Comorbidity between SCARED anxiety factors and depressive symptomatology in 8- to 12-year-old children

The aim of this study was to examine the comorbidity between the SCARED anxiety factors and depressive symptoms in 8-12-year-old children. Participants were 792 girls and 715 boys, who completed: the 41-ítem version of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorder (SCARED), the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and a Socio-demographic questionnaire. Of the sample, 47% showed anxiety symptoms and 11.5% showed depressive symptoms. Heterotypic comorbidity was 82% in children at risk of depression and 20% in children at risk of anxiety. Homotypic Comorbidity between anxiety factors was 87%. Homotypic comorbidity and heterotypic comorbidity were high; their early detection will prevent the continuity of an anxious disorder and the development of depression.     

Avoidant coping in panic disorder: a yohimbine biological challenge study

Abstract

Few studies have addressed whether the use of avoidance-oriented coping strategies is related to the development of panic in patients with panic disorder(PD). Self-report, clinician-rated, and physiological data were collected from 42 individuals who participated in a yohimbine biological challenge study, performed under double-blind, placebo-controlled conditions. Participants included 20 healthy controls and 22 currently symptomatic patients who met DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for PD. Consistent with prediction, patients with PD who had higher perceived efficacy of avoidance-oriented strategies in reducing anxiety-related thoughts reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the yohimbine challenge condition as compared to the placebo. Further, patients with PD who had more fear of cognitive dyscontrol, cardiovascular symptoms, and publicly observable anxiety also reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the challenge. Healthy controls who had more fear of cardiovascular symptoms similarly reported increased severity in panic symptoms during the challenge. No effects were found for heart rate response to the challenge agent. These results provide support for the role of avoidance-oriented coping strategies and fear of anxiety-related symptoms as risk and maintenance factors in the development of panic symptoms, particularly within a biological challenge model.     

Visual Object Agnosia without Alexia or Prosopagnosia: Arguments for Separate Knowledge Stores

We review the points raised by Farah (this issue) in her discussion of the paper by Rumiati, Humphreys, Riddoch, and Bateman (1994), in which a case study was presented of a patient, Mr W., with visual object agnosia without either prosopagnosia or alexia. We reiterate the argument that Mr W. had impaired stored knowledge about the visual characteristics of objects, and that this was more severe than his deficit at a semantic level. In addition, we summarize supporting evidence from another patient (Humphreys & Rumiati, submitted), who showed the same pattern of breakdown as Mr W. We suggest that stored visual knowledge can be specific to the form of stimulus (words, objects, and faces), that these different forms of knowledge may be represented in distinct neural areas, and that agnosia can result after damage to stimulus-specific sites of knowledge representation.     

NIM: A Web-based Swiss army knife to select stimuli for psycholinguistic studies

NIM is Web-based software developed to help experimenters with some of the usual tasks carried out in psycholinguistic studies. It allows the user to search for words according to several variables, such as length, matching substrings, lexical frequency, or part of speech, in English, Spanish, and Catalan. NIM also provides the user with the possibilities to obtain different word metrics, such as lexical frequency, length, and part of speech; to find intralanguage and cross-language lexical neighbors; and to get control words for critical stimuli. Regardless of the language used, the program also enables the user to get the orthographic similarity between word pairs and to identify repeated items in lists of experimental stimuli. NIM is free and is publicly available at http://psico.fcep.urv.cat/utilitats/nim/.