Abnormal Emotion and Trauma Lab

The Abnormal Emotion and Trauma Lab is led by Grazia CESCHI (maître d'enseignement et de recherche).

Research Fields

Post-traumatic stress reactions in the community (and in at-risk populations)

Traumatic events can be considered etiological factors of several emotional symptoms, beside other different anxiety and mood disorders. Despite this consensus, it remains unclear as whether the relationship between trauma and emotion is consistently mediated or modulated by inter-individual factors such as by negative appraisals, dysfunctional beliefs, self-presentation strategies, emotion regulation strategies, etc. These studies test different cognitive models of emotion vulnerability. Longitudinal studies of at-risk populations (i.e., enrolling police officers exposed to important traumatic experiences during their work) will further this line of researches in a more applied direction.

A diathesis-stress perspective of obsessive-compulsive symptoms

A diathesis-stress perspective of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) predicts that exposure to adverse events and personality dispositions jointly influence OCS severity. For instance, our findings show exposure to adverse events is more critical for reward dependent people. New studies will further our understanding of this complex phenomena.

Cognitive Biais Modification

Our interest is to apply Cognitive Bias Modification Procedures to attention biases and interpretation biases currently observed in several anxiety disorders. We aim to assess the impact of these biases modifications across anxiety symptoms. We postulate that changing the way one looks at different “threatening” information may help to improve stress vulnerability and resilience and, ultimately, to reduce risk factors of ubiquitous disorders like stress, and anxiety.

Self-report measure of intrusive images and involuntary autobiographical memories and abnormal emotion

Intrusive images are currently reported among individuals experiencing emotional disorders. The first aim of these studies concerns the validation of a self-report questionnaire assessing intrusive images, because such an instrument does not exist in our knowledge. The second goal of these studies is to investigate the involvement of intrusive images in the development of emotional disorders. As intrusive images are a common mechanism to the post-traumatic stress disorder and the obsessive-compulsive disorder, our interest concerns the role of intrusive images in the emergence of obsessive-compulsive symptoms following a traumatic life event. These studies take place in a community sample, because intrusive images are a universal phenomenon, also present in a non-clinical sample.

Attentional Bias towards body image

Attentional biases play an important role in the development and maintenance of emotional disorders. The first interest of these studies is to demonstrate attentional biases towards body image (e.g., towards overweighed shapes or thin shapes, towards hated or loved own or other body parts). In a second step, these attentional biases will be manipulated through Attentional Biases Modification procedures (ABM). We expect that changing the perception of an individual towards various "emotional" stimuli can influence his/her response to a stressor and increase his/her self-esteem. These studies will be conducted with non-clinical populations that have high levels of body dissatisfaction and clinical populations suffering from an eating disorder or body dysmorphic disorder.

Implicit and explicit anxiety malleability through mental imagery

We aim to investigate further the malleability of explicit and implicit anxiety through different cognitive interventions, like for instance imagery rescripting. State and trait anxiety will be assessed with explicit (self-reports), as well as with implicit measures (a variant of the Implicit Association Test, IAT). The findings will indicate if the implicit self-concept of anxiety has trait-like characteristics and is as stable against a voluntary mental control strategy as an established explicit measure of trait anxiety.