The current concept of Bipolar Spectrum is still evolving and much more interest is focused on the definition of Hypomania (BP-II Disorder) and especially Cyclothymic Disorder. In order to get the entire diagnosable range of bipolar conditions, the clinical approach must go beyond “polarity” of episodes: family history, age of onset, time course (circularity), level of recurrence, type of cycli...

Schizotypy, defined in terms of commonly occurring personality traits related to the schizophrenia spectrum, has been an important construct for understanding the neurodevelopment and stress-diathesis of schizophrenia. However, as schizotypy nears its sixth decade of application, it is important to acknowledge its impressively rich literature accumulating outside of schizophrenia research. In t...

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia (“no words for feelings”) is a psychological construct that can be divided in a cognitive and affective dimension. The cognitive dimension reflects the ability to identify, verbalize and analyze feelings, whereas the affective dimension reflects the degree to which individuals get aroused by emotional stimuli and their ability to fantasize. These two alexithymia dimensio...

This article describes the results and recommendations of the third Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia meeting related to measuring treatment effects on social and affective processing. At the first meeting, it was recommended that measurement development focuses on the construct of emotion identification and responding. Five Tasks were nominated as ...

A short-term longitudinal study (N = 162 undergraduate students) replicates and extends previous findings on the relationship between self-reported procrastination and behavioral measures of procrastination (i.e., a comparison between actual and planned study time), and assesses their relation with affective well-being. All variables were measured 16 times over the course of 8 weeks. State meas...

Alexithymia ("no words for feelings") is a psychological construct that can be divided in a cognitive and affective dimension. The cognitive dimension reflects the ability to identify, verbalize and analyze feelings, whereas the affective dimension reflects the degree to which individuals get aroused by emotional stimuli and their ability to fantasize. These two alexithymia dimensions may diffe...

Empathy is an important component of human relationships, yet the neural mechanisms that facilitate empathy are unclear. The broad construct of empathy incorporates both cognitive and affective components. Cognitive empathy includes mentalizing skills such as perspective-taking. Affective empathy consists of the affect produced in response to someone else's emotional state, a process which is f...

Key research suggests that empathy is a multidimensional construct comprising of both cognitive and affective components. More recent theories and research suggest even further factors within these components of empathy, including the ability to empathize with others versus the drive towards empathizing with others. While numerous self-report measures have been developed to examine empathy, non...

The understanding of empathy from a neuroscientific perspective has recently developed quickly, with numerous functional MRI studies associating different brain regions with different components of empathy. A recent meta-analysis across 40 fMRI studies revealed that affective empathy is most often associated with increased activity in the insula, whereas cognitive empathy is most often associat...