2018, Vol.4, No.2

Clinical Psychology in Korea: Research and Practice 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.83

pISSN : 2466-0787
https://journal.kci.go.kr/cpkjournal

The present study aimed to examine the preference for emotion regulation choice in depression and anxiety through an experiment and the impacts of affective flexibility. In this study, cognitive and affective flexibility was measured with a switching task. Additionally the preferred emotion regulation choice depending on negative emotional strength was measured using an emotion regulation task involving directly selection of reappraisal or switching strategy. The results showed that the high trait anxiety group preferred to switch away under low-emotion intensity compared to the low trait anxiety group. In particular, greater preference was related to lower switching away from the affective aspects of positive image. The depressed group was not different from the non-depressed group in terms of preference. However, their preference depended on switching away from the neutral aspects of negative image. This study emphasizes the importance of flexible emotion regulation choice and shows that affective flexibility, measured with emotional material, is closely associated with effects on emotion regulation choice in depression and anxiety. Moreover, this study implies that affective flexibility should be improved with flexible emotion regulation choice to regulate emotion adaptively.

This study determined how mentalization abilities differ based on narcissistic personality tendency among college students. A survey was conducted involving 345 students enrolled in universities in Seoul and Gyeong-gi province; 25 of the students marked over the average breaking point, 2.74 in Pathological Narcissism Inventory(PNI), and belonged to the top and bottom 30% in narcissistic personality tendencies. To measure mentalization ability, this study used many different types of tools; Mentalization Questionnaire(MZQ), Metacognition Awareness Scale(MAS), Empathy Quotient(EQ-Short-K), Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test(RMET) and A novel cartoon-based task. First, as for MZQ, students with high narcissistic personality tendency showed a lower mentalization ability than did those with low narcissistic personality tendency. The criterion of MAS also showed significant difference between the groups, with the group having high narcissistic personality tendency conspicuously lacking the ability to recognize their own thoughts and emotions. Meanwhile, EQ-Short-K and RMET did not show any significant differences, and “guessing the right order” in A novel cartoon-based task did not show any significant differences among the groups. Exceptionally, in this task, cognitive and affective mentalization abilities showed significant differences. These results show that those with narcissistic personality tendency have defects in mentalization abilities to recognize and focus on their own or others' mental status, and lack the ability to represent it in a more accurate and detailed manner.

This study investigated the relationships between auditory time perception and neuropsychological functions in patients with schizophrenia using Synchrony/Asynchrony discrimination (SA) task, Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) task and comprehensive neuropsychological tests. Participants were asked to respond whether two tones were presented simultaneously or not in SA task, whereas in TOJ task, participants were asked to judge which tone was presented prior to the other tone. Thirty patients with schizophrenia and 31 normal controls participated in this study. The schizophrenia group showed significantly lower accuracy rates than did the control group in both SA and TOJ tasks. Performance on the SA task was positively correlated with attention., whereas performance on the TOJ task was positively correlated with attention, memory, executive function. Moreover, performances on the SA task were negatively associated with P3 (hallucination) symptom, and performances on the TOJ task were negatively associated with positive symptoms, P3, general psychopathology, and total score of the PANSS for schizophrenia. These findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have deficits both in discriminating between synchrony and asynchrony, and judging temporal order. In addition, deficits of auditory time perception in patients with schizophrenia were significantly associated with schizophrenic symptoms and cognitive dysfucntions such as attention and executive dysfunctions.