Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) Reduces Depression-Related Self- Referential Processing In Patients With Bipolar Disorder

Background: Negative self-referential processing has fruitfully been studied in unipolar depressed patients, but remarkably less in patients with bipolar disorder (BD). This study examines the relation between task-based self-referential processing and depressive symptoms in BD and their possible importance to the working mechanism of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for BD.Methods: The study population consisted of a subsample of patients with BD (n = 49) participating in an RCT of MBCT for BD, who were assigned to MBCT+TAU (n = 23) or treatment as usual (TAU) (n = 26). Patients performed the self-referential encoding task (SRET), which measures (1) positive and (2) negative attributions to oneself as well as (3) negative self-referential memory bias, before and after MBCT. Results: At baseline all three SRET measures were significantly related to depressive symptoms in patients with BD. Moreover, repeated measures analyses of variance revealed that negative self-referential memory bias diminished over time in the MBCT+TAU group, compared with the TAU group. Conclusions: Task-based self-referential processing is related to depressive symptoms in BD. Moreover, the negative self-referential memory bias was specifically amenable to change through MBCT. Future research should explore the possibly mediating role of reduction of negative self-referential memory bias in preventing and treating depressive symptoms in BD through MBCT.

Can Yoga Boost Access to the Bodily and Emotional Self? Changes in Heart Rate Variability and in Affective Evaluation Before, During and After a Single Session of Yoga Exercise With and Without Instructions of Controlled Breathing and Mindful Body Awareness in Young Healthy Women

Exercise is indispensable for a healthy lifestyle. Yoga exercise can have positive effects on well-being and on cardiac autonomic activity making it an ideal intervention for improving mind-body interactions and resilience to physical and mental stressors. Emotions trigger especially strong bodily and affective-cognitive responses because of their social relevance for the self and their biological relevance of mobilizing the organism for action. This study investigates whether changes in emotion processing related to self-other referential processing and changes in cardiac autonomic activity, reflected by heart rate variability (HRV), occur immediately after already a single session of yoga exercise when yoga postures are practiced with or without breathing- and mindful body awareness instructions. Women, all university students (N = 34, final sample: n = 30, n = 25 naïve to yoga practice) were randomly assigned to two experimental groups who performed the same yoga exercises with or without controlled breathing and mindfulness instructions. Emotional, self-other referential processing, awareness of bodily signals and HRV indicators were investigated before and after the exercise using standardized experimental tasks, standardized questionnaires, and mobile recording devices. Exercising for 30 minutes changed cardiac activity significantly. HRV measures showed adaptability of cardiac activity during the exercise as well as during the affective task post- to pre-exercise. Exercising with breathing instructions and mindful body awareness had no superior effects on cardiac, particularly parasympathetic activity, compared to practicing the same movements without such explicit instructions. Self-referential processing did not change; however, participants were faster and more accurate in their affective judgments of emotional stimuli [regardless of their reference (self/other)], and showed better awareness of bodily signals after compared to before the exercise session. The results support immediate, adaptive effects of yoga exercise on cardiac and affective-cognitive processing in an all-female healthy sample. Therefore, yoga exercise could be recommended as a physical activity for boosting cardiac and emotional resilience in this target group.

Taking the perspective of narrative characters

An ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and whether different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect how and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating which objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.