Laura J. Long

Boston University | BU · Psychological & Brain Sciences

Strengths use, the engagement of positive character traits in everyday contexts, is associated with both positive functioning and symptom reduction. The present study examined longitudinal relationships between strengths use and emotional disorder symptoms (anxiety, stress, and depression) during a randomized clinical trial of the Digital Unified P...

Introduction The COVID‐19 pandemic posed a threat to public health and psychological functioning, with early studies documenting higher rates of psychopathology within the United States and globally. Hope and optimism promote adjustment and are associated with positive physical and mental health outcomes. Thus, individual differences in hope and op...

This chapter presents an overview of the status of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for benzodiazepine discontinuation. A conceptual model for treatment and elemental interventions are discussed and exemplified. Although benzodiazepine medications are efficacious for treating anxiety disorders, short-term treatment is generally recommended given...

The present study expands on the growing body of research on the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) on positive affect. More specifically, we explore how CBT may promote increases in the Joviality subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule–Expanded Form (PANAS-X), a measure of self-rated affect that captures positive emotions,...

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded more than 300,000 buildings causing an estimated $125 billion in damages and resulting in 68 deaths (National Hurricane Center). This actual or threatened loss of life and physical harm led many to report negative effects on mental well-being and greater mental illness. However, many individuals have been able to e...

Objective Digital supplements to tele-psychotherapy are increasingly needed. The purpose of this retrospective study was to investigate the association between outcomes and the use of supplemental video lessons based on the Unified Protocol (UP), an empirically supported transdiagnostic treatment. Methods Participants included 7,326 adults in psyc...

Background Exposure-based therapy is an effective first-line treatment for anxiety-, obsessive–compulsive, and trauma- and stressor-related disorders; however, many patients do not improve, resulting in prolonged suffering and poorly used resources. Basic research on fear extinction may inform the development of a biomarker for the selection of exp...

Background: Exposure-based therapy is an effective first-line treatment for anxiety-, obsessive-compulsive, and trauma- and stressor-related disorders; however, many patients do not improve, resulting in prolonged suffering and poorly used resources. Basic research on fear extinction may inform the development of a biomarker for the selection of ex...

This paper reviews the present literature examining how hope relates to PTSD and broader functioning after a trauma, including potential underlying mechanisms and significant factors impacting these relationships and the role of hope as a mechanism of change within interventions for PTSD. First, the ways in which trauma impacts hope are discussed....

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on health and well-being worldwide. There is increasing research seeking to better understand the psychological impact of COVID-19 experiences. However, this research has largely been limited in size and scope.Methods The present study examined longitudinal trajectories of COVID-19 experien...

The present meta-analysis consolidated research examining how posttraumatic growth relates to global anxiety and depression. Articles were identified by searching PTSDpubs, PsycINFO, PubMed, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses databases, as well as searching the reference sections of relevant review articles. Meta-analytic review of 129 included...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound negative impact on mental health symptoms and daily life functioning across the United States and worldwide. Past work has revealed that perceived stress relates to poorer outcomes, however, little work to date has examined factors that may exacerbate these outcomes, and no work to date has examin...

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on health and well-being worldwide. There is an increasing need to understand the psychological impact of COVID-19, particularly associations with posttraumatic stress. This cross-sectional study examined associations between COVID-19 and posttraumatic stress among adults utilizing structural equation modeling met...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an adverse effect on anxiety and depression symptoms and disorders in the United States and worldwide. As such, there is considerable interest in better understanding the relationship between COVID-19 and anxiety and depressive disorders. Although individual differences in perceived stress have shown to be related to a...

SBEH_A_1877341 Hope is a cognitive trait that predicts both resilience to and recovery from anxiety and stress-related disorders. The present study examines the prospective associations of hope with subsequent anxiety, stress, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Perceived emotional control, a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor, was also...

Psychiatric comorbidities are common throughout clinical practice. This article discusses the prevalence and etiology of psychiatric comorbidities, in addition to commenting on clinical implications and future directions. Modern comorbidity research frequently evaluates whether psychiatric comorbidity reflects the presence of two or more distinct c...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on health and well-being worldwide and there is increasing recognition of the need to understand the psychological impact of COVID-19 experiences and stress in addition to the physical health consequences.Methods The present study examined how experiences related to COVID-19 and associated...

Western samples have demonstrated greater optimism than East Asian samples, however, the factor structure of the Life Orientation Test (LOT) is not always consistent. Measurement properties of scales may differ across cultures, potentially biasing estimation of group differences. This study examined the factor structure and measurement invariance o...

Natural disasters can lead to mental health problems, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Higher levels of loss and/or disruption and prior trauma exposure constitute risk factors for mental illness, whereas protective factors, including hope and resilience, support positive functioning. The present cross‐sectional study used structural e...

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been found to be very effective in reducing many forms of mental illness, but much less is known about whether CBT also promotes mental health or well-being. The goals of the present study were to (a) quantify the magnitude and timing of changes in overall well-being and specific facets of well-being during di...

This chapter outlines a select number of some of the most extensively studied and widely used models and measures of well-being and quality of life. As the field of positive psychology has quickly grown in the past two decades, the number of assessment tools for quantifying positive mental health and other positive aspects of functioning has rapidl...

Objective: The present meta-analysis consolidated research examining how positive expectancies (e.g., hope, self-efficacy, and optimism) may protect against the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Method: Articles were identified by searching PILOTS, PsycINFO, PubMed, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses databases. Results: A...

Background: As extreme weather events increasingly affect the global population, it is valuable to understand their impacts on mental health. Extending upon previous theory and research, the current study examined a hypothesized framework of direct and indirect pathways. Exposure and psychosocial resource factors at the time of the hurricane/flood...

Hope is a trait that represents the capacity to identify strategies or pathways to achieve goals and the motivation or agency to effectively pursue those pathways. Hope has been demonstrated to be a robust source of resilience to anxiety and stress and there is limited evidence that, as has been suggested for decades, hope may function as a core pr...

Optimism and mastery are two cognitive traits that involve positive expectations for the future and that have been demonstrated to be important predictors of reduced anxiety as well as superior coping and physical health in many populations, including cancer survivors. There is limited research, however, examining the unique effects of these traits...

1 Objective The present study examined the impact of expressive writing on reducing posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSS) and facilitating posttraumatic growth (PTG) in Chinese American breast cancer survivors. 2 Method Ninety‐six women who had completed primary treatments for breast cancer were randomly assigned to a cancer experience fac...

Individuals differ greatly in their sensitivity to rewards and punishments. In the extreme, these differences are implicated in a range of psychiatric disorders from addiction to depression. However, it is unclear how these differences influence the recruitment of attention, working memory, and long-term memory when responding to potential rewards....

We can improve human vision by correcting the optics of our lenses [1-3]. However, after the eye transduces the light, visual cortex has its own limitations that are challenging to correct [4]. Overcoming these limitations has typically involved innovative training regimes that improve vision across many days [5, 6]. In the present study, we wanted...

How do people get attention to operate at peak efficiency in high-pressure situations? We tested the hypothesis that the general mechanism that allows this is the maintenance of multiple target representations in working and long-term memory. We recorded subjects' event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing the working memory and long-term memory repr...

Mental imagery can have powerful training effects on behavior, but how this occurs is not well understood. Here we show that even a single instance of mental imagery can improve attentional selection of a target more effectively than actually practicing visual search. By recording subjects' brain activity, we found that these imagery-induced traini...

Pavlovian conditioning paradigms have revealed fear learning tendencies that may be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Given the prominence of disgust in certain anxiety disorders, it may be fruitful to study disgust learning in addition to fear learning. The present study utilized eye tracking to examine the effects o...