David C. Rubin’s research while affiliated with Aarhus University and other places

Prolonged social isolation is known to cause alterations in conscious experience, such as hallucination, and cognitive problems. Surprisingly, although COVID-19 quarantine policies involved long periods of physical confinement and isolation, little is known as to whether this was associated with alterations in consciousness and cognition. We conducted a comprehensive survey of 300 Chinese participants who were subjected to very strict COVID-19 quarantine while answering the survey. Forty percent of the participants indicated having more cognitive problems and psychotic-like symptoms during quarantine compared to before. These problems varied systematically with quarantine conditions: Fewer face-to-face interactions were associated with increased psychotic symptoms, cognitive problems, and anxiety. Smaller quarantine spaces were associated with increased psychotic symptoms and anxiety. Longer quarantine duration when quarantined outside of home was associated with increased anxiety and decreased positive outcomes. These findings provide novel insights into the impact of quarantine on consciousness, cognition, and the resilience factors that may counteract such disturbances. More broadly, the findings indicate that changes in consciousness and cognition, previously well-documented in other contexts following extended social isolation, also apply to the enforced quarantine during the pandemic.

Tonic immobility (TI) and shame are phylogenetically conserved passive defense mechanisms signaling submission. TI causes a loss of intentional motor control including speech. TI is engaged when escape and resistance fail in life-threatening situations, leading TI to be common in highly stressful and traumatic events. Shame is engaged when an individual’s or society’s expectations are violated. Because both engage without conscious awareness, they leave victims blaming themselves for their inaction and emotions. However, unlike shame, TI is absent from most theories of trauma. Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 371, Mage = 40, 137 male), screened to have TI, provided brief narrative descriptions of the event that caused their greatest TI, rated properties of the event, completed individual differences measures, and attributed postevent symptoms to the event itself, to TI from the event, to shame, and to shame from the TI. The most frequently observed categories of events were sexual assaults, other assaults, motor vehicle accidents, medical and deaths, and gun violence. Categories varied widely in their rated properties and the characteristics of their narratives, with sexual assaults often being an outlier. Correlations among the measures, differences in their means, and narrative analyses were combined to demonstrate the importance of TI and shame for trauma. We introduce a theoretical framework for TI, shame, and their interaction based on evolution, biology, behavior, and clinical symptoms that clarifies how both increase symptoms and why both are so prevalent in sexual assaults.

Collective future thinking is a budding research field concerned with the act of imagining possible events in the future of a collective—typically one’s nation. Prior research has shown that people imagine more positive than negative events in the personal future but more negative than positive events in the collective future. This interaction has been interpreted as a valence-based dissociation between collective and personal cognition. We examine if degrees of self-relatedness may account for these effects. In Study 1, participants (N = 299) imagined events in the future of their country and family, rated how central they viewed these collectives to their self and identity and rated the collectives’ futures for positive and negative valence. Positive and negative valence of the imagined collective futures was strongly associated with how central the collectives were viewed to the self. In Study 2, participants (N = 306) rated self-centrality, personal agency, and moral decline perceived for their country. All three measures explained independent variance in how positive the future was for their country. In Study 3, participants (N = 310) self-nominated collectives that they viewed as highly versus minimally central to their self and identity. The futures of highly central collectives were rated more positive than negative, whereas such positive bias was absent for the futures of minimally self-central collectives. Overall, the findings indicate that a continuum of different degrees of self-relatedness may explain the Valence × Domain interaction in previous work, and suggest a need to integrate research on collective future thinking with self-serving biases in social cognition.

We extend Conway's self-memory system by adding theory and data from shame, an emotion that disrupts the internalised ideals of society needed for a positive self-concept. The event that caused 273 undergraduates their greatest amount of shame was analyzed; 66% were not very negative except for producing shame. Ratings of post-event effects, including two measure of self (self-perceived weakness, and centrality to identity) and four clinical symptoms (intrusions, avoidance, anxiety, and depression), were attributed separately to the remembered event, behaviour during the event, and shame from the event. The effects of shame were generally as large as the those of the event and larger than those of the behaviour, demonstrating the importance of shame's effects. The Tonic Immobility Scale (TIS), which measures tonic immobility (i.e., freezing), was obtained for the event that produced the most tonic immobility but that was not the event that caused the most shame. The post-event symptoms measured on the event that caused the most shame and the TIS correlated highly, suggesting that shame and tonic immobility may belong to a cluster of phylogenetically conserved submissive defensive mechanisms that could account for effects currently attributed to goals in self-memory systems.

Narrative identity refers to a person's internalized and evolving life story. It is a rapidly growing research field, motivated by studies showing a unique association with well-being. Here we show that this association disappears when controlling for the emotional valence of the stories told and individuals' general experience of autobiographical memory. Participants (N = 235) wrote their life story and completed questionnaires on their general experience of autobiographical memory and several dimensions of well-being and affect. Participants' life stories were coded for standard narrative identity variables, including agency and communion. When controlling for emotional valence of the life story, the general experience of autobiographical memory was a significant predictor of most well-being measures, whereas agency was a predictor of one variable only and communion of none. These findings contradict the claim of an incremental association between narrative identity and well-being, and have important theoretical and practical implications for narrative identity as an outcome measure in interventions.

Background Research on depression has largely focused on negative intrusive memories with little research on general involuntary memories as they occur in everyday life. In addition, all studies have been conducted on Western participants, and there are no studies on general involuntary memory in Eastern patients with depression. Methods Thirty Chinese patients with depression and 30 healthy controls completed a memory diary in which they recorded a total of 10 involuntary and 10 voluntary memories. They were requested to fill out corresponding questionnaires of involuntary and voluntary memories as well. Results Both patients with depression and healthy controls reported involuntary memories that had a more negative impact, were more specific, and were associated with more maladaptive emotion regulation when compared to voluntary memories. For both retrieval modes, patients with depression reported more negative and fewer positive memories, more negative and less positive mood impact, more avoidance, rumination, worry, negative interpretation, and less positive interpretation in response to the memories. Patients with depression rated their memories as more central, less specific, and rehearsed more frequently. Negative mood impact and maladaptive emotion regulation associated with involuntary memories were amplified in depression. Conclusions These findings support the view that general involuntary memories could be a potential target to promote the treatment for depression.

Tonic immobility (TI) is a phylogenetically conserved, passive, obligatory defense mechanism commonly engaged during sexual and physical assaults. During TI, people become immobile while remaining conscious and later reexperience intrusive memories of both their assault and of its accompanying immobility. Here we show that this well-studied biological process has powerful effects on memory and other processes. Participants had experienced either a serious sexual (n = 234) or physical (n = 137) assault. For both the assault and its accompanying immobility, the standard measure of the peritraumatic severity of TI correlated between .40 and .65 with post-assault effects on memory, including memory of the assault and memory of the immobility, the two memory-based self-concept measures of self-blame and event centrality, and post-assault anxiety and depression. The correlations with TI were much higher than other peritraumatic characteristics commonly used to predict and describe posttraumatic effects in assaults and other traumas. The results suggest that TI should be considered for a broader, more biologically based and ecologically valid understanding of the effects of trauma on memory and memory-based reactions.