Paul Gilbert | University of Derby (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Gilbert

Depression and Anxiety, 2017

Background/Objective The role of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) in Borderline Personality Disorde... more Background/Objective The role of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is not well understood and recent findings depict a complex mode of action of OT. In this study we aimed to examine the association of oxytocin levels in the plasma of BPD patients with the experience of compassion and recalled parental behavior during childhood. Methods Fifity-seven BPD patients and forty-three healthy controls participated in the study. OT plasma levels were obtained and analyzed by radioimmunological assay. Subjects additionally completed questionnaires focusing on fears of compassion (FOC) and recalled upbringing by their parents ("Questionnaire of Recalled Parental Rearing Behavior/Fragebogen zum erinnerten elterlichen Erziehungsverhalten", FEE). Results BPD patients had significantly lower OT plasma levels than healthy controls. Additionally, both groups differed significantly on all FOC and FEE scales; BPD patients had higher FOC scores (indicating more aversion of being compassionate and receiving compassion from others) and differed in recalled parenting. In the BPD group, scores of the CES scale "Responding to the expression of compassion from others" were negatively correlated with oxytocin levels. M oreover, recalled "emotional warmth" of their parents during childhood was positively correlated with oxytocin plasma levels of BPD subjects. No such correlations were found in the control group. Conclusion Our results corroborate findings from previous studies reporting lower OT levels in patients with BPD. M oreover, peripheral OT seems to be linked with the tolerance of compassion and recalled parental upbringing style. This is consistent with the assumption that OT

Psychotherapy and Counselling for Depression

Psychology and psychotherapy, Jan 15, 2018

Several studies suggest that self-criticism and self-reassurance operate through different mechan... more Several studies suggest that self-criticism and self-reassurance operate through different mechanisms and might interact with each other. This study examined the hypothesis that self-reassurance serves as a buffer between self-criticism and depressive symptoms in a way that self-esteem, which is rooted in a different motivational system, may not. We hypothesized that self-criticism would be correlated with high levels of depressive symptoms, but that this association would be weaker at higher levels of self-reassurance abilities. We also hypothesized that self-esteem, a self-relating process based on feeling able and competent to achieve life goals, would not buffer the relationship between self-criticism and depression. Self-criticism, self-reassurance, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem were assessed in a sample of 419 participants (66% females; M = 33.40, SD = 11.13). At higher levels of self-reassurance, the relationship between self-criticism and depressive symptoms became n...

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2004

Schizophrenia is a worldwide, prevalent disorder with a multifactorial but highly genetic aetiolo... more Schizophrenia is a worldwide, prevalent disorder with a multifactorial but highly genetic aetiology. A constant prevalence rate in the face of reduced fecundity has caused some to argue that an evolutionary advantage exists in unaffected relatives. Here, I critique this adaptationist approach, and review – and find wanting – Crow's “speciation” hypothesis. In keeping with available biological and psychological evidence, I propose an alternative theory of the origins of this disorder. Schizophrenia is a disorder of the social brain, and it exists as a costly trade-off in the evolution of complex social cognition. Paleoanthropological and comparative primate research suggests that hominids evolved complex cortical interconnectivity (in particular, frontotemporal and frontoparietal circuits) to regulate social cognition and the intellectual demands of group living. I suggest that the ontogenetic mechanism underlying this cerebral adaptation was sequential hypermorphosis and that it...

Psychology and psychotherapy, Jan 28, 2014

Imagery is known to be a powerful means of stimulating various physiological processes and is inc... more Imagery is known to be a powerful means of stimulating various physiological processes and is increasingly used within standard psychological therapies. Compassion-focused imagery (CFI) has been used to stimulate affiliative emotion in people with mental health problems. However, evidence suggests that self-critical individuals may have particular difficulties in this domain with single trials. The aim of the present study was to further investigate the role of self-criticism in responsiveness to CFI by specifically pre-selecting participants based on trait self-criticism. Using the Forms of Self-Criticism/Self-Reassuring Scale, 29 individuals from a total sample of 139 were pre-selected to determine how self-criticism impacts upon an initial instance of imagery. All participants took part in three activities: a control imagery intervention (useable data N = 25), a standard CFI intervention (useable data N = 25), and a non-intervention control (useable data N = 24). Physiological me...

Psychology and psychotherapy, Jan 22, 2018

The Weight-Focused Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale (WFSCRS) is base... more The Weight-Focused Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale (WFSCRS) is based on the original Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale (FSCSRS; Gilbert et al., 2004, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43, 31) and assesses the inadequate and hated forms of self-criticism and the ability to self-reassure when coping with attempts to control body weight, shape, and eating. The aim of this study was to examine the factor structure, consistency, and reliability of the WFSCRS in overweight and obese women. The factorial structure of the WFSCRS was examined through a confirmatory factor analysis in 724 overweight and obese women participating in a commercial weight management programme. The scale's construct and convergent validity were also examined. The WFSCRS had a three-factor structure, similar to the FSCSRS, which fitted the data well. The WFSCRS had high internal reliability, construct, and discriminant validity. The scale was posit...

Journal of Depression and Anxiety, 2014

Background: While psychological therapies for depression have advanced in the last 20 years, stil... more Background: While psychological therapies for depression have advanced in the last 20 years, still many people respond only partially and remain vulnerable to relapse. Insight into the limitations of our psychological therapies might be obtained from recent research that has revealed, in nonclinical populations, that some people can be fearful of positive emotions especially affiliative and compassion-focused ones. Aims: This study explores the fears of compassion in a clinical population and their associations with selfcriticism, self-compassion and depression, anxiety and stress. Method: 53 depressed patients completed a series of self-report scales. Results: Fears of compassion, particularly for oneself and from others, were strongly linked to self-criticism, depression, anxiety and stress, and negatively associated with self-compassion and self-reassurance. Conclusions: Since compassion and the affiliative emotions associated with compassion play a fundamental role in emotion regulation, individuals who are blocked or fearful of accessing these emotions are likely to be struggle with emotional regulation and the psychotherapeutic process. Research on the fears of compassion and affiliative emotions suggests these are important therapeutic targets.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapies

Journal of clinical nursing, 2014

To investigate the tension between individual and organisational responses to contemporary demand... more To investigate the tension between individual and organisational responses to contemporary demands for compassionate interactions in health care. Health care is often said to need more compassion among its practitioners. However, this represents a rather simplistic view of the issue, situating the problem with individual practitioners rather than focusing on the overall design of care and healthcare organisations, which have often adopted a production-line approach. This is a position paper informed by a narrative literature review. A search of the PubMed, Science Direct and CINAHL databases for the terms compassion, care and design was conducted in the research literature published from 2000 through to mid-2013. There is a relatively large literature on compassion in health care, where authors discuss the value of imbuing a variety of aspects of health services with compassion including nurses, other practitioners and, ultimately, among patients. This contrasts with the rather limi...

PloS one, 2014

Virtual reality has been successfully used to study and treat psychological disorders such as pho... more Virtual reality has been successfully used to study and treat psychological disorders such as phobias and posttraumatic stress disorder but has rarely been applied to clinically-relevant emotions other than fear and anxiety. Self-criticism is a ubiquitous feature of psychopathology and can be treated by increasing levels of self-compassion. We exploited the known effects of identification with a virtual body to arrange for healthy female volunteers high in self-criticism to experience self-compassion from an embodied first-person perspective within immersive virtual reality. Whereas observation and practice of compassionate responses reduced self-criticism, the additional experience of embodiment also increased self-compassion and feelings of being safe. The results suggest potential new uses for immersive virtual reality in a range of clinical conditions.

Sociology of Health & Illness, 2013

We propose to "gauge" the group of similarity transformations that acts on a space of non-Hermiti... more We propose to "gauge" the group of similarity transformations that acts on a space of non-Hermitian scalar theories. We introduce the "similarity gauge field," which acts as a gauge connection on the space of non-Hermitian theories characterized by (and equivalent to a Hermitian) real-valued mass spectrum. This extension leads to new effects: if the mass matrix is not the same in distant regions of space, but its eigenvalues coincide pairwise in both regions, the particle masses stay constant in the whole spacetime, making the model indistinguishable from a standard, low-energy, and scalar Hermitian one. However, contrary to the Hermitian case, the high-energy scalar particles become unstable at a particular wavelength determined by the strength of the emergent similarity gauge field. This instability corresponds to momentum-dependent exceptional points, whose locations cannot be identified from an analysis of the eigenvalues of the coordinate-dependent squared-mass matrix in isolation, as one might naively have expected. For a doublet of scalar particles with masses of the order of 1 MeV and a similarity gauge rotation of order unity at distances of 1 meter, the corrections to the masses are about 10 −7 eV, which makes no experimentally detectable imprint on the low-energy spectrum. However, the instability occurs at 10 18 eV, suggestively in the energy range of detectable ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, thereby making this truly non-Hermitian effect and its generalizations of phenomenological interest for high-energy particle physics.

Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 2010

Background. Mentalization has recently been identified as a major process in the origins, mainten... more Background. Mentalization has recently been identified as a major process in the origins, maintenance, and recovery from various mental disorders. Aims. Questions arise however, as to the degree to which deficits in mentalization can be trait or state-like: whether they manifest themselves across all types of human interaction, or are they relationship dependent, such that different types of relationship (e.g., affiliative vs. competitive) can facilitate or compromise mentalizing? Findings. This paper suggests that mentalization has a complex evolutionary history, has various subtypes and functions, is highly regulated by the experience of threat or safeness within relationships, and can operate differently in different types of social relationship. Implications. Awareness of this enables therapists to pay particular attention to the social roles and types of relationships in which mentalization occurs, its specific focus and functions for specific types of relationships. Therapists can be mindful of the kind of specific events in social roles that activate threat and loss of mentalizing (e.g., abandonment threats, feeling controlled by 'the other', status loss, non-reciprocation).

Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 2013

Personality and Individual Differences, 2004

This study explored the associations and interactions between social rank (submissive behaviour a... more This study explored the associations and interactions between social rank (submissive behaviour and social comparison), shame, rumination and depression. 125 undergraduate students completed a battery of self-report questionnaires measuring the research variables. It was found that social rank and shame are highly related and that both shame and social rank are significantly correlated with rumination. A moderator analysis suggested an effect of gender on the relationship between external shame and rumination. A mediational path analysis suggested that rumination partially mediated a link between shame and depression, but shame retained a unique contribution to depression after controlling for rumination.

Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2004

To develop greater coherence, psychology must develop its macro and integrative approaches to the... more To develop greater coherence, psychology must develop its macro and integrative approaches to the mind. In this illuminating paper, Henriques (this issue, pp. 1207-1221) outlines the kind of thinking that is needed. He skillfully illuminates the levels of emergence of mind from the material world and argues that the recursive self-regulative abilities of selfawareness set us apart from other animals. The interaction between an evolved mind, adapted to pursue strategic goals, while also being phenotypically shaped by both environment and our recently evolved cognitive competencies, is a core focus of psychology.

Cognitive Therapy and Research, 2012

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent neuroscience research, Gil-bert (2005, 2009a) suggested that vulnerabi... more ABSTRACT Drawing on recent neuroscience research, Gil-bert (2005, 2009a) suggested that vulnerability and psy-chopathology could be conceptualized and treated using a tripartite model of affect regulation which postulates three evolved systems oriented toward threats, resources, and affiliation, and respectively triggering negative affect (NA), activated positive affect (PA), and social safeness. He additionally proposed that social safeness, characterized by feelings of warmth and connectedness, plays an espe-cially important role in psychosocial functioning. We tes-ted various aspects of this theory through a 7-day daily diary study in which 51 male and 51 female students completed measures of social safeness, NA, PA, perceived social support (PSS), and received social support (RSS) every evening. First, social safeness emerged as opera-tionally distinct from low NA, PA, and PSS. Second, par-ticipants who endorsed higher mean levels of RSS over the week had higher mean levels of safeness, and social safe-ness was higher on days when participants reported higher RSS than their mean. Third, social safeness was more strongly related to numerous indicators of vulnerability and psychopathology than NA, PA, and PSS, and it predicted these variables controlling for NA, PA, and PSS. Results support the theory that social safeness is a distinct affective experience that responds to affiliation and offers unique protection from psychosocial suffering.

Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 2006

Compassion-focused Therapy (CFT) derives from an evolutionary approach linked to neuroscience and... more Compassion-focused Therapy (CFT) derives from an evolutionary approach linked to neuroscience and social psychology and was specifically developed for complex disorders in which high levels of shame and self-criticism have a key role. This approach's main objective is using the Compassionate Mind Training to help people establish compassion-based relationships, deactivating the threat-defense system and developing the soothing system [1]. CFT has shown positive effects on several clinical conditions [2]. It is consensual the importance of psychosocial interventions in the treatment of schizophrenia and this has been an area of significant investment, namely concerning evaluation of efficacy. It has been argued that intervention programs should focus primarily in disease management, change of the underlying mechanisms and adequacy of coping strategies [3]. In psychosis shame and self-criticism have been advocated as a psychological factors increasing vulnerability to relapse which makes CFT especially suitable for this population. The Compassion-Focused Therapy for Psychosis (CFTp) appears in this context as an innovative intervention. Efficacy studies have been emerging with promising results and CFTp seems to address several limitations identified for existing interventions [4]. AIMS To develop a CFT Group Intervention Program for psychosis and test its efficacy and effectiveness o Assess the efficacy of the intervention comparing control group and experimental group in outcome measures (assessed by clinician, patient and family) before (1wk) and after intervention (1wk and 3mths). o Explore the processes behind efficacy; o Explore the treatment benefits in terms of relapse prevention:; o Assess opinions about the program, therapeutic techniques and subjective perception of improvement; (patient and family); o Evaluate program adherence (drop-outs, homework and presence in sessions).

British Journal of Social Psychology, 2007

Social rank theory suggests that mood variation is linked to the security a person feels in his/h... more Social rank theory suggests that mood variation is linked to the security a person feels in his/her social domain and the extent to which they are sensitive to involuntary subordination (e.g. feeling defeated and feeling inferior). Previous studies looking at rank-related and competitive behaviour have often focused on striving for dominance, whereas social rank theory has focused on striving to avoid inferiority. This study set out to develop a measure of 'Striving to Avoid Inferiority' (SAIS) and assess its relationship to other rank and mood-related variables. We hypothesized two factors: one we called insecure striving, relating to fear of rejection/criticism for 'not keeping up', and the second we called secure non-striving, relating to feeling socially acceptable and valued regardless of whether one succeeds or not. This scale was given to 207 undergraduates. The SAIS had good psychometric properties, with the two factors of insecure striving and secure non-striving strongly supported by exploratory factor analysis. Both factors were significantly (though contrastingly) related to various fears of rejection, need for validation, hypercompetitive attitudes, feeling inferior to others, submissive behaviour and indicators of stress, anxiety and depression. Striving to avoid inferiority was a significant predictor of psychopathologies, especially where individuals perceived themselves to have low social rank.

British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2004

Objectives. Self-critical people, compared with those who self-reassure, are at increased risk of... more Objectives. Self-critical people, compared with those who self-reassure, are at increased risk of psychopathology. However, there has been little work on the different forms and functions of these self-experiences. This study developed two selfreport scales to measure forms and functions of self-criticism and self-reassurance and explore their relationship to depression. Methods. A self-report scale measuring forms of self-criticism and self-reassuring, and a scale measuring possible functions of self-criticism, together with a measure of depression and another self-criticism scale (LOSC), were given to 246 female students. Results. Self-criticizing vs. self-reassuring separated into two components. Forms of self-criticizing separated into two components related to: being self-critical, dwelling on mistakes and sense of inadequacy; and a second component of wanting to hurt the self and feeling self-disgust/hate. The reasons/functions for self-criticism separated into two components. One was related to desires to try to self-improve (called self-improving/ correction), and the other to take revenge on, harm or hurt the self for failures (called self-harming/persecuting). Mediation analysis suggested that wanting to harm the self may be particularly pathogenic and is positively mediated by the effects of hating the self and negatively mediated by being able to self-reassure and focus on one's positives. Conclusions. Self-criticism is not a single process but has different forms, functions, and underpinning emotions. This indicates a need for more detailed research into the variations of self-criticism and the mechanisms for developing self-reassurance. Billy Connolly, the famous Glaswegian comedian, suffered various forms of early abuse and has struggled with depression and an alcohol problem (Stephenson, 2001). During an interview with Tim Adams (Adams, 2001), Connolly recalls an important insight he www.bps.org.uk