Comparison of Suicide Attempters and Decedents in the U.S. Army: A Latent Class Analysis

A clearer understanding of risk factors for suicidal behavior among soldiers is of principal importance to military suicide prevention. It is unclear whether soldiers who attempt suicide and those who die by suicide have different patterns of risk factors. As such, preventive efforts aimed toward reducing suicide attempts and suicides, respectively, may require different strategies. We conducted a latent class analysis (LCA) to examine classes of risk factors among suicide attempters (n = 1,433) and decedents (n = 424). Both groups were represented by three classes: (1) External/Antisocial Risk Factors, (2) Mental Health Risk Factors, and (3) No Pattern. These findings support the conceptualization that military suicide attempters and decedents represent a single population.     

Reciprocal overshadowing in flavour-aversion learning

The present experiments were concerned with the overshadowing by a novel flavour which preceded the pairing of a target flavour and toxicosis. This effect was demonstrated in Experiment I as was reciprocal overshadowing by a novel flavour which was interpolated between the target flavour and illness. Experiment 2 indicated that such overshadowing only occurred if the novel flavour was presented immediately prior to the target flavour; an interval of 10 min between the two abolished the effect. Experiment 3 indicated that the failure to observe overshadowing with a delay of 10 min between the two flavours was not due to a lack of association between the interfering flavour and illness. These data were interpreted as demonstrating that the introduction of the interfering flavour on the training day resulted in a perceptual generalisation decrement and a subsequent reduction in the aversion displayed to the target flavour.