Understanding the onset and course of sudden gains in treatment provides clinical information to the patient and clinician, and encourages clinicians to strive for these sudden clinical gains with their patients. This study characterizes the occurrence of sudden gains with Behavioral Activation (BA; Martell, Addis, & Jacobson, 2001), and the extent to which pre-treatment dysfunctional depressive thinking predicts sudden gains during treatment. We enrolled a sample of adults (n = 42) between ages 18–65 diagnosed with primary Major Depressive Disorder. All participants completed a 16-week course of BA, with clinical and self-report assessments at pre-, mid- and post-treatment. Results indicated that sudden gain and non-sudden gain participants showed differential improvement across treatment. No significant effects emerged for the dysfunctional cognitive style as a predictor of sudden gain status. Sudden gains may result from interaction of non-specific factors with the BA techniques implemented during early phases of therapy.

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Background and Objectives Humans have the dual capacity to assign a slightly pleasant valence to neutral stimuli (the positivity offset) to encourage approach behaviors, as well as to assign a higher negative valence to unpleasant images relative to the positive valence to equally arousing and extreme pleasant images (the negativity bias) to facilitate defensive strategies. We conducted an experimental psychopathology study to examine the extent to which the negativity bias and the positivity offset differ in participants with and without major depression. Method Forty-one depressed and thirty-six healthy participants were evaluated using a structured clinical interview for DSM-IV Axis I disorders, questionnaires, and a computerized task designed to measure implicit affective responses to unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant stimuli. Results The negativity bias was significantly higher and the positivity offset was significantly lower in depressed relative to healthy participants. Limitations Entry criteria enrolling medication-free participants with minimal DSM-IV comorbidity may limit generalizability of the findings. Conclusions This study advances our understanding of the positive and negative valence systems in depression, highlighting the irregularities in the positive valence system.

In research with animals as well as samples of chronic pain patients and elderly persons, pain has been positively correlated with measures of irritability, hostility, and aggression. The present investigation examined the relationship of pain tolerance with aggression. 72 men participated in the Response Choice Aggression Paradigm, described previously by Zeichner and colleagues, in which aggressive response to provocation was possible but not required of participants. Subjective pain tolerance, defined as maximal electrical shock willingly tolerated by participants, was assessed. Significant but small Pearson product-moment correlations between pain tolerance and aggression ranged between .21 and .32, with the largest accounting for 9% of variance.

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