Improving the validity and reliability of medical-legal certifications of suicide

On a very basic level, those who study suicide are either explicitly or implicitly concerned with the certification of suicide deaths by coroners and medical examiners. Although many authors have questioned the reliability and validity of officially reported rates, these statistics continue to be quoted as fact--a potentially problematic practice for researchers who seek accurate and true causative factors for suicidal behavior. In relation to this topic, this article provides an overview of the existing vital statistics registry system and describes and proposes innovations that could ultimately improve the quality of officially reported suicide statistics.     

The kidnapping of W. S. Gilbert

Gilbert's probable screen memory of having been kidnapped, along with his persistent preoccupations with babyhood, remembering and forgetting, stress the intensity of his struggle against remembering the painful experiences from his childhood. His creative efforts function as an obsessional defense; they divert his attention from the experiences themselves to a fascination with the process of remembering and forgetting, while the painful affects are reversed into playful, good-natured humor. The results are some of his most treasured anecdotes. Watson (1918) quotes Gilbert's story of the amateur burglar who badly bungled an attempted robbery and ended up being arrested and jailed under the most humiliating circumstances. For years afterward, every time he though of the incident, he felt wretchedly uncomfortable, and he tried vainly to drive the occurrence from his mind. The story concludes with a statement which, remarks Watson, only Gilbert could have written: "Gradually one detail after another slipped from my recollection, and one lovely morning last May I found to my intense delight that I had absolutely forgotten all about it" (p. 94).     

Neural and behavioral effects of interference resolution in depression and rumination

Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about their depression and their life situations, impairing their concentration and performance on daily tasks. We examined whether rumination might be due to a deficit in the ability to expel negative information from short-term memory (STM), and fMRI was used to examine the neural structures involved in this ability. MDD and healthy control (HC) participants were tested using a directed-forgetting procedure in a short-term item recognition task. As predicted, MDD participants had more difficulty than did HCs in expelling negative, but not positive, words from STM. Overall, the neural networks involved in directed forgetting were similar for both groups, but the MDDs exhibited more spatial variability in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (a region critical for inhibiting irrelevant information), which may contribute to their relative inability to inhibit negative information.     

A cross-sectional evaluation of the factorial invariance of anxiety sensitivity in adolescents and young adults

This study examined the cross-sectional factorial invariance of anxiety sensitivity in an ethnically diverse sample of adolescents (n = 173; mean age 15.5 years) and young adults (n = 291; mean age 20.1 years). Research in adult and youth samples suggests that anxiety sensitivity is best understood as a hierarchical construct with several lower-order factors. Factor models based on previous research using both adult and youth samples were compared and a hierarchical model with three lower-order factors provided the best fit to the data. Results supported the hypothesis that the factor structure of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index was invariant across age and gender. The factor scores also demonstrated differential correlations with symptoms of anxiety and depression. Results are discussed with regard to construct validation and understanding the structure of anxiety sensitivity in youth.     

Nonword repetition abilities of children who stutter: an exploratory study

Past research has suggested that children who stutter (CWS) may have less well-developed language skills than fluent children, and that such relative linguistic deficiencies may play a role in precipitating their disfluencies. However, data to support this position are primarily derived from results of standardized diagnostic inventories, which are originally designed to identify frank language impairment. Nonword repetition has emerged as a more sensitive measure of children's linguistic abilities. In this exploratory study, eight CWS (mean age 5:10, range 4:3-8:4) were compared to eight normally developing children (ND) (mean age 5:9, range 4:1-8:4) in their ability to repeat the nonwords of the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition. CWS performed more poorly than NS on measures of Number of Words Correct and Number of Phoneme Errors at all nonword lengths, although statistical differences were observed only for 3-syllable nonwords. When lexical stress of the nonwords was varied to a non-English stress pattern, all participants repeated the stimuli with less accuracy, and the CWS again exhibited more errors than NS. Fluency for the CWS group did not change systematically with increasing nonword length. These preliminary findings are interpreted in light of a number of extant theories of the underlying deficit in childhood stuttering. We conclude that children who stutter may have diminished ability to remember and/or reproduce novel phonological sequences, and that further investigation into this possibility may shed light on the emergence and characteristics of childhood stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: After completing this activity, the learner will: (1) be able to evaluate the research support for a linguistic component to stuttering; (2) describe the use of nonword repetition as an experimental and assessment device with children with SLI and children who stutter; (3) suggest future directions for research to further refine the potential role that linguistic encoding plays in the etiology and persistence of stuttering.