research

Transdiagnostic treatment of depression and anxiety: a meta-analysis

BackgroundIn the past 10 years an increasing number of randomised trials have examined the effects of transdiagnostic treatments of patients with depression or anxiety. We conducted the first comprehensive meta-analysis of the outcomes of this emerging field.MethodsWe used the searches in PubMed, PsychINFO, Embase and the Cochrane library of an existing database of randomised trials of psychological interventions for depression to identify studies comparing a transdiagnostic treatment of patients with depression or anxiety with a control group (deadline 1 January 2022). We conducted random-effects meta-analyses and examined the effects on depression and anxiety at the short and longer term.ResultsWe included 45 randomised controlled trials with 51 comparisons between a psychotherapy and a control group and 5530 participants. Thirty-five (78%) studies were conducted in the last 10 years. The overall effect size was g = 0.54 (95% CI 0.40–0.69; NNT = 5.87), with high heterogeneity (I2 = 78; 95% CI 71–83), and a broad PI (−0.31–1.39). The effects remained significant in a series of sensitivity analyses, including exclusion of outliers, adjustment for publication bias, for studies with low risk of bias, and in multilevel analyses. The results were comparable for depression and anxiety separately. At 6 months after randomisation the main effects were still significant, but not at 12 months, although the number of studies was small.ConclusionsTransdiagnostic treatments of patients with depression or anxiety are increasingly examined and are probably effective at the short term.

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Effects of Music Combined With Sports Games on Alleviating Psychological Stress, Anxiety and Mental Energy Among Adolescents During COVID-19 Pandemic in Lanzhou Gansu Province China

Conditions:   Stress;   Anxiety and FearInterventions:   Behavioral: Music intervention only;   Behavioral: Sports games intervention only;   Behavioral: Music and sports games interventionSponsor:   Wu JiarunCompleted

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Understanding PTSD Symptoms Over Time: Longitudinal Network Analysis

Background
Network modeling has been applied in a range of trauma-exposed samples, yet results are limited by an over reliance on cross-sectional data. The current analyses used posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom data collected over a 5-year period to estimate a more robust between-subject network and an associated symptom change network.

Methods
A PTSD symptom network is measured in a sample of military veterans across four time points (Ns = 1254, 1231, 1106, 925). The repeated measures permit isolating between-subject associations by limiting the effects of within-subject variability. The result is a highly reliable PTSD symptom network. A symptom slope network depicting covariation of symptom change over time is also estimated.

Results
Negative trauma-related emotions had particularly strong associations with the network. Trauma-related amnesia, sleep disturbance, and self-destructive behavior had weaker overall associations with other PTSD symptoms.

Conclusions
PTSD’s network structure appears stable over time. There is no single ‘most important’ node or node cluster. The relevance of self-destructive behavior, sleep disturbance, and trauma-related amnesia to the PTSD construct may deserve additional consideration.

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Social media use and adolescents’ well-being: A note on flourishing

BackgroundSeveral large-scale studies and reviews have reported both negative and positive associations of social media use with well-being, suggesting that the findings are more complex and need more nuanced study. Moreover, there is little or no exploration of how social media use in adolescence influences flourishing, a more all-encompassing construct beyond well-being, including six sub-domains (i.e., happiness, meaning and purpose, physical and mental health, character, close social relationships, and financial stability). This paper aims to fill this gap by understanding how adolescents might flourish through social media activities by fulfilling the basic needs pointed out by the Self-Determination Theory, i.e., relatedness, autonomy, and competence.MethodsThe study is drawn on cross-sectional data collected from 1,429 Swiss adolescents (58.8% females, Mage = 15.84, SDage = 0.83) as part of the HappyB project in Spring 2022. Self-reported measures included the Harvard Adolescent Flourishing scale, positive and negative online social experiences, self-disclosure on social media, and social media inspiration. Control variables included, among others, self-esteem, ill-being, and personality.ResultsAfter applying Bonferroni’s correction, results of the hierarchical regression analyses showed that positive social media experiences (β = 0.112, p 

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Patients’ experiences of being “ghosted” by their psychotherapists.

Psychotherapy, Vol 59(4), Dec 2022, 545-553; doi:10.1037/pst0000454 Psychotherapist ghosting is a type of inappropriate, therapist-initiated termination of treatment in which the therapist ceases communication with their patient without prior notice. A total of 77 patients (M age = 34) who reported being ghosted by their therapist completed a web-based therapist ghosting survey (TGS) that assessed

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Disaggregating between- and within-patient effects of ruptures and resolutions on the therapeutic alliance and symptom severity.

Psychotherapy, Vol 59(4), Dec 2022, 567-571; doi:10.1037/pst0000457 The therapeutic alliance is considered a robust predictor of psychotherapy outcome. Ruptures and resolutions in the alliance have been the focus of recent alliance literature. Most previous studies investigated their between-patient effects. We used hierarchical linear models to disaggregate the between- and within-patient effects of ruptures on the

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Some Problems with Clinical Mental Health Studies

Studies may show results that are statistically significant but clinically irrelevant. If a study uses a large enough sample, small effects of questionable relevance may be identified as significant factors in an outcome. The reason is that various independent factors with little relevance, autonomous trends as well as random fluctuations can lead to small effects,

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