Smart phones help researchers better understand the nature of depression and anxiety

Decades of research on anxiety and depression have resulted in the development of models to explain the causes and dimensions of both disorders.

However, despite their well-established utility, these models measure differences among individuals and are derived from studies designed with the help of a few badessments that may last several months or even years.

In other words, the models are very informative, but not optimal for examining what is going on emotionally in a given person, from one moment to the next.

Now, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo is expanding his research to repeatedly and frequently measure the symptoms of specific individuals, in real time, to badess the relationship between immediate feelings and later symptoms.

The research presents anxiety and depression in a way that has not yet been studied and the results suggest that some emotions persist in order to predict feelings that go beyond what happens at a given moment. According to Kristin Gainey, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UB and author of the study, this information could offer therapeutic benefits to patients struggling with these disorders.

"Clinicians are not primarily interested in how one person's symptoms compare to those of another, what most studies focus on." They are more interested in how to change the feelings of a person suffering from anxiety or depression.In other words, want to understand how to change the emotional experiences of a given individual in time and in different situations, "says Gainey, a specialist in emotions and mood disorders and anxiety, who has just received one of the scientists from Early Career Distinguished Scientific Awards. "The only way to get this result directly is to measure these processes repeatedly in a person as they happen."

To do this, Gainey conducted baseline badessments of 135 participants, each of whom was already seeking psychological treatment.

Three times a day for 10 weeks, participants received surveys on their smartphone about their feelings and symptoms. They responded to the survey within 20 minutes of arrival.

"This generated enough reports to give a good idea of ​​the fluctuations and trajectories of the symptoms and the affect of each person (defined as the state of objective feeling part of an emotion)" said Gainey.

A smartphone gives an overview of the immediacy that questionnaires distributed in a laboratory that summarize feelings over long periods of time are impossible to obtain.

"We can not always remember precisely what we felt days and weeks ago, especially if some days you feel really bad and other days, you feel good," she says. . "It's not easy to summarize in one index."

Anxiety and depression are unique disorders, but they often appear together in the same patient. Both disorders share high levels of negative emotions, such as fear, sadness, and anger, while low levels of positive emotions, such as excitement and interest, are specific to depression.

Gainey says that it's no wonder that particular emotional states, like feeling happy or sad, are responsible for the symptoms felt shortly afterwards. Researchers do not know how long these conditions tend to persist and what specific symptoms they cause hours or days later.

"This study found that some affects were short-lived, but in the case of depression, if you felt high levels of negative affect, even if we controlled the degree of depression of a participant at that time. that was predictive of increased depression 24 hours later, "says Gainey.

This could suggest that clinicians could track the real and positive effects of people in real time and chart higher risk trajectories.

"If we could identify specific risk factors for increasing symptoms in real time, we could even use smartphones to send suggestions on useful strategies or alert the person's mental health provider," says -she.

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University in Buffalo