Psychiatry-Interpersonal and Biological Processes最新文献

Objective: The armed conflict in Ukraine and its impact on Europe's economy have led to an war and economic crisis, potentially affecting the mental health of women during the perinatal period. This study aimed to assess the severity of depressive symptoms and labor anxiety among Polish women in perinatal period during this crisis.

Methods: From June 2, 2022, to April 11, 2023, 152 women completed three sets of online surveys-two during pregnancy (before 33 weeks and/or between 33 and 37 weeks) and one postpartum (4 weeks after childbirth). The questionnaires used to evaluate the anxiety and depressive symptoms included Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-2), Labor Anxiety Questionnaire (LAQ), and team-developed questionnaires evaluating war-related anxiety (WAQ) and global situation anxiety (GSAQ) Statistical analyses included U-Mann Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, Wilcoxon signed-rank, Friedman tests and Spearman's correlations, with a significance level set at p < .05.

Results: Among Polish pregnant women aged 23-43, 31.6% of participants experienced depressive symptoms, while 70.4% reported increased labor-related anxiety. Additionally, 24.3% experienced significant anxiety due to the war, and 25% suffered from severe anxiety related to the global situation. Positive correlations were noted between EPDS and GSAQ scores (R = 0.34, p < .001) and LAQ and WAQ scores (R = 0.21, p = .008).

Conclusions: The prevalence of perinatal depression is high during war and economic crisis, underscoring the urgent need to improve screening for perinatal depression in Poland. Further, the manuscript did not discuss symptom patterns across the three time points.

This article aims to report on the clinical care of a gifted child in the context of Health and Education. The child showed signs of emotional distress and disruptive behaviors, which were related to the school context. Based on the assessment that revealed this child was gifted, his acceleration by one school year was recommended, which in turn resulted in complete remission of symptoms. This experience exemplifies the importance of identifying giftedness in childhood as a guide for appropriate conduct, both in cultivating the good development of the child's skills and in promoting their emotional well-being.

Objective: Pandemics have been shown to affect both physical and mental health, with healthcare workers (HCWs) bearing a particularly heavy burden. During the COVID-19 pandemic, HCWs faced a high volume of cases, extended work hours, and heightened pandemic-related stressors, which placed them at increased risk for mental health issues. This study examines the effects of COVID-19-related anxiety on HCWs' mental health, specifically exploring the roles of compassion fatigue (comprising burnout and secondary traumatic stress) as potential mediators in this relationship.

Method: A sample of 104 HCWs completed an online survey measuring their demographic characteristics (such as gender, age, length of service, marital status, and education), levels of COVID-19 anxiety, compassion fatigue, and mental health outcomes. Path analysis and bootstrapping procedures were used to analyze the data.

Results: Results indicated that COVID-19 anxiety was positively associated with compassion fatigue, defined as the emotional strain of caring for others, which includes both burnout (emotional exhaustion from work) and secondary traumatic stress (stress from exposure to others' trauma). Compassion fatigue, particularly secondary traumatic stress, mediated the relationship between COVID-19 anxiety and various mental health indicators, including symptoms of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Both COVID-19 anxiety and compassion fatigue were significant predictors of these mental health outcomes.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that COVID-19 anxiety alone does not fully explain mental health outcomes among HCWs, as compassion fatigue, specifically secondary traumatic stress, plays a substantial role. Recognizing the complex interplay of pandemic-related stressors and compassion fatigue may guide interventions to better support HCWs' mental health.

Objective: Prior research has indicated that outcome expectancies, sensitivity to punishment, and sensitivity to reward may predict harmful health behaviors concurrently, including disordered eating. Loss-of-control eating (LOCE), feeling unable to resist eating or stop once one has started, is associated with expectancies that eating alleviates negative affect (NA reduction expectancies) and expectancies that eating is rewarding (reward expectancies).

Method: A survey battery was administered examining LOCE pathology, sensitivity to punishment, sensitivity to reward, and eating expectancies to a sample of 1660 adults in the United States (M_age = 39.24 (14.51), 73.86% assigned female at birth). It was hypothesized that sensitivity to punishment would have a potentiating effect on the relationship between NA reduction expectancies and LOCE (a two-way interactive effect). This relationship was theorized to be moderated by the effect of reward sensitivity (a three-way interactive effect), as reward sensitivity has been found to interact with punishment sensitivity. Similarly, reward expectancies on LOCE were thought to be potentiated by sensitivity to reward (a two-way interactive effect) and this relationship was also thought to be influenced by sensitivity to punishment (a three-way interactive effect).

Results: Hypotheses were partially supported. Sensitivity to punishment significantly moderated a two-way interactive relationship between reward sensitivity and reward expectancies on LOCE, attenuating this two-way interaction at low sensitivity to punishment. Similarly, the interaction between sensitivity to punishment and NA reduction expectancies on LOCE was only significant when reward sensitivity was low or at its mean.

Conclusion: Sensitivity to punishment and sensitivity to reward evince nuanced interactions with each other and eating expectancies to predict LOCE. Findings have treatment implications for cognitive interventions in LOCE.

Objective: Emergencies in child and adolescent psychiatry are prevalent, and pediatric psychiatric emergency departments play a crucial role in acute intervention during mental health-related crises. This retrospective cross-sectional study aimed to analyze the characteristics of children and adolescents who were admitted to a pediatric psychiatric emergency department.

Method: The data were collected from the records of 8803 patients (females 56.6%, Mage = 15.07 ± 2.6) admitted to our pediatric psychiatry emergency department between 2014 and 2021. Diagnoses were made using the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision. We used descriptive statistics to determine patient characteristics and conducted a regression analysis to compare the changes in the admissions numbers by the year.

Results: It was found that depressive disorder was the highest psychiatric diagnosis, with a percentage of 21.4%. Depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown an increase over the years. In 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychiatric admissions reached their lowest level. The percentage of hospitalizations was 21.1% for the total of all years. No significant change was found in the total number of admissions, sex, and age.

Conclusions: The number of admissions for female adolescents who were diagnosed with depressive disorder to our pediatric psychiatry emergency department is shown to be high. The fact that these patients seek help more frequently should be taken into consideration during the planning of mental health services for outpatient and inpatient clinics as well as pediatric psychiatry emergency services.

Objective: Insomnia as a disorder on its own or as a symptom of other mental disorders can lead to significant distress and lower quality of life. By exacerbating negative affect and emotion dysregulation, poor sleep and insomnia can contribute to the initiation and maintenance of mental disorders. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the relationship between insomnia severity and overall psychiatric symptoms (anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, somatization, phobic anxiety, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism), and the mediational roles of worry and rumination in this relationship.

Method: The data was collected from a community sample of 1444 participants (females 69.39%, M_age = 27.95, SD = 9.37) who completed self-report measures of insomnia severity, worry, rumination, and psychiatric symptoms. The mediational roles of worry and rumination were tested with mediation analysis using the PROCESS Macro.

Results: It was found that insomnia severity (β = 0.20, p < .001) significantly predicted psychiatric symptoms directly and via worry and rumination (β = 0.33, p < .001), meaning that worry and rumination partially mediated the relationship between insomnia severity and psychiatric symptoms. The findings were similar after controlling for smoking status, daily screen time, coffee consumption in the evening, weekly exercise frequency, and pre-sleep screen time.

Conclusions: Interventions targeting the reduction of insomnia severity and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., worry and rumination), as well as the enhancement of adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., positive refocusing and mindfulness), may alleviate the adverse effects of insomnia on psychiatric symptoms.

ObjectiveCollege students consume more alcohol and engage in binge drinking more frequently than their non-college attending peers, and prevalence of alcohol-related consequences (e.g., drinking and driving; taking avoidable risks) has not decreased proportionally with decreases in consumption. Social anxiety and alcohol expectancies, or beliefs about the effects of alcohol, have been found to be significantly related to alcohol use and account for significant variance in alcohol use and related consequences. Few studies, however, have examined how other social variables such as need to belong and social connectedness may fit into existing models of increased and risky alcohol use. Methods: Students at a large state university (n = 1,278) completed an online survey measuring alcohol expectancies, need to belong, social anxiety, and social connectedness. Mean age of participants was 19.65 years, and 59.5% self-identified as female, 39.8% male, and 0.7% identified as transgender. Structural equation modeling supported hypothesized relationships between need to belong, social anxiety, social connectedness, alcohol expectancies, and alcohol use, a mean centered variable that included binge drinking, drinking frequency, and amount of consumption. Results: Positive alcohol expectancies related to tension reduction, sociability, and sexuality, were positively related to drinking, such that increased alcohol expectancies were associated with increased drinking. Alcohol expectancies mediated the relationship between need to belong and increased alcohol use, as well as social connectedness and increased alcohol use. Similarly, social anxiety also mediated these relationships. No direct relationships were found between need to belong or social connectedness and alcohol use, suggesting previous research exploring these relationships may have excluded control variables (e.g., biological sex, race/ethnicity) that better explain the impact of need to belong and social connectedness on alcohol use. Conclusion: Prevention and intervention efforts might be more effective in reducing alcohol use if social factors are more broadly targeted.

ObjectiveTo investigate the influence of visual contextual information on emotion recognition of ambiguous facial expressions in depression and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Method: Ambiguous facial expressions and emotional contexts representing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise were validated in a pre-test with healthy independent raters. Afterwards, 20 healthy participants (8 women, 12 men; mean age 24.35 ± 2.85 years), 20 participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (9 women, 11 men; mean age 40.25 ± 11.68 years) and 19 participants with depression (11 women, 8 men; mean age 43.74 ± 12.65 years) rated the emotional content of nine different faces in seven different emotion-suggesting contexts. The proportions of context-congruent answers and differences between emotion ratings in each context were analysed using non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis and explorative, paired Wilcoxon tests. Correlational analyses explored the influence of clinical symptoms assessed by clinician-administered scales. Results: The overall proportion of context-congruent answers did not differ between participants with depression and schizophrenia spectrum disorders compared to healthy participants. Participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders were more susceptible to anger-suggesting contexts and participants with depression were more susceptible to fear-suggesting contexts. Differences in emotion recognition were associated with the severity of depressive, but not psychotic, symptoms. Conclusion: Despite increased susceptibility to anger-suggesting cues in schizophrenia and to fear-suggesting cues in depression, visual contextual influence remains largely consistent with healthy participants. Preserved emotional responsiveness suggests an efficacy of emotion training but emphasizes the need for additional research focusing on other factors contributing to social interaction deficits.