Development and validation of a Rasch-derived CES-D short form

The current study presents a Rasch-derived short form of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D) for use as a depression screening tool in the general population. In contrast to short forms developed with reliance on classical measurement techniques, those developed using techniques based on item response theory produce a measure that offers true interval scaling, provide enhanced information about responders with extreme scores, and expand understanding of the underlying latent structure. Cross-validation of the Rasch-derived CES-D short form supported its utility and structural validity across samples. Tests of structural validity using latent variable modeling methodology indicated that a hierarchical, single-factor model of depression had the best fit for the original full form and the Rasch-derived short form of the CES-D. This finding challenges depression researchers and theorists to reconsider the interfactor relationships in the study and assessment of depression.     

Diagnosis and treatment of depression during pregnancy

Pregnancy has frequently been described as a time of affective well-being. However, a growing literature suggests that women are neither "protected" against new-onset or recurrence of depression during this time. Diagnosis and effective treatment of depression during pregnancy requires a careful weighing of risk of treatment which may include psychotropic medications against the risks associated with failure to adequately manage affective distress and its potential impact of maternal and fetal well-being. Treatment options during pregnancy are reviewed in the context of developing the most appropriate risk/benefit decision for individual patients with past or current depression who either anticipate pregnancy or who become pregnant.     

Why aren’t all deep superior colliculus neurons multisensory? A Bayes’ ratio analysis

Multisensory neurons in the deep superior colliculus (SC) show response enhancement to cross-modal stimuli that coincide in time and space. However, multisensory SC neurons respond to unimodal input as well. It is thus legitimate to ask why not all deep SC neurons are multisensory or, at least, develop multisensory behavior during an organism's maturation. The novel answer given here derives from a signal detection theory perspective. A Bayes' ratio model of multisensory enhancement is suggested. It holds that deep SC neurons operate under the Bayes' ratio rule, which guarantees optimal performance-that is, it maximizes the probability of target detection while minimizing the false alarm rate. It is shown that optimal performance of multisensory neurons vis-à-vis cross-modal stimuli implies, at the same time, that modality-specific neurons will outperform multisensory neurons in processing unimodal targets. Thus, only the existence of both multisensory and modality-specific neurons allows optimal performance when targets of one or several modalities may occur.     

Medication as object

People experience and treat medication as though it were a person: in other words, as an object. Among the many symbolic meanings attributed to medication, this sort of personification, or object representation, is a meaning that medication is uniquely positioned to contain and convey: imbued with intentionality and influence, medication moves beyond the sphere of static, iconic representation and enters the changeable, dynamic object world of action, aim, and agency. Unlike more generic or stereotypic meanings, object representations attributed to medication may reflect the patient's specific dynamics and object relations. These representations are many and mutable, and take on shifting and overlapping forms that evolve with the analytic process. Medication may represent a third person within the framework of an analytic treatment, expanding the analytic dyad into a triad and offering new transference paradigms to explore. The defensive displacement of transferential qualities and attitudes, or split-off parts thereof, from the analyst onto medication can serve as a powerful resistance to the awareness of the transference to the analyst. Clinical examples illustrate the utility and importance of the analysis of medication as object, for both patient and analyst, with particular attention to the transference.     

Modeling the effects of payoff on response bias in a perceptual discrimination task: bound-change, drift-rate-change, or two-stage-processing hypothesis

Three hypotheses--the bound-change hypothesis, drift-rate-change hypothesis, and two-stage-processing hypothesis--are proposed to account for data from a perceptual discrimination task in which three different response deadlines were involved and three different payoffs were presented prior to each individual trial. The aim of the present research was to show (1) how the three different hypotheses incorporate response biases into a sequential sampling decision process, (2) how payoffs and deadlines affect choice probabilities, and (3) the hypotheses' predictions of response times and choice probabilities. The two-stage-processing hypothesis gave the best account, especially for the choice probabilities, whereas the drift-rate-change hypothesis had problems predicting choice probabilities as a function of deadlines.     

Bootstrapping conceptual deduction using physical connection: rethinking frontal cortex

The age at which infants can demonstrate the ability to deduce abstract rules can be reduced by more than half, from 21 months to 9 months. The key is to introduce a physical connection between the items to be conceptually related. I argue here that making the same change in how items are presented might also help some preschoolers with learning delays, especially some children with autism. I also suggest that the roles of premotor and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices in deducing abstract rules might have been misinterpreted behaviorally and anatomically. The crucial brain region may be the periarcuate, which partially overlaps both premotor and lateral prefrontal cortex. The cognitive ability made possible by this region might be something far more elementary than previously considered: the ability to perceive conceptual connections in the absence of physical connection.     

Why Managerial Women are Less Happy Than Managerial Men

Women with managerial careers are significantly less satisfied with their life than their male counterparts. Why? In a representative German panel dataset (GSOEP) we find biological constraints and substitutive mechanisms determining the subjective well-being of female managers. Women’s terminated fertility has a negative impact on women’s life satisfaction between the ages of 35 and 45, when managerial careers usually take off. Money and spare time can compensate for this biological difference. But to maintain an equivalent level of happiness, women need to be compensated by much more income for each hour of spare time given up than men do. So, in order to reach better gender equality in leadership positions, women must be either paid higher incomes (on average around 10%) or must be incentivized with more spare time than men. In the conclusion, we speculate on a new mix of carrots and sticks for advanced careers in order to boost female representation in leadership positions.