Loneliness predicts suicidal ideation and anxiety symptoms in long-term childhood cancer survivors

Background/ObjectiveLong-term childhood cancer survivors (CCS) are at risk for adverse late effects. However, not all of them are well understood. The present study addressed loneliness, a previously under-researched mental health risk in cancer survivor populations. We assessed the prevalence of loneliness and its impact on psychological symptoms over time. Method: A registry-based sample of N = 633 adult long-term CCS underwent medical and psychological assessments and took part in a follow-up survey 2.5 years later. Psychological symptoms (somatic, anxiety, depression symptoms, and suicidal ideation) were measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire. We calculated linear regression models of symptoms at follow-up to investigate the impact of loneliness over time (controlling for symptoms at baseline and relevant confounders). Results: Loneliness was reported by 17.70% of CCS. In multivariate linear regression analyses, loneliness was still predictive of more severe anxiety symptoms and suicidal ideation over two years later. Loneliness did not predict somatic and depression symptoms at follow-up (which increased with age). Conclusions: Loneliness affected a significant number of CCS and was a risk factor for persistent anxiety symptoms and suicidal ideation. The extent to which young cancer patients’ re-integration into society is successful could thus have important implications for well-being in adulthood.     

Situational Peer effects on Adolescents’ Alcohol Consumption: The Moderating Role of Supervision,Activity Structure,and Personal Moral Rules

Using five waves of unique space-time budget data, this study investigates the relevance of peer presence and behavior on adolescents’ alcohol consumption at a situational level, addressing to which degree these situational peer effects are moderated by the setting and by individual differences. Multilevel models, predicting the probability of alcohol consumption in a given hour, show that peers’ alcohol misuse is most relevant during unstructured activities while unsupervised. However, individuals differ in their susceptibility to these situational processes, with adolescents holding strong moral convictions against alcohol consumption being basically immune to situational peer effects, even during unstructured and unsupervised activities.     

East of West,West of East: a matter of global and local identity

Research is a very personal matter. On the basis of experiences in different countries with researchers from different cultures over many years, some observations will be described. The conceptual frame of this attempt is to look for anthropological universals and cultural specifics. Much can be learned from spatial representations in the arts. Whereas in the West since Renaissance time the central perspective has become dominant in visual art, in Eastern landscape paintings the “floating view” is typical. The claim that the central perspective corresponds to geometric laws and matches how we see the world is misleading for at least two reasons: It violates mechanisms of size constancy, and the visual world is spatially reduced in pictures to the perifoveal region only. Research on spatial attention has disclosed two different attentional systems being responsible either for near-fovea vision or for the far periphery. This fundamental principle as a global characteristic of visual processing is neglected in Western art. In Eastern art with a floating view geometric laws are violated, and different potential perspectives are integrated within a holistic pattern. The semantics of what shall be expressed becomes important irrespective of physical parameters. The latter may also create the unique phenomenon of becoming subjectively part of the picture confirming personal identity. Cultural specifics like in the arts (what one might expect) can surprisingly also be observed in theoretical considerations about visual processing. Whereas in the tradition of Western science visual percepts are built up with local elements like feature detectors, in an important Chinese theory global topological features are analyzed first. An important task of the brain is to create the identity of a percept on the basis of spatially and temporally distributed neural activities. It is, thus, an important theoretical question how to deal with the challenge to create and maintain the identity of a percept for some time. It is suggested that one should leave behind a monocausal reasoning for such explanations but adopt for analytical strategies the concept of complementarity as a generative principle.     

LAC-Depressionsstudie

The study on long-term therapy of chronic depression (LAC depression study) is one of the first prospective studies to compare psychoanalytic with cognitive behavioral long-term treatment and also investigates the impact of patient assignment by randomization and preference. This comprehensive multicenter study combines a naturalistic and a randomized controlled approach. The long-term follow-up is based on a broad spectrum of quantitative and qualitative research methods and is expected to contribute to the further development of psychotherapeutic treatment methods in this hard to treat patient group as well as to research on the effectiveness of long-term treatment. The background, design and current state of the assessment are presented. A total of 402 patients with chronic depression were included in the trial and the 1 and 2?year follow-up results are currently being analyzed.