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Most people experience positive involuntary mental imagery (IMI) frequently in daily life; however, evidence for the importance and effects of positive IMI is largely indirect. The current study adapted a paradigm to experimentally induce positive IMI in participants’ daily lives. This could in turn provide a means to directly test positive IMI’s effects. In a within-subjects design, participants (N = 41) generated positive mental images (imagery condition) and sentences (verbal condition) from photo cues, half of which participants provided from their own living environment. Participants then recorded involuntary memories of the previously generated images or sentences in a seven-day diary, before returning to the lab and completing some measures including an involuntary memory task. In the diary, participants reported more involuntary memories from the imagery condition than from the verbal condition, and more involuntary memories from their own photos compared to the other photos. A more mixed pattern of findings was found across other tasks in the lab. The study indicates that the paradigm can be used as a means to induce positive IMI and that using photos as the basis for generating positive imagery increases the amount of IMI in daily life. Theoretical and potential clinical implications are discussed.

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Background and objectives Typicality asymmetry in generalization refers to enhanced fear generalization when trained with typical compared to atypical exemplars. Typical exemplars are highly representative of their category, whereas atypical exemplars are less representative. Individual risk factors, such as trait anxiety, attenuate this effect, due to the high level of threat ambiguity of atypical exemplars. Although recent research provided evidence for generalization of safety behavior, it is unclear whether this generalization also follows typicality asymmetry. This study examined (1) whether participants exhibited typicality asymmetry in the generalization of safety behavior and (2) whether this effect would be attenuated by individual risk factors, such as intolerance of uncertainty and trait anxiety. Methods Participants were trained with either typical (Typical group, n = 53) or atypical (Atypical group, n = 55) exemplars in a fear and avoidance conditioning procedure. Participants acquired differential conditioned fear and costly safety behavior to the threat- and safety-related exemplars. In a following Generalization Test, the degree of safety behavior to novel exemplars of the same categories was tested. Results The Atypical group showed greater differential safety behavior responses compared to the Typical group. Higher trait anxiety was associated with lower differential safety behavior generalization, driven by an increase in generalized responding to novel safety-related exemplars. Limitations: This study used hypothetical cost instead of real cost. Conclusions Training with atypical exemplars led to greater safety behavior generalization. Moreover, individuals with high trait anxiety show impaired safety behavior generalization.

Objective: Specific phobia is a common anxiety disorder, but the literature on associated brain structure alterations exhibits substantial gaps. The ENIGMA Anxiety Working Group examined brain structure differences between individuals with specific phobias and healthy control subjects as well as between the animal and blood-injection-injury (BII) subtypes of specific phobia. Additionally, the authors investigated associations of brain structure with symptom severity and age (youths vs. adults). Methods: Data sets from 31 original studies were combined to create a final sample with 1,452 participants with phobia and 2,991 healthy participants (62.7% female; ages 5–90). Imaging processing and quality control were performed using established ENIGMA protocols. Subcortical volumes as well as cortical surface area and thickness were examined in a preregistered analysis. Results: Compared with the healthy control group, the phobia group showed mostly smaller subcortical volumes, mixed surface differences, and larger cortical thickness across a substantial number of regions. The phobia subgroups also showed differences, including, as hypothesized, larger medial orbitofrontal cortex thickness in BII phobia (N=182) compared with animal phobia (N=739). All findings were driven by adult participants; no significant results were observed in children and adolescents. Conclusions: Brain alterations associated with specific phobia exceeded those of other anxiety disorders in comparable analyses in extent and effect size and were not limited to reductions in brain structure. Moreover, phenomenological differences between phobia subgroups were reflected in diverging neural underpinnings, including brain areas related to fear processing and higher cognitive processes. The findings implicate brain structure alterations in specific phobia, although subcortical alterations in particular may also relate to broader internalizing psychopathology.