Nilly Mor

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Psychology and School of Education

Purpose Depressive symptoms are associated with reduced processing of and memory for positive content. These cognitive biases maintain depressive states, and are presumed to be interrelated. This study examined the effect of a single-session training to process (or inhibit) positive stimuli, on memory of new emotional content. Methods Participants...

Affective Working Memory (AWM) is the ability to maintain an emotion after the emotion-eliciting stimulus is no longer present. Emotions are dynamic, and emotion-eliciting stimuli are encountered simultaneously and sequentially. Therefore, this research aimed to examine AWM when more than one emotion is being maintained. We aimed to re-examine prev...

Background and objectives Rumination involves fixating on negative content, is associated with biases in inhibitory control, and typically worsens negative mood. In contrast, distraction attempts to engage attentional control and downregulate negative mood. To date studies have not dissociated the detrimental effects of rumination from beneficial e...

This research examines the effects of a cognitive bias modification procedure for facilitating inferential flexibility, on inferences, mood, and state rumination. Participants were presented with training scenarios, followed by two consecutive inferences for each scenario. In the training condition, participants repeatedly practiced shifting from a...

Rumination about negative experiences is widely viewed as a transdiagnostic process underlying various forms of psychopathology that involve emotion dysregulation. Cognitive models highlight the role of attentional control and emotional biases in the development and maintenance of rumination. We suggest that the temporality of the attentional blink...

Making negative inferences for negative events, ruminating about them, and retrieving negative aspects of memories have all been associated with depression. However, the causal mechanisms that link negative inferences to negative mood and the interplay between inferences, rumination, and memory have not been explored. In the current study, we used...

Depressive rumination, the tendency to engage in repetitive self-focus in response to distress, seems to be affected by a variety of cognitive biases that in turn maintain negative emotional states. The current study examined whether the difficulty in inhibiting attention to negative information contributes to rumination and to rumination-related b...

The present study investigated the associations between social anxiety (SA) and depression on the one hand, and intra- and interpersonal perceptions within a friendship relationship on the other. Evolutionary theories suggest that SA is associated with impairment in the social-rank system. Recent studies suggest that depression is associated with i...

Suppression is a useful everyday skill leading to the clinically important outcome of forgetting. Suppression-induced forgetting, investigated with the think/no-think (TNT) paradigm, is typically demonstrated on direct tests of memory, even though indirect tests are often more ecologically valid. We report results from two TNT experiments terminati...

Depressive rumination is an emotion regulation strategy that is considered a major risk factor for depression and other emotional disorders. While well-established measures of trait rumination are available, a psychometrically sound measure of state rumination is lacking. We report on the development and validation of a new self-report measure, the...

Reappraisal is a multifaceted construct associated with a wide range of proximal (e.g., affective responses) and distal (e.g., psychopathology) consequences. To date, our understanding of use of reappraisal is based either on self-reports of tendencies to use a specific strategy in general or in the last week or on performance on lab-based tasks. T...

In this study, we developed a cognitive bias modification procedure that targets inferential style, and tested its effect on hope, mood, and self-esteem. Participants were randomly assigned to training conditions intended to encourage either a negative or a positive inferential style. Participants’ inferences for their failure on a cognitive challe...

In the current study we explored whether training individuals to recruit cognitive control prior to exposure to negative pictures can facilitate the propensity to use reappraisal and reappraisal success. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the training group, negative pictures were typically preceded by a stimulus that recr...

Impairments in cognitive processes have been theorized to play a critical role in rumination, a well-established risk factor for depression. In this review, we outline central theories that present cognitive impairments as causal contributors to ruminative thinking and review relevant findings from cross-sectional and prospective studies. We then f...

Whereas the association between depression and the perception of emotions has been widely studied, only few studies have examined the association between depression and the ability to discriminate genuine (Duchenne) from fake (non-Duchenne) smiles. The present study examined this by comparing currently depressed, previously depressed, and healthy c...

To explore cognitive factors in ruminative thinking, we assessed the effect of a single-session of inhibition training on subsequent biases in attention and interpretation. We randomly assigned participants to either inhibit or attend to negative stimuli. Inhibition was assessed by using assessment trials embedded throughout the training, and inter...

To understand cognitive bases of self-reported ruminative tendencies, we examined interpretations and subsequent memories of ambiguous situations depicting opportunities for rumination. In Experiment 1, we recruited students, randomly assigned them to a distracting or ruminative concentration task, and then measured their latencies to complete frag...

The ability to inhibit negative information is associated with emotion regulation (ER). Reduced inhibition of negative information characterises poor ER, which in turn plays a critical role in psychopathology. People engage in multiple ER strategies; some are harmful and others are helpful. However, the interaction between harmful and helpful ER st...

We aimed to examine the core elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy that target distressing negative cognitions, cognitive restructuring (CR) and cognitive defusion (CD), respectively. Participants (N = 142) recalled a saddening autobiographical event, identified a distressing thought it triggered, and comple...

People who tend to engage in brooding, the maladaptive subtype of rumination, are at risk to develop depression. Brooders often endorse metacognitive beliefs that self-focused ruminative thinking is beneficial. In the current study, we examined whether brooding and positive beliefs about rumination are associated with perceptions of and preferences...

People vary in how they cope with negative events. Some people become immersed in repetitive ruminative thinking concerning the event, whereas others employ reappraisal and attempt to interpret the event in less negative ways. Interestingly, although both reappraisal and rumination involve active processing of negative situations rather than avoidi...

Rumination, a maladaptive self-reflection, is a risk factor for depression, thought to be maintained by executive control deficits that impair ruminators’ ability to ignore emotional information. The current research examined whether training individuals to exert executive control when exposed to negative stimuli can ease rumination. A total of 85...

Although depression and rumination have been associated with a difficulty ignoring irrelevant negative content, the causal direction of this relationship is unclear. The aim of this study was to train individuals who engage in habitual brooding, a particularly maladaptive subtype of rumination, to inhibit or to attend to negative stimuli. The effec...

Rumination, a maladaptive cognitive style of responding to negative mood, is thought to be maintained by a variety of cognitive biases. However, it is unknown whether rumination is characterized by interpretation biases. Two experiments examined the link between rumination and interpretation biases, revealed in lexical-decision tasks (LDT). A homog...

It is with excitement and earnestness that we assume the role of Editor and Associate Editors for the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration. JPI has been the official publication of the Society for the Exploration of Psycho-therapy Integration (SEPI) for the past 21 years. Owing to the vision and leadership of SEPI founders (see Goldfried & Newman,...

The current research explored the interaction between brooding, a maladaptive subtype of depressive rumination, and content valence, in a basic cognitive process of negation. Following presentation of positive and negative trait descriptions, phrased affirmatively or negatively (e.g., "Liz is/is not a smart person"), participants' associations were...

We examine the link between depression and empathic accuracy, the ability to infer other people's thoughts and feelings, as a possible mechanism underlying gender differences in the association between depression and interpersonal difficulties within intimate relationships. Fifty-one heterosexual couples completed questionnaires assessing depressiv...

Many studies have reported concurrent relationships between depressive symptoms and various personality, cognitive, and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities, but the degree of overlap among these vulnerabilities is unclear. Moreover, whereas most investigations of these vulnerabilities have focused on depression, their possible relationships with...

Evolution theory suggests that adaptive behavior depends on our ability to give preferential attention to emotional information when it is necessary for our survival, and to down-regulate irrelevant emotional influence. However, empirical work has shown that the interaction between emotion and attention varies, based on the attentional network in q...

The association between brooding and reflection, components of rumination, and attentional control, was examined using a novel executive attention task. Participants (n=156) self-encoded words from two semantic categories by providing autobiographical memories involving the words. They subsequently classified the self-encoded and non-self encoded (...

The present research examined rumination-related biases in refreshing, a component process of memory updating that involves briefly thinking back to a just-activated thought or percept. In 2 studies, participants were presented with neutral words and with task-relevant (Study 1) and task-irrelevant (Study 2) emotional words. We predicted that brood...

Neuroticism has been hypothesized to be a non-specific risk factor for both anxiety and unipolar mood disorders whereas some cognitive and personality-cognitive vulnerabilities have been hypothesized to be more specific to depression. Using a retrospective design with a sample of 575 high school juniors, we tested three competing models of the asso...

The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) is a self-report instrument that is based on Eysenck's theory of personality. The EPQ was developed by Hans J. Eysenck, one of the most influential personality theorists, and Sybil B. G. Eysenck, and is part of a group of scales developed by Eysenck and his colleagues. The first published scale in this li...

This study examined within-person co-occurrence of self-focus, negative affect, and stress in a community sample of adolescents with or without emotional disorders. As part of a larger study, 278 adolescents were interviewed about emotional disorders. Later, they completed diary measures over three days, six times a day, reporting their current tho...

Rejection Sensitivity (RS) refers to the tendency to anxiously anticipate, readily perceive and overreact to rejection. The current research assesses schema-congruent information processing biases related to RS. Specifically, we predicted that high RS individuals would show biases in attention and self-referential encoding and recall of rejection-r...

Major Depressive Disorder is one of the most common and debilitating mental disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression has received ample empirical support and is considered one of the most effective modes of treatment for depression. In this article, we review the theoretical underpinnings of this approach, whereby biased cogniti...

Anxiety disorders are the most common childhood disorders. They tend to be chronic and to cause significant impairment. In this article, we review the scientific basis of cognitive behavioral therapy in treating childhood anxiety disorders. We describe the assessment process and its use throughout the treatment. An outline of the central principles...

We examined the factor structure of the Neuroticism scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R-N; S. B. G. Eysenck, Eysenck & Barrett, 1985) and its factor invariance across sex and racial/ethnic groups in a sample of 1,979 adolescents. Using confirmatory factor analyses, we compared a hierarchical model to previous models of the EPQ-R-N...

This chapter analyzes the role of self-efficacy beliefs in self-regulation by considering self-efficacy as one component of an overall social-cognitive architecture of personality. This perspective highlights not only the contribution of self-efficacy beliefs to motivation and performance, but also relations between self-efficacy appraisal and endu...

This investigation examined trait inferences that people make of individuals who engage in body rocking. In Study 1, participants interacted with either a rocking or a nonrocking individual. In Study 2, participants observed video-clips of rocking and nonrocking individuals in various settings. In Study 3, participants observed video-clips of a per...

This meta-analysis synthesized 226 effect sizes reflecting the relation between self-focused attention and negative affect (depression, anxiety, negative mood). The results demonstrate the multifaceted nature of self-focused attention and elucidate major controversies in the field. Overall, self-focus was associated with negative affect. Several mo...

Prevalence of body-rocking in college students was assessed, and the characteristics of body-rocking of college students were compared to those of individuals with mental retardation. For college students, the prevalence depended on the restrictiveness of the method used and varied between 3% and 25%. Video samples showed that when compared with co...

A brief survey of eight motor habits, including body-rocking, was administered to two large samples of college undergraduates. A subsample was retested to establish survey reliability and validity. Those indicating engagement in body-rocking were interviewed about their body-rocking. Two psychopathology instruments were administered. The general pr...

Thesis (Ph. D. in psychology)--University of Illinois at Chicago, 2001. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-77). Typescript (photocopy).