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Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect

The importance of the role of affect in psychotherapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) is well established, but the common use of self-reported measures may limit our understanding of its underlying mechanisms. A promising predictor of patient affect is the stress hormone cortisol. To date, no st...

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Autores principales: Levi, Eyal, Fischer, Susanne, Fisher, Hadar, Admon, Roee, Zilcha-Mano, Sigal
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8615903/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34827482
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111483
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author Levi, Eyal
Fischer, Susanne
Fisher, Hadar
Admon, Roee
Zilcha-Mano, Sigal
author_facet Levi, Eyal
Fischer, Susanne
Fisher, Hadar
Admon, Roee
Zilcha-Mano, Sigal
author_sort Levi, Eyal
collection PubMed
description The importance of the role of affect in psychotherapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) is well established, but the common use of self-reported measures may limit our understanding of its underlying mechanisms. A promising predictor of patient affect is the stress hormone cortisol. To date, no studies have studied in-session changes in cortisol in psychotherapy for MDD. We investigated whether an increase in patient cortisol over the course of a session correlated with higher negative and lower positive affect. Given previous findings on healthy individuals on the contagious nature of stress, an additional aim was to examine whether these relationships are moderated by therapist cortisol. To this end, 40 dyads (including 6 therapists) provided saliva samples before and after four pre-specified sessions (616 samples). After each session, the patients provided retrospective reports of in-session affect. We found no association between patient cortisol and affect. However, increases in patient cortisol predicted negative affect when the therapists exhibited decreases in cortisol, and increases in patient cortisol predicted positive affect when the therapists showed increases. Our study provides initial evidence for the importance of the social context in the cortisol–affect relationship in MDD.
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spelling pubmed-86159032021-11-26 Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect Levi, Eyal Fischer, Susanne Fisher, Hadar Admon, Roee Zilcha-Mano, Sigal Brain Sci Article The importance of the role of affect in psychotherapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) is well established, but the common use of self-reported measures may limit our understanding of its underlying mechanisms. A promising predictor of patient affect is the stress hormone cortisol. To date, no studies have studied in-session changes in cortisol in psychotherapy for MDD. We investigated whether an increase in patient cortisol over the course of a session correlated with higher negative and lower positive affect. Given previous findings on healthy individuals on the contagious nature of stress, an additional aim was to examine whether these relationships are moderated by therapist cortisol. To this end, 40 dyads (including 6 therapists) provided saliva samples before and after four pre-specified sessions (616 samples). After each session, the patients provided retrospective reports of in-session affect. We found no association between patient cortisol and affect. However, increases in patient cortisol predicted negative affect when the therapists exhibited decreases in cortisol, and increases in patient cortisol predicted positive affect when the therapists showed increases. Our study provides initial evidence for the importance of the social context in the cortisol–affect relationship in MDD. MDPI 2021-11-10 /pmc/articles/PMC8615903/ /pubmed/34827482 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111483 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Levi, Eyal
Fischer, Susanne
Fisher, Hadar
Admon, Roee
Zilcha-Mano, Sigal
Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title_full Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title_fullStr Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title_full_unstemmed Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title_short Patient and Therapist In-Session Cortisol as Predictor of Post-Session Patient Reported Affect
title_sort patient and therapist in-session cortisol as predictor of post-session patient reported affect
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8615903/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34827482
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111483
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