Suicide ideation as a predictor of treatment outcomes in cognitive-behavioral therapy for unipolar mood disorders

Background/Objective: Suicide ideation is common in depressed patients. However, no studies to date have examined whether pretreatment suicide ideation is associated with poorer outcomes after cognitive-behavioral therapy for adult depression. Method: 475 depressed outpatients (age: M = 39.9 years, SD = 11.71; 60.2% female) took part in a pre-treatment and a post-treatment assessment. Pre-treatment suicide ideation measured with the BDI suicide item was considered as a predictor of treatment outcomes – controlling for age, gender, number of attended therapy sessions, as well as pre-treatment depression severity. Results: Hierarchical regression revealed that age, gender, number of completed therapy sessions and depression severity at baseline could explain 25% of the variance in post-treatment BDI-scores. Adding suicide ideation significantly improved the amount of variance explained to 27%. Treatment outcomes were worse for patients with more severe depression, suicidal patients, patients receiving more therapy-sessions and older patients. Conclusions: Suicide ideation added only little incremental variance to the prospective prediction of post-treatment depression severity. Depressed patients with suicide ideation can attain almost as good treatment outcomes as patients without suicide ideation, which is a clinically encouraging result.     

Processing overlap-dependent distractor dilution rather than perceptual target load determines attentional selectivity

The perceptual load theory of attentional selection argues that the degree to which distractors interfere with target processing is determined by the “perceptual load” (or discrimination difficulty) of target processing: when perceptual load is low, distractors interfere to a greater extent than when it is high. A well-known exception is load-independent interference effects from face distractors during processing of name targets. This finding was reconciled with load theory by proposing distinct processing resources for faces versus names. In the present study, we revisit this effect to test (a) whether increasing the processing overlap (perceptual, lexical, conceptual) between potential targets and distractors would reinstate the classic load effect, and (b) whether this data pattern could be better explained by load theory or by a rival account that argues that distractor dilution rather than target load determines the degree of distractor interference. Over four experiments, we first replicate the original finding and then show that load effects grow with increasing processing overlap between potential targets and distractors. However, by adding dilution conditions, we also show that these processing overlap dependent modulations of distractor interference can be explained by the distractor dilution perspective but not by perceptual load theory. Thus, our findings support a processing overlap dilution account of attentional selection.     

The Transportation Scale–Short Form (TS–SF)

One popular concept to capture the experience of being immersed into the world of a story is that of transportation. This article examines the factorial validity of the Transportation Scale (TS) and introduces a short and psychometrically sound alternative for the assessment of transportation. Exploratory bifactor modeling in Study 1 (N = 179) provided support for the hypothesized factor structure of the original TS with three facets and a general transportation factor. Based on these analyses, a six-item short version of the scale, the Transportation Scale–Short Form (TS–SF), was developed. Study 2 (N = 131 and N = 246) as well as Study 3 (N = 301) corroborated the short form's factorial structure, reliability, and validity.