About
52
Publications
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Introduction
I completed my PhD at UWA’s school of Psychological Science. Currently, I am a research fellow at the UWA’s School of Psychological Science working on various projects that investigates cognitive mechanisms that compromise mental health and well-being, and makes important contributions to development, and enhancement of a new generation of health-promoting technologies, collectively known as cognitive bias modification.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
April 2015 - March 2018
Arzeshafarin Vista Co.
Position
- Psychologist/Coordinator
Description
- Arzeshafarin Vista Co. is an assessment center for the psychological and managerial skills of managers who work in the industry. I worked there as a psychologist, administrating psychological tests and coordinating assessment team activities.
January 2019 - December 2021
Position
- Academic Tutor/Demonstrator
Description
- Main Duties: • Delivering tutorials for various psychology units • Grading and providing feedback on assignments and essays • Collaborating with other academics to ensure consistency in marking guidelines
Editor roles
Journal of Emotion and Psychopathology
Position
- Editorial Board Member
Education
June 2018 - June 2022
September 2013 - December 2016
September 2009 - July 2013
Publications
Publications (52)
Background
Estimation of a patient's pain may have a considerable impact on the level of care that patient receives. Many studies have shown that contextual factors may influence an observer's pain estimation. Here, we investigate the effect of an observer's impression of a person in pain and justification of his/her pain on the observer's pain est...
Abstract
Background: Cognitive models propose that attentional dysregulation, including an attentional bias towards threat as one of the factors through which chronic pain and post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) maintain and exacerbate one another. The current investigation assessed the attentional bias for painful facial expressions and its rela...
Introduction
This study investigated the time course of attention to pain and examined the moderating effect of attentional control in the relationship between pain catastrophizing and attentional bias in chronic pain patients.
Methods
A total of 28 patients with chronic pain and 29 pain-free individuals observed pictures of pain, happy and neutra...
This meta-analytic study examined the associations between childhood emotional abuse (CEA) history in adults and 11 emotion regulation (ER) abilities (i.e., distress tolerance, emotional awareness, acceptance, clarity, impulse control) and strategies (i.e., behavioural avoidance, distraction, experiential avoidance, expressive suppression, reapprai...
Abstract
Objective: Despite potentially harmful consequences, people routinely encounter alcohol adverts designed to increase consumption of alcohol in preference to safer alternatives. However, individuals differ in the degree to which such adverts elicit preferential alcohol consumption. The present study builds upon and extends prior research, b...
Background and Aims
Alcohol advertising can induce craving and increase consumption of alcohol, though individuals vary in their susceptibility. Recent findings suggest that attentional bias toward alcohol adverts predicts subsequent alcohol craving and consumption. However, methodological limitations leave key issues unresolved, including whether...
Objectives: Maladaptive beliefs about emotions (e.g., believing emotions are uncontrollable or useless) are theorised to contribute to emotion regulation difficulties and psychological distress. Despite growing interest, limited research has examined maladaptive emotion beliefs in clinical populations. This study investigated the psychometric prope...
Cognitive theories contend that attentional bias to negative information contributes to elevated trait anxiety. However, research in this area has been hindered by the lack of a standardized assessment task that demonstrates the required qualities, including strong internal consistency and ecological validity. The present study aimed to develop and...
Background: Beliefs about emotions are an important yet understudied beliefs proposed to influence emotion regulation and psychological distress. Here, we replicated research on the relationship between beliefs about emotions in general, emotion regulation, and psychological distress, and extended it by examining the relative importance of beliefs...
Introduction
Empathy, a complex and multidimensional construct essential for social functioning and mental health, has been extensively studied in both research and clinical settings. The Perth Empathy Scale (PES), a recently developed self-report measure, assesses cognitive and affective empathy across both positive and negative emotions and is ba...
Abstract
Repetitive Negative Thinking (RNT) during pregnancy is a key risk factor for psychopathology in the perinatal period. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying prenatal RNT remain poorly understood. Recent research has suggested that a tendency to volitionally seek negative rather than positive information (i.e., biased information seek...
Purpose While long considered a unitary dimension, research has moved towards a multidimensional understanding of trait anxiety, and has identified two dissociable dimensions of trait anxiety: anxiety reactivity and anxiety perseveration. Despite
the consolidation of this understanding over the past decade, the mechanisms underlying these two dimen...
Abstract
Empathy, a complex and multidimensional construct essential for social functioning and mental health, has been extensively studied in both research and clinical settings. The Perth Empathy Scale (PES), a recently developed self-report measure, assesses cognitive and affective empathy across both positive and negative emotions and is based...
The current study examined the association between elevated prenatal worry and negative expectancies about parenthood and the potential cognitive mechanisms driving such expectancies. Two main hypotheses were examined: First, that negative expectancies about parenthood contribute to elevated prenatal worry, and second, negative selective interrogat...
Death Anxiety Beliefs and Behaviours Scale (DABBS) Persian (Farsi) and English versions with scoring keys
Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing feelings, as well as a lack of focus on feelings. Alexithymia is a transdiagnostic risk factor for developing a wide array of psychopathologies, such as anxiety and depression, with a key hypothesised mechanism being the impairing impact of alexithymia on emotion regulation. Ho...
Numerous tools assess death anxiety, but many have questionable psychometric properties. The Death Anxiety Beliefs and Behaviors Scale (DABBS) addresses these shortcomings, assessing death-related maladaptive affect, beliefs, and behaviors that could be foundational to fears associated with death. We translated the DABBS into Persian and examined i...
Background: Cognitive theories of health anxiety emphasize the critical importance of general Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU-general) in the development and maintenance of health anxiety. There is, however, a dearth of research on the mechanisms through which IU-general leads to health anxiety. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to test th...
Purpose
While long considered a unitary dimension, research has moved towards a multidimensional understanding of trait anxiety. Most relevant to this study, is the conceptualisation of two dissociable dimensions of trait anxiety; anxiety reactivity and anxiety perseveration. Despite the consolidation of this understanding over the past decade, the...
Research across various psychology disciplines underscores death anxiety as a significant construct. Numerous tools assess death anxiety, but many have questionable psychometric properties. To address these shortcomings, the Death Anxiety Beliefs and Behaviours Scale (DABBS) was developed, which also assesses death-related maladaptive beliefs and b...
The current study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale-Short Form (DERS-SF) in Iran, including testing its measurement invariance across sexes, as well as community and student populations. Two samples were recruited: a community sample of 583 participants (58.7% female; Mage = 33.55) and a u...
The current study explored the association between elevated prenatal worry and negative expectancies about parenthood and the potential cognitive mechanisms driving such expectancies. Two main hypotheses were examined: First, that negative expectancies about parenthood contribute to elevated prenatal worry, and second, negative selective interrogat...
Objectives: The current study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale-Short Form (DERS-SF) in Iran, including testing its measurement invariance across genders, as well as community and student populations. We also aimed to use the DERS-SF to explore the potential mediating role of emotion dysre...
People’s beliefs about emotions contribute to their psychological wellbeing, and two important beliefs about emotions concern their controllability and usefulness. Recently, the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) was developed to assess beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of positive and negative emotions. To date, most psychometric s...
Objective: Alexithymia is a trait defined by difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, as well as externally oriented thinking. It is an important transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, and therefore its assessment is of substantial interest. Recently, the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ) was developed to try to...
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ): copy of the questionnaire and scoring instructions.
People’s beliefs about emotions contribute to their psychological wellbeing, and two important beliefs about emotions concern their controllability and usefulness. Recently, the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) was developed to assess beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of positive and negative emotions. To date, most psychometric s...
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ): copy of the questionnaire and scoring instructions
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI): copy of questionnaire and scoring instructions
Objective
A critical factor for adaptive psychological functioning is the ability to successfully regulate negative and positive emotions. Various tools and methods have been developed to assess emotion regulation competence. Recently, the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI) was developed to overcome some of the limitations of pre...
Introduction
Empathy is an interpersonal experience that enables understanding of other's emotions and can lead to altruistic behavior such as blood donation. Cognitive theories of empathy refer to selective attention as one of its cognitive dimensions. The current study examined if individuals who engage in altruistic behavior are characterized by...
Cognitive models of social anxiety propose that a heightened social anxiety vulnerability is characterized by a bias favouring negative anticipatory thinking prior to upcoming stressful social events. While empirical evidence confirms the existence of such bias, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the relationship between negatively biased antic...
The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...
Cognitive theories of eating disorders implicate Attentional Bias (AB) towards food-related information in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent, and the measures used to examine AB to food-related stimuli typically showed poor reliability. The aim of the current st...
The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with increased uncertainty, fear and worry in everyone's life. The effect of changes in daily life has been studied widely, but we do not know how emotion-regulation strategies influence adaptation to a new situation to help them overcome worry in the face of uncertainty. Here, 1,064 self-selected Farsi spe...
Cognitive theories of social anxiety implicate selective attention to negative social information in the development and maintenance of heightened social anxiety. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of attentional control, which is one’s ability to deploy attenti...
Cognitive theories of social anxiety implicate greater attention to negative social information in the development and maintenance of heightened social anxiety. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of attentional control, which is one’s ability to deploy attention...
Cognitive theories of eating disorders implicate Attentional Bias (AB) towards food-related information in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent and the measures used to examine AB to food-related stimuli typically showed poor reliability. The aim of the current stu...
Cognitive theories of health anxiety emphasize the critical importance of general Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU-general) in the development and maintenance of health anxiety. There is, however, a dearth of research on the mechanisms through which IU-general leads to health anxiety. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to test the hypothesis...
Cognitive models of chronic pain emphasize the critical role of pain catastrophizing in attentional bias to pain-related stimuli. The aim of this study was (a) to investigate the relationship between pain catastrophizing and the ability to inhibit selective attention to pain-related faces (attentional bias); and (b) to determine whether attentional...
Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the factor structure as well as the validity and reliability of the Persian version of Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ).
Method: Data were collected in three samples. A student sample (N=894) completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), the Difficulties in Emotion Regula...
Background: Estimation of a patient’s pain may have a considerable impact on the level of care that patient receives. Many studies have shown that contextual factors may influence an observer’s pain estimation. Here, we investigate the effect of an observer’s impression of a person in pain and justification of his/her pain on the observer’s pain es...
Objective: Generalized anxiety disorder is one of the most common
anxiety disorders in the general population. Several studies suggest that
anxiety sensitivity is a vulnerability factor in generalized anxiety severity.
However, some other studies suggest that negative repetitive thinking
and experiential avoidance as response factors can explain th...
Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the most commonly observed stress-related conditions following a motor vehicle accident, and its effective prevention is a high health-care priority. Although the reliable and valid Dissociative Experience Scale (DES) as the gold-standard instrument to quantify the frequency of self-reporte...
Objective:This study aimed to differentiate illness anxiety and generalized anxiety by the role of metacognition and intolerance of uncertainty. Methods: This research was a descriptive-correlational study with an ex post facto design. The study population included all students of Yazd University, and the study sample comprised 400 healthy adult un...
The aim of this study was to investigate national, religious and modern identities at explicit and implicit levels. Method: The method was correlational and the population of the study consisted of adolescents and youth in Mazandaran and Yazd from whom 168 participants were selected through convenience sampling. For collecting data at explicit leve...
Questions
Questions (6)
I want to detect multivariate outliers in my dataset, which contains participant responses to various questionnaires such as DASS-21, PSWQ etc. Should I compute Mahalanobis distance using total scores for constructs such as depression, anxiety and worry or should I use item-level data from the questionnaires before aggregating them into their total scores? When using item-level data, 25 participants are detected as outliers among 370 participants, but when using the total scores, only 1 participant is detected as multivariate outlier.
I conducted a parallel mediation model with two candidate mediators using Hayes’s PROCESS. The indirect pathways for both mediators are statistically significant. However, I need to compare the effect sizes of these mediation effects to see if one of them is significantly larger than the other one (please note that I don’t want to simply report and compare them, but in addition to test if one is significantly larger than the other). Do you know how that could be done? Please let me know if more information might be needed to answer the question. I use R and SPSS. Thanks in advance for your help!
I am doing confirmatory factor analysis using the lavaan package in R. I am testing a model for two different samples (adults and adolescents).
I run the below code:
five_factor_model <- "
factor1 =~ item_3 + item _6 + item _9 + item _12 + item _15 + item _18 + item _21 + item _24
factor2 =~ item _2 + item _8 + item _14 + item _20
factor3 =~ item _5 + item _11 + item _17 + item _23
factor4 =~ item _1 + item _7 + item _13 + item _19
factor5 =~ item _4 + item_10 + item _16 + item _22”
fit_model <- cfa(five_factor_model, data = df, estimator = "MLM")
The model fits well for the adults (N = 940) but shows the below error for the adolescent's sample (N = 670):
Lavvan WARNING: covariance matrix of latent variables is not positive definite; use lavInspect(fit, “cov.lv) to investigate.
Running the lavInspect(fit_model, “cov.lv”) gives the below output, which I don’t know how to use.
factr1 factr2 factr3 factr4 factr5
factor1 1.161
factor2 1.095 1.997
factor3 1.209 1.691 1.779
factor4 0.996 1.796 1.415 1.822
factor5 1.139 1.548 1.629 1.608 1.773
I am very new to these analyses and would appreciate if you let me know if the warning I get is problematic and I should not report the output for this model? Also, what should I do to overcome the potential issues?
Just some more info that might be relevant: I have a bifactor model version of the same mode above. This bifactor model works with the adult sample but with the adolescent sample, I get the below error:
lavaan WARNING: the optimizer warns that a solution has NOT been found!
Thanks a lot in advance! Please let me know if more information might be required.
In a typical moderation model with one moderator, is it a problem if the moderator and the dependent variable show a strong correlation (say 0.85)? What if a strong correlation exists between the moderator and independent (predictor) variable?
Another related question to moderation is that: Why sometimes when we switch the dependent and independent variables in a moderation model with the same moderator variable, the significance of the moderation changes? For example, when a model with say rumination as the independent variable, depression as the dependent variable, and gender as the moderator variable is significant; why it become non-significant when we switch the location of dependent and independent variables, put depression as independent and rumination as dependent (the example is not real, just to convey the pint).
Please let me know if any further information is required to make it clearer. Thanks in advance for your help :)
I am looking for a reliable source that explains how to carry out the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure for multiple testing such as multiple t-tests or multiple correlations. I read about it from several different websites and watched some videos, but got more confused as there were different formulas and methods for doing the procedure or were not clear (used symbols without explaining them).
For example, this post: (https://www.statisticshowto.datasciencecentral.com/benjamini-hochberg-procedure/) explained how to do it, but the example it presented wasn't clear to me. Specifically, it is still unclear to me what is the exact criterion for considering a p-value significant after carrying out the correction formula? Whether tests with the original p-values smaller than the modified p-values (obtained from the formula) are significant, or we should only consider the modified p-values lower than 0.05 significant?
I appreciate any help and comment :)
I am working with SMI eye-tracker (BeGaze version 2.5). I exported the data from the device. My problem now is transferring the data to SPSS. It really takes long to copy and paste the data to SPSS in a manner that is compatible with SPSS (in SPSS the data for each variable should be sorted vertically while in the export file the data for each AOI are sorted horizontally and the data for each subject is repeated in separate rows for each AOI that make the researcher to copy and paste the data to combine all them into one row for every participants. This process is really time consuming and increase the possibility of making errors. For example I have 160 AOIs and for 4 variables I have to do around 650 copying. I attached two pictures and explained the problem on them more clearly. Is there any other way we can transfer the data? I would really appreciate your answer to this question.
