
Richard E ZinbargNorthwestern University | NU · Department of Psychology
Richard E Zinbarg
Doctor of Philosophy
About
248
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September 1999 - June 2015
Publications
Publications (248)
Background
Negative symptoms are a key feature of several psychiatric disorders. Difficulty identifying common neurobiological mechanisms that cut across diagnostic boundaries might result from equifinality (i.e., multiple mechanistic pathways to the same clinical profile), both within and across disorders. This study used a data-driven approach to...
Background and Hypothesis
In accordance with the Cognitive Model of Negative Symptoms, defeatist performance beliefs (DPBs) are an important psychosocial mechanism of negative symptoms in schizophrenia-spectrum groups. DPBs are also mediators of negative symptom improvement in clinical trials. Despite the clinical significance of DPBs and their inc...
The wide array of symptoms of and high comorbidity rates between unipolar depressive and anxiety-related disorders have raised questions about the relations among their symptoms. Factor analysis examines these relations, yet factor-analytic symptom-measurement models have relied on a single method of measurement and do not always replicate. We conc...
Objective: The purpose of this randomized controlled trial was to test the effects of an online, coached mindfulness intervention on momentary negative affect (mNA) for youth with high levels of trait negative affectivity. Method: Participants were 111 youth ages 12 to 17 years old (M = 14.17, SD = 1.60). Youth self-identified as 68% female, 29% ma...
Open Access via doi: There are well-established theoretical and empirical foundations for a negative association between trait positive affectivity and anxiety symptoms in anxiety disorders and a positive association between trait negative affectivity and anxiety symptoms, respectively. However, no previous meta-analysis systematically estimated to...
In this study, we examined how Big Five personality traits relate to outcome-based resilience in primarily female, upper-middle class, ethnically diverse U.S. adolescents (baseline N = 535; age range = 15–17) oversampled on elevated neuroticism. Cross-sectional, prospective-longitudinal, and dynamic analyses were performed with 8-year longitudinal...
Internalizing psychopathology is associated with abnormalities in heart rate variability (HRV). Lower HRV that reflects reduced parasympathetic nervous system activity has been observed in depressive and anxiety disorders. Existing studies predominantly used categorical rather than dimensional approaches, the latter of which better addresses clinic...
Threat learning processes are thought to be foundational to anxiety and fear-related disorders. However, the study of these processes in the human brain has largely focused on specific brain regions, owing partly to the ease of translating between these regions in human and nonhuman animals. Moving beyond analyzing focal regions of interest to whol...
Adult attachment orientations can influence emotion regulation. Such influence on the tendency to employ two strategies, cognitive reappraisal (which aims to modify emotional experiences) and expressive suppression (which inhibits emotional expression) and later symptoms is understudied. This longitudinal study evaluated indirect associations betwe...
Everyday discrimination is a stressor associated with adverse mental health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately impacted marginalized communities and exacerbated vulnerability to worse mental health outcomes among these groups. However, the effects of discrimination on psychopathology during the pandemic have yet to be comprehensivel...
The prediction error account of delusions has had success. However, its explanation of delusions with different contents has been lacking. Persecutory delusions and paranoia are the common unfounded beliefs that others have harmful intentions towards us. Other delusions include believing that one’s thoughts or actions are under external control, or...
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology is a quantitative diagnostic system that is gaining traction as a framework for studying the correlates of mental-health problems. However, it remains unknown how best to operationalize hierarchically related psychopathology dimensions during criterion validity tests. In a series of simulations, we evalu...
The prediction error account of delusions has had success. However, its explanation of delusions with different contents has been lacking. Persecutory delusions and paranoia are the common unfounded beliefs that others have harmful intentions towards us. Other delusions include believing that one’s thoughts or actions are under external control, or...
BACKGROUND: Pavlovian fear paradigms involve learning to associate cues with threat or safety. Aberrances in Pavlovian fear learning correlate with psychopathology and are especially prominent among individuals with anxiety disorders. This study evaluated symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression in relation to Pavlovian fear acquisition and gen...
Background and Hypothesis
Processing speed dysfunction is a core feature of psychosis and predictive of conversion in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis. Although traditionally measured with pen-and-paper tasks, computerized digit symbol tasks are needed to meet the increasing demand for remote assessments. Therefore we: (1) asse...
Objective The Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC) is a systemic measurement feedback system that provides therapists with feedback regarding the multidimensional clinical change in individual, couple, and family therapy. The STIC Intersession scales include Individual Problems and Strengths (IPS), Relationship with Partner (RWP), Family/Hou...
Introduction: Threat learning and extinction processes are thought to be foundational to anxiety and fear-related disorders. However, the study of these processes in the human brain has largely focused on a priori regions of interest, owing partly to the ease of translating between these regions in human and non-human animals. Moving beyond analyzi...
Historically, researchers have proposed higher-order factors to explicate the structure of psychopathology, including Externalizing, Internalizing, Fear, Distress, Thought Disorder, and a general factor. Despite extensive research in this domain, the underlying structure of psychopathology remains unresolved. Here, we examine several issues in adju...
This study aimed to characterize within-person pre-COVID-19 and coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) transdiagnostic anxiety and depression symptom trajectories in emerging adults and determine the roles of neuroticism and behavioral activation in predicting these COVID-19-related changes. We recruited a sample of 342 emerging adults (aged 18–19 at base...
A main goal in translational neuroscience is to identify neural correlates of psychopathology (“biomarkers”) that can be used to facilitate diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. This goal has led to substantial research into how psychopathology symptoms relate to large-scale brain systems. However, these efforts have not yet resulted in practical bi...
Now in its fourth edition, the acclaimed Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology aims for both depth and breadth, with a focus on adult disorders and special attention given to personality disorders. It provides an unparalleled guide for professionals and students alike. Esteemed editors Robert F. Krueger and Paul H. Blaney selected the most eminent res...
Introduction:
Depression and anxiety are implicated in suicide risk, but the contributionof specific symptom dimensions within these disorders is not well understood. The present study examined longitudinal associations of transdiagnostic symptoms (General Distress[GD]) and unique symptom dimensions (Anhedonia-Apprehension [AA], Fears, and Narrow...
Negative or stressful life events are robust risk factors for depression and anxiety. Less attention has been paid to the positive aspects of events and whether positivity buffers the impact of the negative aspects of events. In this study, we examined the positivity and negativity of interpersonal and noninterpersonal episodic life events in predi...
Introduction:
Paranoia is a common and impairing psychosis symptom, which exists along a severity continuum that extends into the general population. Individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR) frequently experience paranoia and this may elevate their risk for developing full psychosis. Nonetheless, limited work has examined the efficien...
A main goal in translational neuroscience is to identify neural correlates of psychopathology (“biomarkers”) that can be used to facilitate diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. This goal has led to substantial research into how psychopathology symptoms relate to large-scale brain systems. However, these efforts have not yet resulted in practical bi...
Background:
Chronic interpersonal stress has been identified as predictive of anxiety and depression. However, more research is needed to understand predictors of chronic interpersonal stress and mediators of its relationship with anxiety and depression. Irritability, a transdiagnostic symptom closely related to chronic interpersonal stress, may p...
Now in its fourth edition, the acclaimed Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology aims for both depth and breadth, with a focus on adult disorders and special attention given to personality disorders. It provides an unparalleled guide for professionals and students alike. Esteemed editors Robert F. Krueger and Paul H. Blaney selected the most eminent res...
Depression and anxiety are associated with abnormalities in brain regions that process rewards including the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), the ventral striatum (VS), and the amygdala. However, there are inconsistencies in these findings. This may be due to past reliance on categorical diagnoses that, while valuable, provide less precision tha...
Historically, researchers have proposed higher-order factors to explicate the structure of psychopathology, including Externalizing, Internalizing, Fear, Distress, Thought Disorder, and a general factor. Despite extensive research in this domain, the underlying structure of psychopathology remains unresolved. Herein, we examine several issues in ad...
Background
Although worry is well-known to share a robust relationship with psychopathology, whether this association is higher in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) versus other anxiety disorders and depressive disorder, and clinical versus nonclinical populations is unclear.Methods
We conducted a meta-analysis in which the association between wor...
The Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm examines probabilistic and reinforcement learning. Disruptions in mechanisms that mediate PIT (i.e., cues not triggering adaptive behaviors) are thought to be contributors to psychopathology, making the study of probabilistic and reinforcement learning clinically relevant. The current study evaluat...
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a quantitative diagnostic system that addresses limitations in categorical rubrics. Despite growing interest in using HiTOP as a research framework, there is no consensus regarding the optimal way to estimate criterion validity effects of hierarchical dimensions. Using simulations, we quantifi...
The authors describe how contemporary learning theory and research provide the basis for models of the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and related disorders. They argue that contemporary learning theory accounts for much of the complexity associated with individual differences in the development and course of these disorders. These insights fro...
Background
Elevated defensive responding, through startle reflex (SR) and skin conductance response (SCR), may contribute to onset and maintenance of depression and anxiety. Most work examining SR and SCR has predicted psychiatric diagnoses. There is a paucity of research examining links between SR or SCR and dimensional measures of psychopathology...
Early-life adversity is a major risk factor for psychopathology, but not all who experience adversity develop psychopathology. The current study evaluated whether the links between child and adolescent adversity and depression and anxiety were described by general benefits and / or buffering effects of interpersonal support. Data from 456 adolescen...
Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent psychological disorders; our understanding of these conditions remains limited. Efforts to explain anxiety and depression have been constrained in part by binary classification systems. Dimensional approaches to understanding psychopathology may be more effective. The present study used latent profile ana...
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a quantitative nosological system that addresses shortcomings of traditional mental disorder diagnoses, including arbitrary boundaries between psychopathology and normality, frequent disorder co-occurrence, substantial heterogeneity within disorders, and diagnostic unreliability over time and...
p>Experimental sleep deprivation has been shown to differentially affect behavioral indices of effort and temporal discounting, 2 domains of reward processing often observed to be impaired in depression. Experimental sleep deprivation is phenomenologically different from sleep deprivation in everyday life (e.g., poor quality sleep or habitual short...
Background
Due to high heterogeneity and comorbidity, the shared and unique neural mechanisms underlying the development of anxiety and major depressive disorders remain unclear. Using a dimensional model describing shared versus unique symptoms associated to anxiety and depression, the current study investigated how longitudinal changes in symptom...
Altered functioning of the brain’s threat and reward circuitry has been linked to early life adversity and to symptoms of anxiety and depression. To date, however, these relationships have been studied in isolation and in categorical-based approaches. It is unclear to what extent early life adversity and psychopathology have unique effects on brain...
Identifying state-sensitive measures of perceptual and cognitive processes implicated in psychosis may allow for objective, earlier, and better monitoring of changes in mental status that are predictive of an impending psychotic episode, relative to traditional self-report-based clinical measures. To determine whether a measure of visual perception...
BACKGROUND
Pavlovian learning processes are central to the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders. Anhedonia and related perturbations in reward processes have been implicated in Pavlovian learning. Associations between anhedonia symptoms and neural indices of Pavlovian learning can inform transdiagnostic associations among depressive and anxi...
Early life adversity influences the diurnal cortisol rhythm, yet the relative influence of different characteristics of adversity remains unknown. In this study, we examine how developmental timing (childhood vs. adolescence), severity (major vs. minor), and domain of early life adversity relate to diurnal cortisol rhythms in late adolescence. We a...
Worry is a central feature of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Although worry is related to anxiety and maintained by beliefs that worry is uncontrollable, there is scarce research on how individuals with GAD react to worry episodes in their daily life and how their positive experiences might impact reactions to worry episodes. The current study...
Early detection and intervention with young people at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis is critical for prevention efforts focused on altering the trajectory of psychosis. Early CHR research largely focused on validating clinical interviews for detecting at-risk individuals; however, this approach has limitations related to: (1) specificity (i...
Language outcomes after speech and language therapy in post-stroke aphasia are challenging to predict. This study examines behavioral language measures and resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) as predictors of treatment outcome. Fifty-seven patients with chronic aphasia were recruited and treated for one of three aphasia impairments: anomia, agrammatism, or...
Dimensional models of anxiety and depression highlight common and distinct symptom clusters that are thought to reflect disruptions in underlying functional processes. The current study investigated how functioning of threat neurocircuitry relates to symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression. Participants were aged 18-19 years (n = 229, 158 fema...
Objective:
There is little evidence-based knowledge of how psychotherapists should handle both sudden gains and more gradual session-by-session changes, either in general or in individuals suffering from generalized anxiety disorder.
Methods:
Using an ABAB crossed-therapist randomized clinical implementation trial design (N = 80 patients and 20...
Introduction
The high rate of comorbidity between alcohol use and emotional disorders is well demonstrated, but the mechanisms underlying their relationship remain largely unidentified. One possibility is maladaptive responding to negative affect, such as worry and rumination. The present study sought to examine worry and rumination as putative med...
The present study examines the longitudinal association between cortisol (dys)regulation – mean cortisol awakening response (CAR) and area under the curve with respect to ground (AUCg) for total daily cortisol – and autobiographical memory. 135 participants (mean age at baseline = 16.1; Females = 78.5%) provided cortisol samples (T1). Seven months...
Background: Stressful life experiences and personality can influence one another. Personality may contribute to the amount and type of stress individuals experience, which is referred to as a selection effect. Life stress may also impact one's personality, which is referred to as a socialization effect. It was hypothesized that neuroticism would pr...
Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by remarkable volatility and comorbidity in internalizing disorders. Delineating internalizing symptom change in a manner that accounts for symptoms' shared versus distinctive features is imperative to an understanding of their development. An additional question concerns how vulnerabilities for i...
Internalizing (anxiety and depressive) disorders, and the symptoms that comprise them, are known for being chronic and recurrent. Neuroticism, reflecting dispositional tendencies toward negative affect, is a personality trait that bears durable cross-sectional and prospective associations with internalizing symptoms. There are also indications that...
Whereas there is extensive research on factors that contribute to vulnerability for depression and anxiety, research on how to promote mental health or offset risk effects in individuals likely to develop these disorders is lacking. Resilience models focus on risk, resource, and protective factors and their relationships. The current longitudinal s...
Background: Language outcomes after speech and language therapy in post-stroke aphasia are challenging to predict. This study examines behavioral language measures and resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) as prognostics for response to language therapy.
Methods: Seventy patients with chronic aphasia were recruited and treated for one of three deficits: anom...
Open access: https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-020-02694-x
Background
Previous research has suggested that worry is negatively associated with working memory performance. However, it is unclear whether these findings would replicate across different worry levels and in individuals with anxiety and depressive disorders...
The past decades of research on predictors of depression have frequently emphasized interactive diathesis-stress questions: What kinds of vulnerabilities under stressful circumstances increase risk of developing depression? This study addresses 3 theoretically important gaps in our knowledge regarding diathesis-stress models of depression: the role...
Neuroticism has been associated with depression and anxiety both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Interpretive bias has been associated with depression and anxiety, primarily in cross-sectional and bias induction studies. The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of interpretive bias as a prospective risk factor and a mediator o...
Investigating the neurobiology of language impairment and treatment in chronic stroke aphasia using fMRI requires an understanding of measurement variability within and between participants. In this multicenter study we evaluated the scan‐rescan reliability of an auditory and visual (written) story comprehension paradigm in stroke participants with...
The current study examined a novel computerized cognitive reappraisal paradigm (REAP) for worry management in college-aged adults with a range of PSWQ scores (n = 98). Participants listed three current worries and were randomized to either REAP or a worry condition. For the REAP condition, participants selected positive reappraisal statements of th...
Evaluation of facial and vocal emotional cues is vital in social interactions but can be highly influenced by characteristics of the observer, such as sex, age, and symptoms of affective disorders. Our evaluations of others' emotional expressions are likely to change as we get to know them and anticipate how they are likely to behave. However, the...
The purpose of this study was to examine the covarying relationship between commitment and sexual satisfaction in committed relationships throughout the course of couple therapy. A sample of 366 heterosexual couples completed questionnaires regarding sexual satisfaction and commitment at each of the first five sessions of couple therapy. Cross-lagg...
Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM) is recommended as a psychotherapy procedure to serve as clinical feedback in order to improve client treatment outcomes. ROM can work as a warning signal to the therapist if the client shows signs of no change or deterioration. This study has investigated whether any difference in outcome could be detected between t...
The study of aggression in juvenile offenders, a high priority from clinical and public health standpoints, depends on properly measuring and modeling aggression. The Aggressive Behaviors scale from the Youth Self-Report (YSR–AB) has been widely used to measure youth aggression, often functioning as a stand-alone scale in analyses (of note, even wh...