Suicide attempts in israel: age by gender analysis of a national emergency departments database

An analysis of all emergency department admissions in Israel classified as an attempted suicide in the years 1996-2002 was done to examine attempted suicide rates by age and gender with particular attention to adolescents and young adults. Gender differences in attempted suicide rates were significant only during adolescence and young adulthood, ages 13 to 26. The highest rate for females was 3 years earlier than the highest rate for males. The results lead to the conclusion that women do not attempt suicide more than men, except for 13-26 year olds.     

Is the Interdependent Self More Sensitive to Question Context Than the Independent Self? Self-Construal and the Observation of Conversational Norms

Question answering requires close attention to the common ground to determine what the questioner wants to know. Because attentiveness to others is more likely to be a self-defining goal when the self is thought of as interdependent with others rather than independent of others, we predicted that self-construal influences attentiveness to the common ground. In Experiment 1, participants' temporary self-construal was manipulated through a priming technique. As predicted, interdependence-primed participants were more likely than independence-primed participants to take the recipient's knowledge into account and avoided providing redundant information in a self-administered questionnaire. Drawing on chronic differences in self-construal, Experiment 2 replicated these findings with participants from independent (Germany) and interdependent (China) cultures. Throughout, participants' differential attentiveness to the common ground resulted in differential question order effects, raising important methodological issues for cross-cultural research.     

Antipsychotic dose modulates behavioral and neural responses to feedback during reinforcement learning in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is characterized by an abnormal dopamine system, and dopamine blockade is the primary mechanism of antipsychotic treatment. Consistent with the known role of dopamine in reward processing, prior research has demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia exhibit impairments in reward-based learning. However, it remains unknown how treatment with antipsychotic medication impacts the behavioral and neural signatures of reinforcement learning in schizophrenia. The goal of this study was to examine whether antipsychotic medication modulates behavioral and neural responses to prediction error coding during reinforcement learning. Patients with schizophrenia completed a reinforcement learning task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The task consisted of two separate conditions in which participants accumulated monetary gain or avoided monetary loss. Behavioral results indicated that antipsychotic medication dose was associated with altered behavioral approaches to learning, such that patients taking higher doses of medication showed increased sensitivity to negative reinforcement. Higher doses of antipsychotic medication were also associated with higher learning rates (LRs), suggesting that medication enhanced sensitivity to trial-by-trial feedback. Neuroimaging data demonstrated that antipsychotic dose was related to differences in neural signatures of feedback prediction error during the loss condition. Specifically, patients taking higher doses of medication showed attenuated prediction error responses in the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex. These findings indicate that antipsychotic medication treatment may influence motivational processes in patients with schizophrenia.     

Interorganisational Relationships in Times of Decline: Implications for Organisational Resilience

We seek to delineate the processes by which work relationships between employees from buyer and supplier organisations can enhance the supplier's resilience. A micro-foundations perspective is taken to study the effect of individual-level relationships on these higher-level processes in the context of a declining organisation—a supplier that has been experiencing a period of size decline, following the transition of some of its stronger competitors to a more advanced generation of products. The findings of a qualitative study indicate that the work relationships built between employees from the supplier and the customers around current product and services offerings can help a declining organisation to cope with setbacks and difficulties. Expanding on the three C's of hardiness (challenge, control, and commitment), we discuss the implications of our research for the study of resilience through the lens of interorganisational work relationships and highlight the different pathways that build these coping and adaptation qualities for the organisation. Specifically, the challenge of transitioning to new products can negatively influence these work relationships unless the supplier organisation provides supportive context by allowing employees to retain the necessary control over what it takes to serve their customers. Furthermore, the supplier should display strong commitment to integrate the new offerings while customers need to mirror this commitment by developing a willingness to adopt these new offerings by the supplier. The findings further suggest that these new offerings can be translated into higher levels of adaptation.     

Searching high and low: domestic dogs’ understanding of solidity

Animal Cognition - Physical reasoning appears central to understanding how the world works, suggesting adaptive function across the animal kingdom. However, conclusive evidence for inferential...