Temporal variation in Irish suicide rates

Using Irish suicide data for the period 1990-1998, the independent effects of month and day adjusting for age, gender, and calendar year effects and distinguishing between holiday and working Mondays were assessed. The male suicide rate was significantly higher on working Mondays (+31%) and Saturdays (+14%), and during April, June, and August (+17%), after adjustment for the other variables. In contrast, female suicide rates were higher only in August (+35%) and exhibited no day effect. Teenage men had a greater elevation of risk on Saturdays, Sundays, and both working and holiday Mondays than any other group. The study findings should be taken into account in the planning of specialized health care services and helplines for suicidal people. Furthermore, the findings provide support for Gabennesch's (1988) broken promise theory and the relationship between dysfunctions of the serotonergic system and suicidal behavior.     

Transition planning and recidivism among mentally ill juvenile offenders

OBJECTIVES: To determine the extent to which transition planning and community service would predict lower levels of recidivism among mentally ill juvenile offenders. DESIGN: Review of legal, medical and social service records including examination of 3-month period following community release. PARTICIPANTS: Juvenile offenders incarcerated for 6 months or more (N = 44) transitioning to community. MEASURES: Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS), sum of different documented pre- and post-release discharge planning contacts, documented community service contacts. OUTCOMES: Re-offense during the first year post-release. RESULTS: Documented community service contacts in the 3 months following discharge were rare for mental health (20.5%), substance abuse (38.6%), financial assistance (29.5%), and school placement (34.1%). The average number of different pre-release and post-release discharge planning contacts was also low, M(SD)=1.86(1.68) and M(SD)= 2.34(1.71) respectively. Post-release discharge planning and the receipt of financial assistance and mental health services were all associated with lower levels of reoffending. CONCLUSIONS: Community transition planning, including the coordination and provision of community services, is an essential component of community reintegration for juvenile offenders and is associated with lower rates of recidivism during the first year post-discharge.     

Children who question their heterosexuality

Many gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults report a period of childhood sexual questioning--an uneasy questioning of their heterosexuality brought on by same-sex attractions and motivating same-sex sexual exploration. This article evaluates hypotheses about the correlates, causes, and consequences of childhood sexual questioning. Participants were 182 children in the 4th through 8th grades. Compared with children more confident in their heterosexuality, sexual-questioning children reported more impaired self-concepts, fewer same-sex-typed attributes (but not more cross-sex-typed attributes), a greater sense of feeling different from same-sex others, and lesser satisfaction with their gender assignment. Short-term longitudinal analyses indicated that sexual questioning is more likely a determinant than a consequence of these correlated variables. However, influences of sexual questioning on these outcomes were small.     

Temporal coding in conditioned inhibition: analysis of associative structure of inhibition

Two experiments with rats as subjects were conducted to investigate the associative structure of temporal control of conditioned inhibition through posttraining manipulation of the training excitor-unconditioned stimulus (US) temporal relationship. Experiment 1 found that following simultaneous Pavlovian inhibition training (i.e., A --> US/XA-no US) in which a conditioned stimulus (CS A) was established as a delay excitor, maximal inhibition was observed on a summation test when CS X was compounded with a delay transfer CS. Furthermore, posttraining shifts in the A-US temporal relationship from delay to trace resulted in maximal inhibition of a trace transfer CS. Experiment 2 found complementary results to Experiment 1 with an A-US posttraining shift from serial to simultaneous. These results suggest that temporal control of inhibition is mediated by the training excitor-US temporal relationship.     

Test-retest reliability of fMRI during nonverbal semantic decisions in moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia patients

Cortical reorganization in poststroke aphasia is not well understood. Few studies have investigated neural mechanisms underlying language recovery in severe aphasia patients, who are typically viewed as having a poor prognosis for language recovery. Although test-retest reliability is routinely demonstrated during collection of language data in single-subject aphasia research, this is rarely examined in fMRI studies investigating the underlying neural mechanisms in aphasia recovery. The purpose of this study was to acquire fMRI test-retest data examining semantic decisions both within and between two aphasia patients. Functional MRI was utilized to image individuals with chronic, moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia during nonverbal, yes/no button-box semantic judgments of iconic sentences presented in the Computer-assisted Visual Communication (C-ViC) program. We investigated the critical issue of intra-subject reliability by exploring similarities and differences in regions of activation during participants' performance of identical tasks twice on the same day. Each participant demonstrated high intra-subject reliability, with response decrements typical of task familiarity. Differences between participants included greater left hemisphere perilesional activation in the individual with better response to C-ViC training. This study provides fMRI reliability in chronic nonfluent aphasia, and adds to evidence supporting differences in individual cortical reorganization in aphasia recovery.     

Unilateral forced nostril breathing affects dichotic listening for emotional tones

Unilateral forced nostril breathing (UFNB) through the left nostril is associated with enhanced spatial abilities, whereas UFNB through the right nostril is associated with enhanced verbal abilities. However, the effects of UFNB on standard tasks of laterality (e.g., dichotic listening) are unknown. This study employed dichotic listening for word targets, which typically exhibits a right ear advantage (REA), and dichotic listening for emotional targets, which typically exhibits a left ear advantage (LEA). Participants were asked to breathe either through their dominant nostril (congruent UFNB) or to breathe through their non-dominant nostril (incongruent UFNB) for the entire testing session. There was a significant three-way interaction between the type of dichotic listening task, nostril dominance, and nostril assignment, with the expected REA for word targets and the expected LEA for emotional targets-with one exception. Right nostril dominant participants assigned to the congruent condition exhibited an LEA for emotional targets (p < .05). The other three groups exhibited the expected LEA/right hemisphere advantage for the detection of emotional targets and all groups exhibited the expected REA/left hemisphere advantage for detection of word targets. As such, possible bias induced by tactile stimulation of the contralateral face cannot account for these results. Thus, our data are consistent with a selective enhancement of right hemispheric lateralized functions by right nostril UFNB.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

Refinements in the Rorschach Ego Impairment Index incorporating the human representational variable

The Ego Impairment Index (EII; Perry & Viglione, 1991) is a composite measure of psychological impairment and thought disturbance developed from the empirical and theoretical literature on the Rorschach. In this article, we summarize reliability and validity data regarding the EII. Our major goal was to present the rationale and empirical basis for recent refinements in the EII. Among the subcomponents of the original EII was the Human Experience variable (HEV), which has recently been revised and replaced with the Human Representational variable (HRV; Viglione, Perry, Jansak, Meyer, & Exner, 2003). In this study, we replaced the HEV with the HRV to create the EII-2. This was accomplished by recalculating the factor coefficients with a sample of 363 Rorschach protocols. We present additional validity data for the new EII-2. Research recommendations and interpretive guidelines are also presented.     

Testing different interpretations for the mistaken belief that rays exit the eyes during vision

Research has shown that children and adults believe that emissions from the eye occur during the act of vision. Such beliefs are similar to ancient extramission theories of perception. In Study 1, the authors tested the idea that extramission beliefs might stem from people's thinking about what might occur during vision as opposed to what is necessary for seeing. Training participants to think about what is necessary for vision, however, had no effect on extramission responses. The results of Study 2 indicated that emphasizing the idea of visual input led to a decline in extramission responses and supported the hypothesis that extramission notions stem from the outer-oriented phenomenology of vision.     

Enhanced retention in the passive-avoidance task by 5-HT(1A) receptor blockade is not associated with increased activity of the central nucleus of the amygdala

The effect of blockade of 5-HT1A receptors was investigated on (1). retention in a mildly aversive passive-avoidance task, and (2). spontaneous single-unit activity of central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) neurons, a brain site implicated in modulation of retention. Systemic administration of the selective 5-HT1A antagonist NAN-190 immediately after training markedly-and dose-dependently-facilitated retention in the passive-avoidance task; enhanced retention was time-dependent and was not attributable to variations in wattages of shock received by animals. Systemic administration of NAN-190 had mixed effects on spontaneous single-unit activity of CeA neurons recorded extracellularly in vivo; microiontophoretic application of 5-HT, in contrast, consistently and potently suppressed CeA activity. The present findings-that 5-HT1A receptor blockade by NAN-190 (1). enhances retention in the passive-avoidance task, and (2). does not consistently increase spontaneous neuronal activity of the CeA-provide evidence that a serotonergic system tonically inhibits modulation of retention in the passive-avoidance task through activation of the 5-HT1A receptor subtype at brain sites located outside the CeA.