandemic. We hypothesized that the use of ER strategies would predict distress, especially among parents of children with SN.

The present study used an online survey to measure emotional distress as well as concerns related to the COVID-19 outbreak among 94 parents of children with SN (mean age = 41.6 years, SD = 6.59; 83% female) and 79 parents raising a TD child (mean age = 40.85 years, SD = 7.40; 85% female). We also examined whether the use of adaptive and maladaptive ER strategies (reappraisal and suppression, respectively) moderate the link between COVID-19 concerns and emotional distress.

Parents of a child with SN reported more concerns about the COVID19 outbreak t(171) = 3.04, p < .01, and more symptoms of emotional distress t(171) = 3.23, p < .01, compared to parents of a TD child. The association between concerns arising from the COVID-19 outbreak and emotional distress, was moderated by habitual use of suppression F (3,172) = 31.322, p < .01, and reappraisal, F(3,172) = 26.45, p < .01. In ad-dition, the link between suppression, but not reappraisal, and emotional distress was moderated by parents group, F(3,172) =10.61, p < .01 (Figure 1 ).

Conclusions Findings of the current study highlight the role played by ER in maintaining well-being at times of crisis among vulnerable populations, such as families raising children with SN.

C. A.

B.

Manual for the youth self-report and 1991 profile

A selective impairment in the processing of sad and fearful expressions in children with psychopathic tendencies

fMRIPrep: a robust preprocessing pipeline for functional MRI

Abnormal attention modulation of fear circuit function in pediatric generalized anxiety disorder

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

A linguistic signature of psychological distancing in emotion regulation

Predicting emotional health indicators from linguistic evidence of psychological distancing

Emotion regulation and schizophrenia

Emotion regulation and psychopathology

An ecological momentary assessment evaluation of emotion regulation abnormalities in schizophrenia

Affective Style and Affective Disorders: Perspectives from Affective Neuroscience

The lexical fallacy in emotion research: Mistaking vernacular words for psychological entities

Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal

Eye for Detail: Local versus Global Visual Processing Style Predicts the Development of Re-experiencing after Analogue Trauma

Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: a proof-ofconcept randomized controlled trial

The effects of anxiety on the interpretation of emotion in the face-voice pairs

Exposure therapy for pediatric irritability: Theory and potential mechanisms

Persons With Communication Disabilities in Natural Disasters, War, and/or Conflict

Health anxiety, cyberchondria, and coping in the current COVID-19 pandemic: Which factors are related to coronavirus anxiety

We used a latent variable approach to dissociate a broad network associated with emotion regulation from circumscribed circuitry uniquely relevant to irritable and non-irritable negative affect. Future studies should (a) aim to further validate this model using tasks that probe the proposed processes, and (b) test the utility of these latent factors as predictors of treatment response.

Summary Multisensory processing is important for emotion perception, and it has been suggested that multisensory deficits could contribute to dysfunctional affective processing in some populations. Despite this, individual differences in multisensory processing have very rarely been studied in the context of trauma or PTSD. This study investigated whether factors relating to performance on a multisensory emotion recognition task predicted intrusive memories following exposure to a virtual reality (VR) analogue trauma. The results revealed that a specific tendency towards greater integration of angry faces and voices predicted a higher number of intrusions. These results suggest that multisensory perception may have an impact on how adaptively traumatic events are processed. Keywords · Multisensory integration · Emotion recognition · Trauma Film · Virtual Reality · Psychological Distress n.r.heffer@bath.ac.uk