Weathering the storm: children's long-term recall of Hurricane Andrew

Children who experienced a highly stressful natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, were interviewed within a few months of the event, when they were 3-4 years old, and again 6 years later, when they were 9-10 years old. Children were grouped into low, moderate, or high stress groups depending on the severity of the experienced storm. All children were able to recall this event in vivid detail 6 years later. In fact, children reported over twice as many propositions at the second interview as at the first. At the initial interview, children in the high stress group reported less information than children in the moderate stress group, but 6 years later, children in all three stress groups reported similar amounts of information. However children in the high stress group needed more questions and prompts than children in the other stress groups. Yet children in the high stress group also reported more consistent information between the two interviews, especially about the storm, than children in the other stress groups. Implications for children's developing memory of stressful events are discussed.     

Spanish-language measures of mania and depression

Efforts to better understand bipolar spectrum disorders across ethnic groups are often hampered by the lack of commonly used self-report instruments to assess mania and depression in individuals who speak languages other than English. This article describes the translation into Spanish of 2 self-report measures of manic symptoms (i.e., the Internal State Scale and the Hypomanic Personality Scale) and 2 self-report measures of depression (i.e., the Inventory to Diagnose Depression and the Inventory to Diagnose Depression, Lifetime version). The authors translated these measures into Spanish and assessed their psychometric properties among bilingual college students (N = 88). Results suggest that the Spanish versions have psychometric properties comparable to the English versions of the instruments.     

Spatial learning in rats is impaired by microinfusions of protein kinase C-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide within the nucleus accumbens

The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) has been shown to play a role in motor and spatial learning. Protein kinase C (PKC) has been implicated in the mechanisms of initiation and maintenance of long-term potentiation that is thought to be involved in the storage of long-term memory. In the present study, the importance of de novo synthesis of PKC-gamma within the NAcc in the acquisition and retention of spatial discrimination learning was assessed using an antisense knockdown approach. Separate groups of Long-Evans rats were exposed to acute microinfusions (6microg/microl) of PKC-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide (AS-ODN), control oligodeoxynucleotide (C-ODN) or vehicle into the NAcc at 24 and 3h before each training session. Behavioral findings showed that the blockade of NAcc-PKC-gamma translation caused impairments in the early phase of learning and retention of spatial information. Biochemical experiments showed that PKC-gamma expression was reduced and Ca(2+)/phospholipid-dependent protein kinase C (PKC) activity was blocked significantly in the AS-ODN-treated rats in comparison with control rats. The present findings suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma plays a role during the early acquisition of spatial learning. Also, retention test results suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma may be working as an intermediate factor involved in the onset of molecular mechanisms necessary for spatial memory consolidation within the NAcc.     

Is the unilateral lesion of the left substantia nigra pars compacta sufficient to induce working memory impairment in rats?

Adult male Wistar rats with a substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) lesion induced by intranigral administration of 1 micromol 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) were used as a model of early phase Parkinson's disease (PD). This lesion caused a partial depletion of striatal dopamine (DA). The animals were submitted to a spatial working memory version of the water maze task in which they had to find a hidden (submersed) platform using online-maintained information that the platform remains in the same place during four consecutive trials, but that it is moved to another place every training day. Left, but not right SNc-lesioned rats were impaired in finding the platform in the second trial. This result suggests that the left SNc plays a key role in spatial working memory. Control experiments ruled out the possibility that motor impairment, sensory neglect, and/or impairment in the mental representation of the contralateral spatial environment had affected performance of the SNc-lesioned rats.     

Identifying environmental contributions to autism: provocative clues and false leads

The potential role of environmental factors in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is an area of emerging interest within the public and scientific communities. The high degree of heritability of ASD suggests that environmental influences are likely to operate through their interaction with genetic susceptibility during vulnerable periods of development. Evaluation of the plausibility of specific neurotoxicants as etiological agents in ASD should be guided by toxicological principles, including dose-effect dependency and pharmacokinetic parameters. Clinical and epidemiological investigations require the use of sufficiently powered study designs with appropriate control groups and unbiased case ascertainment and exposure assessment. Although much of the existing data that have been used to implicate environmental agents in ASD are limited by methodological shortcomings, a number of efforts are underway that will allow more rigorous evaluation of the role of environmental exposures in the etiology and/or phenotypic expression of the disorder. Surveillance systems are now in place that will provide reliable prevalence estimates going forward in time. Anticipated discoveries in genetics, brain pathology, and the molecular/cellular basis of functional impairment in ASD are likely to provide new opportunities to explore environmental aspects of this disorder.     

Placebo and criminal law

This article considers issues concerning cases where the use of placebo is lawful or is not lawful under aspects of German criminal law. It will differentiate between cases of individual therapy and cases of supervised experiments within the scope of medical tests. Thereby, it reveals that a medication of placebo with regard to an individual patient seems to be lawful if there is no alternative possibility of a better treatment using a chemically effective medicine and if the limits of presumed consent are complied with. On the other hand, in the context of the supervised experiment, the assignment of a patient to a group treated with placebo is only lawful if the patient has been fully informed about the possibilities of a treatment and if the patient has given consent to it. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003. The author’s interests include International Criminal Law, Comparative Criminal Law and Philosophy of Law.     

Unimodal and crossmodal effects of endogenous attention to visual and auditory motion

Three experiments were conducted examining unimodal and crossmodal effects of attention to motion. Horizontally moving sounds and dot patterns were presented and participants’ task was to discriminate their motion speed or whether they were presented with a brief gap. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimuli of one modality and of one direction were presented with a higher probability ( p = .7) than other stimuli. Sounds and dot patterns moving in the expected direction were discriminated faster than stimuli moving in the unexpected direction. In Experiment 3, participants had to respond only to stimuli moving in one direction within the primary modality, but to all stimuli regardless of their direction within the rarer secondary modality. Stimuli of the secondary modality moving in the attended direction were discriminated faster than were oppositely moving stimuli. Results suggest that attending to the direction of motion affects perception within vision and audition, but also across modalities.     

Psychological research online: report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)     

Religiosity, values, and horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism: a study of Turkey, the United States, and the Philippines

The authors examined the links between two dimensions that have been useful in understanding cross-cultural differences and similarities, namely, individualism-collectivism (I-C) and value orientations. The authors examined the relations and parallels between the two variables by directly relating them and examining the patterns of relations that both have with a third variable, religiosity. Participants were 475 college students from the Philippines, the United States, and Turkey who responded to measures of horizontal and vertical I-C, value orientations, and religiosity. The authors found partial support for the parallels between I-C and value types, particularly for collectivism and conservative values. Moreover, religiosity was associated positively with conservative values and collectivism, across all three cultures. The authors found individualism to also relate to openness-to-change values, though the patterns were not as consistent as those that they found between collectivism and conservation. Differences and similarities emerged in links of I-C-values to religiosity across the three samples.     

Suicidality and bereavement: complicated grief as psychiatric disorder presenting greatest risk for suicidality

The influence of complicated grief (CG) on suicidality among bereaved adults was examined. The Yale Evaluation of Suicidality scale and the Inventory of Complicated Grief-Revised were administered to 309 bereaved adults in face-to-face interviews conducted at baseline (6.2 months post-loss) and at follow-up (10.8 months post-loss). Cross-sectionally, CG was associated with a 6.58 (95% CI: 1.74-18.0) times greater likelihood of "high suicidality" at baseline, and an 11.30 (95% CI: 3.33-38.10) times greater risk of high suicidality at follow-up, after controlling for gender, race, major depressive disorder (MDD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and social support. Longitudinally, CG at baseline was associated with an 8.21 (95% CI: 2.49-27.0) times greater likelihood of high suicidality at follow-up, controlling for the above confounders. The study results indicate that CG substantially heightened the risk of suicidality after controlling for important confounders such as MDD and PTSD, suggesting that CG poses an independent psychiatric risk for suicidal thoughts and actions.