Older age, female sex, longer school years, and rural origin were associated with negative emotional responses, avoidance, or both (Technical Appendix Table 3).
Our aim was to measure students' anticipated negative emotional responses and avoidance activities (dependent variables) to a possible outbreak of EVD (5 ).
A recent study exploring people's emotional and behavioral responses to an avian flu outbreak also showed that females and older people were, respectively, more likely to express negative emotional responses and exhibit avoidance behaviors (e.g., avoiding leaving their residence, avoiding crowds and avoiding visiting hospitals) in response to avian flu [ 26].
Because EVD causes serious physical harm, negative emotional responses and unnecessary avoidance practices were anticipated.
The present investigation was designed to examine disconnection and rejection (DR) schemas, negative emotional schemas (NESs) and experimental avoidance (EA) as mediating variables of the relationship between the childhood trauma (CT) and depression.
However, consistent with their attention to, or avoidance of, negative emotional situations, high neuroticism subjects tended to look towards this highly arousing stimulus while high conscientiousness subjects diverted their gaze.
Older adults have shown tendencies to regulate negative emotional stimuli using methods such as avoidance, inhibition, or disengagement [ 10- 13].
The critical feature of distraction thus seems not to be the fact of being distracted from the phobic stimulus, but rather the fact of performing emotional avoidance by distracting oneself from negative affect.
The effect of CBT for psychosis on negative (emotional withdrawal, passive social withdrawal) and general psychopathology (depression, active social avoidance) symptom dimensions is thus likely to be related to its effect on positive symptoms (persecution and delusions), as suggested previously by Kuipers and colleagues (2006), and to share common neural correlates (our functional MRI findings).
To prevent relapse resulting from negative emotional states such as anxiety, RPT recommends stimulus control (i.e., avoidance of high-risk situations, with escape as the next best option) as a first-order strategy (Parks et al. 2004).
