Impact of a Suicide‐Specific Intervention within Inpatient Psychiatric Care: The Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality

A growing body of literature indicates that suicidal patients differ from other psychiatric patients with respect to specific psychological vulnerabilities and that suicide‐specific interventions may offer benefits beyond conventional care. This naturalistic controlled‐comparison trial (n = 52) examined outcomes of intensive psychiatric hospital treatment (mean length of stay 58.8 days), comparing suicidal patients who received individual therapy from clinicians utilizing the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) to patients whose individual therapists did not utilize CAMS. Propensity score matching was used to control for potential confounds, including age, sex, treatment unit, and severity of depression and suicidality. Results showed that both groups improved significantly over the course of hospitalization; however, the group receiving CAMS showed significantly greater improvement on measures specific to suicidal ideation and suicidal cognition. Results are discussed in terms of the potential advantages of treating suicide risk with a suicide‐specific intervention to make inpatient psychiatric treatment more effective in reducing risk for future suicidal crises.     

The Ethics of Economic Sanctions: Why Just War Theory is Not the Answer

Res Publica - On 24 December 2017, the UN Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions yet on North Korea. The measures, intended to thwart nuclear ambitions, are some of the most extensive...     

Using the Suicide Index Score to Predict Treatment Outcomes among Psychiatric Inpatients

For many suicidal people, the desire to die is moderated by a competing desire to live. This study aimed to demonstrate the ability of a wish‐to‐live versus wish‐to‐die index score to measure ambivalence and trichotomize suicidal inpatients into distinct stratified risk groups. Analyses revealed that index scores calculated for patients at treatment start significantly discriminated among the groups at index and uniquely predicted suicidal ideation, hopelessness, and depression scores across treatment. On average, patients with wish‐to‐live and wish‐to‐die orientations resolved suicidal ideation by discharge. Changes in suicidal ideation among ambivalently oriented patients were more variable. Clinical and research implications are discussed.     

Repeated Repetition Priming in Face Recognition

Prior exposure to an item can facilitate subsequent recognition of that item. This effect, known as repetition priming, has been found for the recognition of many stimuli including faces (Bruce & Young, 1986). Three experiments are reported, which investigated whether repetition priming is limited to the first repetition or whether subsequent repetitions continually act to increase the speed of face processing. Experiment 1 demonstrated that repetition can reduce categorization time for faces after the first exposure, and this effect is independent of practice effects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the relationship between reaction time and number of repetitions fits a negative power function. Experiment 3 investigated how delay affects this power function. Delay was found to decrease the negative gradient of the power curve. The effects of priming and delay are discussed in terms of the predictions made by Burton's (1994) interactive activation and competition with learning (IACL) model of face recognition and accounts of automaticity.