Heroin addicts reporting previous heroin overdoses also report suicide attempts

Nonfatal heroin overdoses and suicide attempts are both common among heroin addicts, but there is limited knowledge about the association between them. The sample in the present study consisted of 149 regular heroin users in Malmö, Sweden. Out of these 98 had taken an unintentional heroin overdose at some time and 51 had made at least one attempt to commit suicide (but not using heroin). Suicide attempts were significantly more common among those who had taken unintentional overdoses as compared with those who had never taken any overdose (p < 0.01). The more overdoses, the greater the risk of suicide attempt.     

The effects on priming of word frequency, number of repetitions, and delay depend on the magnitude of priming

Conflicting findings with respect to the effects of experimental manipulations on priming have been reported in previous studies. It is argued that, in many priming tasks, large amounts of task-relevant information are available from various sources, and that, therefore, the information available from a specific study episode will have only a small impact on overall performance level. Under such circumstances, high levels of baseline performance and small priming effects will be observed. The experiments reported here investigated the hypothesis that a high baseline performance in informationprocessing tasks that are used to measure priming may constrain priming effects. In a series of wordnaming experiments, perceptual difficulty and, therefore, baseline performance was manipulated. Under easy conditions, priming effects were relatively small and were not affected by word frequency, spaced repetition, or delay. Under more difficult conditions, priming effects were larger, and significant effects of all of the above-mentioned experimental manipulations were observed. Under conditions that produced the largest priming effects, a significant relationship between priming and explicit-memory performance could be observed. In the last experiment, it was shown that the characteristics of the retrieval task can substantially affect the magnitude of priming. It is argued that priming effects should be considered to reflect interactions between memory traces and the information-processing components of the priming task.     

Radical Orthodoxy on Catholicism,Protestantism and Liberalism/Liberality: On the Use of Historical Narratives and Quantitative Methods in Political Theology

Political theology assumes or depends, implicitly or explicitly, on historical narratives and empirical claims. For theologians making historical, socio‐cultural and economic claims an interdisciplinary use of several different methods is helpful, including a theologically and philosophically informed combination of historical narratives with social and economic quantitative methods. This argument is fleshed out by a critical analysis of historical and sociological claims about Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Protestantism in relation to liberalism and liberality, which are central to the argument of John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s book The Politics of Virtue. They find the roots of an increasingly untenable abstract atomistic liberalism both in late medieval and Protestant (especially Calvinist) theology as well as in the dissenting nonconforming traditions that worked for the disestablishment of the Church. This very disestablishment is part of what creates modern liberalism. This article both sketches a partly alternative history to the one Milbank and Pabst provide, pointing to the role of creative minorities in certain dissenting Protestant churches and movements for the emergence of the type of liberality Milbank and Pabst defend, and tests these claims against quantitative social science studies on democracy, social trust, and corruption.     

The cognitive neuroscience of creativity

This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is proposed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous generation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evidence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this article. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age. Implications for the arts and sciences are briefly discussed.     

Fear and the amygdala: manipulation of awareness generates differential cerebral responses to phobic and fear-relevant (but nonfeared) stimuli

Rapid response to danger holds an evolutionary advantage. In this positron emission tomography study, phobics were exposed to masked visual stimuli with timings that either allowed awareness or not of either phobic, fear-relevant (e.g., spiders to snake phobics), or neutral images. When the timing did not permit awareness, the amygdala responded to both phobic and fear-relevant stimuli. With time for more elaborate processing, phobic stimuli resulted in an addition of an affective processing network to the amygdala activity, whereas no activity was found in response to fear-relevant stimuli. Also, right prefrontal areas appeared deactivated, comparing aware phobic and fear-relevant conditions. Thus, a shift from top-down control to an affectively driven system optimized for speed was observed in phobic relative to fear-relevant aware processing.     

Postural control in otolith disorders

It was the aim of the present paper to investigate the influence of otolith disorders on human postural control by different methods. The 33 patients of our study had undergone a minor head injury and suffered subsequently from an utricular or sacculo-utricular disorder as evidenced by vestibular evoked myogenic potential recordings and eccentric rotation recordings of the otolith-ocular responses. Postural control was assessed by performing stance/gait tests (standard balance deficit test, SBDT) and by evaluating trunk sway (using angular velocity sensors). Moreover, classical tests of the posterior column of the spinal tract (Romberg/Unterberger) and the dynamic posturography (sensory organization test, SOT) were included. It could be shown that SBDT tasks with reduced proprioceptive and visual cues (e.g. standing on foam, eyes closed) are most sensitive for an otolith disorder. The patients showed an increased trunk sway in the pitch plane (i.e. linear motion as adequate utricular stimulus) and an increase in sway velocities (i.e. tilting movements as adequate saccular stimulus) compared to controls. The SOT was most sensitive for combined (sacculo-utricular) otolith disorders (78%) while vestibulospinal tests are not enough sensitive. In essence, otolith disorders evidently impair human postural control and have been possibly underestimated as a source of posttraumatic postural imbalance as yet.     

Are oral,obsessive, and hysterical personality traits related to disturbed eating patterns? A general population study of 6,313 men and women

In this study, we explored 3 psychodynamically defined personality traits as predictors of eating disturbances among men and women in the general population. The Basic Character Inventory (Torgersen, 1980) was used to measure oral, obsessive, and hysteria traits along with the Eating Disturbance Scale (Rosenvinge et al., 2001). Oral personality factors were the primary predictors of eating disturbances in both genders-both men and women with eating disturbances tended to score highly on measures of emotional instability, self-doubt, compliance, and sensitivity. In women, the presence of oral personality factors in addition to the absence of the obsessive factor Parsimony accounted for 16% of the variance in eating disturbances. In men, oral personality factors in addition to the presence of the hysterical factor Imagination accounted for 13% of the variance in eating disturbances. This last finding suggests that, in addition to oral characteristics, men with eating disturbances may exhibit dissociative traits and imaginative absorption.     

Passive responses to interpersonal conflict at work amplify employee strain

Interpersonal conflict at work correlates with stress related outcomes such as psychological strain and exhaustion. Consistent with conflict theory, we argued that this relationship is moderated by the way conflict is managed. Cross-sectional data collected in The Netherlands, from students with part-time jobs (Sample 1, n = 104), healthcare workers (Sample 2, n = 191), and mid-level administrative personnel (Sample 3, n = 161) indeed revealed that conflict was related to psychological strain and exhaustion especially when interpersonal conflict was managed passively (through avoiding and yielding). Active conflict management strategies (forcing and problem solving) did not moderate the relationship between interpersonal conflict and employee strain. Implications for conflict theory, for future research, and for practice are discussed.