Tim Dalgleish

Medical Research Council (UKRI) | mrc · MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Background Personalised management of recurrent depression, considering individual patient characteristics, is crucial. Aims This study evaluates the potentially different mediating role of mindfulness skills in managing recurrent depression using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) among people with varying depression severity. Method Data...

Background This study examined the power of theory-derived models to account for the development of PTSD, Complex PTSD (CPTSD), depression, and anxiety in children and adolescents who had experienced a single-event trauma. Methods Children ( n = 234, aged 8–17 years) recruited from local Emergency Departments were assessed at two and nine weeks po...

Objective: Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a viable alternative to maintenance antidepressant medication (M-ADM) to reduce risk of relapse/recurrence (RR) in recurrent depression, but its mechanism of action is not yet fully articulated. This secondary analysis of the PREVENT trial examined if MBCT with support to taper medication (MB...

People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. There is some evidence t...

Background Childhood maltreatment contributes to a large mental health burden worldwide. Different measures of childhood maltreatment are not equivalent and may capture meaningful differences. In particular, prospective and retrospective measures of maltreatment identify different groups of individuals and are differentially associated with psychop...

Understanding ourselves within our peer environment is an important component of self-development during adolescence, the period of life between the onset of puberty and adulthood (between ages 10 and 24 years). We used a self-appraisal paradigm to investigate cross-sectionally the relationship between perceived friendship quality and self-judgemen...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory covers the science of human memory, its application to clinical disorders, and its broader implications for learning and memory in real-world contexts. Written by field leaders, the handbook integrates behavioral, neural, and computational evidence with current theories of how humans learn and remember. Following...

Background: Personalized management of recurrent depression, considering individual patient characteristics, is crucial. Aims: This study evaluates the potentially different mediating role of mindfulness skills in managing recurrent depression using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) among patients with varying depression severity. Method:...

Positive autobiographical memories (AMs) have the potential to repair low mood, but previously depressed individuals have difficulty leveraging their positive AMs for emotion regulation purposes. We examined whether previously depressed individuals benefit from guided, deliberate recollection of preselected AMs to counteract low mood in daily life,...

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11-1...

Adolescence is marked by the onset of puberty, which is associated with an increase in mental health difficulties, particularly in girls. Social and self‐referential processes also develop during this period: adolescents become more aware of others’ perspectives, and judgements about themselves become less favourable. In the current study, data fro...

Objectives This study aimed, following both single‐ and multi‐event trauma, to ascertain prevalence and course of the dissociative subtype of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD‐DS) in youth; how well early PTSD‐DS predicts later PTSD; and whether dissociation accounts for unique variance in post‐traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and functional imp...

Aberrations to metacognition—the ability to reflect on and evaluate self-performance—are a feature of poor mental health. Theoretical models of post-traumatic stress disorder propose that following severe stress or trauma, maladaptive metacognitive evaluations and appraisals of the event drive the development of symptoms. Empirical research is requ...

Background Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are increasingly offered at work, often in online self-guided format. However, the evidence on MBPs’ effect on work performance (WP) is inconsistent. Objective This pragmatic randomised controlled feasibility trial assessed procedural uncertainties, intervention acceptability and preliminary effect si...

Adolescence is a developmental stage in which vulnerability to mental health difficulties increases. One promising strategy to reduce risk of difficulties developing could be to specifically target a key, pan-therapeutic skill broadly relevant for individuals exhibiting preliminary symptoms. Psychological decentering describes the skill of voluntar...

Over half of psychiatric disorders of behaviour, mood, and emotion begin before the age of 15. Thus, development of emotional regulation skills to cope with psycho-social stressors is imperative to reduce risk of adolescent-onset mental health difficulties. Psychological decentering, a self-reflective capacity through which distressing thoughts, fe...

Background Complex PTSD (CPTSD) is a relatively new diagnosis. The objective of the present study was to investigate how trauma characteristics, comorbid psychopathology and cognitive and social factors experienced by children and adolescents with a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis following exposure to multiple traumatic events diffe...

Objective: Adolescence is a key developmental window that may determine long-term mental health. As schools may influence students’ mental health, we examined the association of school-level characteristics with students’ mental health over time. Method: We analysed longitudinal data from a cluster randomised controlled trial on 8,376 students (55%...

Importance As young people’s mental health difficulties increase, understanding risk and resilience factors under challenging circumstances becomes critical. Objective To explore the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic on secondary school students’ mental health difficulties, as well as the associations with individual, family, friendship, and schoo...

Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are increasingly offered in work settings, often in online self-guided format. However, the evidence on MBPs' effect on work performance (WP) is inconsistent.This pragmatic randomised controlled feasibility trial assessed procedural uncertainties, intervention acceptability and, preliminary effect sizes of a MBP...

Cues of social rejection and affiliation represent proximal risk and protective factors in the onset and maintenance of depression. Such cues are thought to activate an evolutionarily primed neuro-cognitive alarm system, alerting the agent to the benefits of inclusion or the risk of social exclusion within social hierarchies focused on ensuring con...

Introduction Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are widely used to prevent mental ill-health that is becoming the leading global cause of morbidity. Evidence suggests beneficial average effects but wide variability. We aimed to confirm the effect of MBPs on psychological distress, and to understand whether and how baseline distress, gender, age, e...

Objective: The ability to notice and reflect on distressing internal experiences from an objective perspective, often called psychological decentering, has been posited to be protective against mental health difficulties. However, little is known about how this skill develops across adolescence, how it relates to mental health symptoms, and how thi...

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted governments worldwide to introduce social distancing measures, including school closures and restrictions on in-person socialising. However, adherence to social distancing was challenging for many, and particularly for adolescents, for whom social interaction is crucial for development. The current study aimed to iden...

Background: Cognitive distancing is an emotion regulation strategy commonly used in psychological treatment of various mental health disorders, but its therapeutic mechanisms are unknown. Methods: 935 participants completed an online reinforcement learning task involving choices between pairs of symbols with differing reward contingencies. Half...

Individuals with depression typically remember their past in a generalised manner, at the cost of retrieving specific event memories. This may impair engagement with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tasks that use concrete episodic information to challenge maladaptive beliefs, potentially limiting their therapeutic benefit. Study 1 demonstrated...

Individuals differ markedly in how they experience the ebb and flow of emotions. In this study, we used daily experience sampling to examine whether these differences reflect the nature and presence of mood disorders or whether they can better be characterized as distinct dynamic emotion profiles that cut-across diagnostic boundaries. We followed 1...

Objective: We explored what predicts secondary school students' mindfulness practice and responsiveness to universal school-based mindfulness training (SBMT), and how students experience SBMT. Method: A mixed-methods design was used. Participants were 4,232 students (aged 11-13) in 43 UK secondary schools, who received universal SBMT (i.e., '.b'...

At least half of all patients with mental health disorders do not respond adequately to psychological therapy. Acutely enhancing particular biological or psychological processes during psychological therapy may improve treatment outcomes. However, previous studies are confined to specific augmentation approaches, typically assessed within single di...

Research suggests affective symptoms are associated with reduced habitual use of reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy in individuals with mental health problems. Less is known, however, about whether mental health problems are related to reduced reappraisal capacity per se. The current study investigates this question using a film-based em...

Aberrations to metacognition— the ability to reflect on and evaluate self-performance— are a feature of poor mental health. Theoretical models suggest that following a stressful event, maladaptive metacognitive evaluations and appraisals of the event drive development of post-traumatic stress symptoms. Yet it is unclear whether disruptions to metac...

Distortions in the recollection of autobiographical memories are a transdiagnostic feature of multiple mental health difficulties including mood, anxiety, stressor-related, eating and psychotic disorders. These distortions can be categorized into three broad domains: relatively increased accessibility, affective impact and degree of detail for memo...

Evolutionary models of depression posit that depressed mood represents an adaptive response to unacceptably low social status, motivating the inhibition of social risk-taking in favor of submissive behaviors which reduce the likelihood of social exclusion. We tested the hypothesis of reduced social risk taking using a novel adaptation of the Balloo...

Cardiovascular ageing contributes to cognitive impairment. However, the unique and synergistic contributions of multiple cardiovascular factors to cognitive function remain unclear because they are often condensed into a single composite score or examined in isolation. We hypothesized that vascular risk factors, electrocardiographic features and bl...

Boundary extension is a memory phenomenon in which an individual reports seeing more of a scene than they actually did. We provide the first examination of boundary extension in individuals diagnosed with depression, hypothesising that an overemphasis on pre-existing schema may enhance boundary extension effects on emotional photographs. The relati...

Mindfulness training programmes have shown to encourage prosocial behaviours and reduce antisocial tendencies in adolescents. However, less is known about whether training affects susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence. The current study investigated the effect of mindfulness training (compared with an active control) on self‐reported...

Depressed individuals show a wide range of difficulties in executive functioning (including working memory), which can be a significant burden on everyday mental processes. Theoretical models of depression have proposed these difficulties to be especially pronounced in affective contexts. However, evidence investigating affective working memory (WM...

Emotion can affect the way in which experiences are stored in our memory. The dual representation account proposes that traumatic events may be encoded as fragmented sensory-perceptual details without a broader conceptual organisation. This can result in involuntary retrieval of perceptual information triggered by environmental cues without the ass...

Individuals with depression typically remember their past in a generalised manner, at the cost of retrieving specific event memories. This may impair engagement with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tasks that use concrete episodic information to challenge maladaptive beliefs, potentially limiting their therapeutic benefit. Study 1 demonstrated...

Positive autobiographical memories (AMs) have the potential to repair low mood, but previously depressed individuals have difficulty leveraging their positive AMs for emotion- regulation purposes. We examined whether previously depressed individuals benefit from guided, deliberate recollection of preselected AMs to counteract low mood in their dail...

Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are suggested to improve work performance despite scarcity of evidence. We synthesised randomised controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the impact of MBPs on adults’ work performance. The primary outcome was task performance. Secondary outcomes were contextual performance, adaptive performance, and counter-productiv...

Depression and anxiety are associated with the interrupted operation of a number of different memory systems. Two memory systems in particular appear to be integral to the maintenance and continuation of symptoms; working memory and autobiographical memory. Within working memory, those experiencing poor mental health appear to have a reduced abilit...

Background Previous research suggests that mindfulness training (MT) appears effective at improving mental health in young people. MT is proposed to work through improving executive control in affectively laden contexts. However, it is unclear whether MT improves such control in young people. MT appears to mitigate mental health difficulties during...

Background Education is broader than academic teaching. It includes teaching students social–emotional skills both directly and indirectly through a positive school climate. Objective To evaluate if a universal school-based mindfulness training (SBMT) enhances teacher mental health and school climate. Methods The My Resilience in Adolescence para...

Background Systematic reviews suggest school-based mindfulness training (SBMT) shows promise in promoting student mental health. Objective The My Resilience in Adolescence (MYRIAD) Trial evaluated the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of SBMT compared with teaching-as-usual (TAU). Methods MYRIAD was a parallel group, cluster-randomised control...

Background Preventing mental health problems in early adolescence is a priority. School-based mindfulness training (SBMT) is an approach with mixed evidence. Objectives To explore for whom SBMT does/does not work and what influences outcomes. Methods The My Resilience in Adolescence was a parallel-group, cluster randomised controlled trial (K=84...

Question Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are an increasingly popular approach to improving mental health in young people. Our previous meta-analysis suggested that MBPs show promising effectiveness, but highlighted a lack of high-quality, adequately powered randomised controlled trials (RCTs). This updated meta-analysis assesses the-state-of th...

Purpose: We explored what predicts secondary school students’ mindfulness practice and responsiveness to universal school-based mindfulness training (SBMT).Methods: Participants were 4,232 students (aged 11-13) in 43 UK secondary schools, who received universal SBMT (i.e., “.b” program), within the MYRIAD trial (ISRCTN86619085). Theory-driven stude...

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with prevalence rates rising. Despite the scale of the problem, available pharmacological and psychological interventions only have limited efficacy. The National Institute of Health's Science of Behaviour Change framework proposes to address this issue by capitalising on insights from basic...

The dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD-DS) was introduced in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and is characterised by symptoms of either depersonalisation or derealisation, in addition to a diag- nosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This systematic review an...

Emotional Granularity (EG) refers to the precision with which we describe and differentiate between our emotion states. Emerging evidence suggests that having poorer EG contributes to the onset and maintenance of psychiatric conditions such as depression. The likely mechanisms of action for this being that poor EG means inferior selection and deplo...

People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively-charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral (‘cool’) and affectively-charged (‘hot’) contexts. Whilst...

Research suggests affective symptoms are associated with habitual use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in individuals with mental health problems. Less is known, however, about whether mental health problems are related to reduced emotion regulation capacity per se. The current study investigates this question using a film-based emotion...

Depressed individuals show a wide range of difficulties in executive functioning (incl. working memory), which can be a significant burden on everyday mental processes. Theoretical models of depression have proposed these difficulties to be especially pronounced in affective contexts. However, evidence investigating affective working memory (WM) ca...

Depression is highly recurrent, even following successful pharmacological and/or psychological intervention. We aimed to develop clinical prediction models to inform adults with recurrent depression choosing between antidepressant medication (ADM) maintenance or switching to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Using previously published dat...

Introduction Mental ill health is a major cause of disability. Workplaces are attractive for preventative interventions since most adults work; meanwhile, employers are interested in improving employees’ well-being and productivity. Mindfulness-based programmes are increasingly popular in occupational settings. However, there is inconsistent eviden...

Open access full text: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/4/e058976 Introduction With mental ill health listed as a top cause of global disease burden, there is an urgent need to prioritise mental health promotion programmes. Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are being widely implemented to reduce stress in non-clinical settings. In a recent agg...

Cognitive distancing is a therapeutic technique commonly used in psychological treatment of various mental health disorders, but its computational mechanisms remain unknown. To determine the effects of cognitive distancing on computational learning mechanisms, we use an online reward decision-making task, combined with reinforcement learning modell...

Mindfulness training programmes have shown to encourage prosocial behaviours and reduce antisocial tendencies in adolescents. However, less is known about whether training affects susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence. The current study investigated the effect of mindfulness training (compared with an active control) on self-reported...

There is evidence that universal school-based mindfulness training (SBMT) can have positive effects for young people. However, it is unknown who benefits most from such training, how training exerts effects, and how implementation impacts effects. This study aimed to provide an overview of the evidence on the mediators, moderators, and implementati...

Aging is associated with a bias in attention and memories towards positive and away from negative emotional content. In addition, emotion regulation appears to improve with age, despite concomitant widespread cognitive decline coupled with gray matter volume loss in cortical and subcortical regions thought to sub-serve emotion regulation. Here, we...

Introduction Decentering describes the ability to voluntarily adopt an objective self-perspective from which to notice internal, typically distressing, stressors (eg, difficult thoughts, memories and feelings). The reinforcement of this skill may be an active ingredient through which different psychological interventions accrue reductions in anxiet...

Hierarchies pervade human society, characterising its members along diverse dimensions ranging from their abilities or skills in a particular domain to their economic status or physical stature. One intriguing aspect of the centrality of hierarchies, relative to egalitarian constructs, is that hierarchically-organised social information appears to...

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...

The ability to retrieve specific, single-incident autobiographical memories has been consistently posited as a predictor of recurrent depression. Elucidating the role of autobiographical memory specificity in patient-response to depressive treatments may improve treatment efficacy and facilitate use of science-driven interventions. We used recent m...

Objective Post-traumatic stress disorder and depression have high comorbidity. Understanding their relationship is of clinical and theoretical importance. A comprehensive way to understand post-trauma psychopathology is through symptom trajectories. This study aims to look at the developmental courses of PTSD and depression symptoms and their inter...

Introduction. Decentering describes the ability to voluntarily adopt an objective self-perspective from which to notice internal, typically distressing, stressors (e.g. difficult thoughts, memories, and feelings). The reinforcement of this skill may be an active ingredient through which different psychological interventions accrue reductions in anx...

Mindfulness training (MT) is considered appropriate for school teachers and enhances well-being. Most research has investigated the efficacy of instructor-led MT. However, little is known about the benefits of using self-taught formats, nor what the key mechanisms of change are that contribute to enhanced teacher well-being. This study compared ins...

Background Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a distressing and disabling condition that affects significant numbers of children and adolescents. Youth exposed to multiple traumas (eg, abuse, domestic violence) are at particular risk of developing PTSD. Cognitive therapy for PTSD (CT-PTSD), derived from adult work, is a theoretically informed...

Objective Trauma exposure is common in preschool children. Understanding the psychological impact of such exposure and the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in this population is important for provision of appropriate and timely intervention. This pre-registered (PROSPERO: CRD41019133984) systematic review and meta-analysis examine...