Adverse childhood experiences in substance use disorder outpatients of a Lebanese addiction center

Childhood adversities (CAs) are well reviewed in mental health and addiction research internationally. However, these variables have not been studied within the framework of addiction in the Middle East region. The present study reports the prevalence of Childhood Adversities in a sample of outpatients seeking treatment for Substance Use Disorder. We used the Adverse Childhood Experiences – International Questionnaire (ACE-IQ) to map out the prevalence of childhood adversities. The studied population was composed of a clinical outpatient sample that met criteria for substance use disorder (N = 144). Results indicated that almost all the sample reported having experienced at least 1 CA, whereby three quarters of the clinical sample reported experiencing 6 or more adversities. Childhood adversities are highly prevalent in a Lebanese substance use disorder population which raises the need for better screening strategies and more understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences in this specific population     

Rule-based learning impairment in rats with lesions to the dorsal striatum.

The present study examined the effects of lesions to the dorsal striatum (DS) in Sprague-Dawley rats, when tested on the acquisition and successive shifts in the position of a goal arm in an eight-arm radial maze. In the procedure we used, rats had to retrieve the location of one baited arm among the eight arms of the maze after it had just been presented as a sample during a forced trial. After attainment of a fixed learning criterion, rats were submitted to five successive shifts in the goal location. Results showed that DS rats were able to learn the position of the goal arm during the acquisition phase as efficiently as sham-operated rats. In contrast, when the position of the goal arm was shifted, although DS rats were able to learn its new position, they made significantly more errors and required more sessions to reach criterion than sham-operated rats. These results suggested that both groups did not solve the task using the same behavioral strategy. The analysis of responses made suggested that sham-operated rats solved the task using the pairing rule between the forced and the free run (matching-to-sample rule), while DS rats solved the task using only visuo-spatial processing. These data therefore suggest that the dorsal striatum plays an important role in rule-learning ability.     

Knowledge About Parenting as a Predictor of Behavioral Discipline Practices between Mothers and Fathers

Psychological Studies - Knowledge of child-rearing and child development is of the utmost importance to optimal parenting and child well-being. Most of what is known about parenting knowledge is...     

Applying the concept of lifestyle in association with aggression and violence in Greek cohabitating couples

The current study investigated the role of lifestyle as a significant factor related to the aggression and violence between cohabitating partners. Based on previous research, lifestyle was defined as a special reflection of socialization into society and working life, where different lifestyles should also be able to produce different patterns of socialization into people's roles as partners. It was found that gender and years of cohabitating were significantly related to Emotional aggression and Sexual violence; lifestyle patterns were associated with specific forms of violence. More specifically, the lifestyles of Pleasure & Elegance and the one of Culture-Intellectualism were found to promote Emotional aggression. Also, the lifestyle of Yuppies/Workaholic and that of Physical activities stimulated the appearance of Sexual violence between partners. Moreover, individuals with Tradition-Religiousness lifestyle were more likely to show lower levels of Physical & Sexual violence while the adherents of the Substance abuse lifestyle pattern appeared to have an inclination towards Physical & Sexual Violence. Finally, the occurrence of one form of violent behaviour was likely to be related to the other forms of violent behaviour.     

Emergency Research without Consent under Polish Law

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only (therapeutic experiment consists of the introduction by the physician of new or only partially proven diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive methods in order to achieve direct benefit to the health of the patients, and it can be carried out when hitherto applied methods were ineffective or their effectiveness was insufficient). (2). Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject's life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject's participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject's consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject's autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: (1) the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and (2) informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible (requirement of obtaining deferred consent). A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible.     

Rethinking Gibbard’s Riverboat Argument

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is rash by proposing a new diagnosis of what is going on in Gibbard’s argument. We also provide empirical evidence in support of our proposal.