Self-reported suicidal behavior in Dutch secondary education students

From nearly 10,000 secondary education students in The Netherlands, aged 14-20, data were collected on the prevalence of suicide attempts and recent thoughts about suicide and death. In this sample, 3.3% of the girls and 1.3% of the boys indicated that they had attempted suicide. The youngest students already reported as many attempts as the eldest, which is remarkable. Differences between boys and girls and between various types of schools were not substantial. We also found that 5.2% of the girls and 2.2% of the boys currently had thoughts of suicide. Again, there was no substantial difference as regards sex, type of school, and age. There was, however, a (small) difference between boys and girls concerning thoughts of death--namely, 9.3% of the girls versus 4.8% of the boys.     

Stabilität posttraumatischer Intrusionen bei Polizeibeamten

Objectives

This prospective study examined the course of posttraumatic symptoms of police officers across a time span of 12 months (T1: directly, T2: 6 months and T3: 12 months) after confrontation with an event of potentially traumatic nature while on duty.

Method

A total of 50 police officers were diagnosed 6 months after the event (T2) using a structured interview (SCID-I and SCID-II). The global functioning was operationalized at T1 and T2 by the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (GAF) and the degree of impairment by the Impairment Score (IS). Furthermore, the intensity of posttraumatic symptoms was assessed at T1 and T2 by the Impact of Event Scale - Revised (IES-R). After 12 months (T3) the intensity of posttraumatic symptoms of 40 police officers was assessed again by a mail enquiry.

Results

Of the police officers 14 (28%) received the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after 6 months. In the PTSD group a significant drop in the level of functioning and a significant increase in the degree of psychiatric impairment could be found. Concerning the stability of the intensity of posttraumatic intrusions (IES-R subscale intrusions) the PTSD group showed in comparison to the non-PTSD group a slower decrease of symptoms over the period of 12 months (ordinal interaction) and no such strong amelioration of the symptoms as for avoidance and hyperarousal could be found.

Conclusions

Although the police force are, due to pre-employment screening and the professional training, both mentally and physically healthy in comparison with the general population, the results point at the risk potential of exceptional events for police officers. Due to the fact that the intensity of posttraumatic intrusions remained on a relatively stable level it seems indispensable to render these police officers further professional support.     

Fallgruppensystem der "diagnosis related groups" in Deutschland

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Blinks of the mind: memory effects of attentional processes

If 2 words are presented successively within 500 ms, subjects often miss the 2nd word. This attentional blink reflects a limited capacity to attend to incoming information. Memory effects were studied for words that fell within an attentional blink. Unrelated words were presented in a modified rapid serial visual presentation task at varying stimulus-onset asynchronies, and attention was systematically manipulated. Subsequently, recognition, repetition priming, and semantic priming were measured separately in 3 experiments. Unidentified words showed no recognition and no repetition priming. However, blinked (i.e., unidentified) words did produce semantic priming in related words. When, for instance, ring was blinked, it was easier to subsequently identify wedding than apple. In contrast, when the blinked word itself was presented again, it was not easier to identify than an unrelated word. Possible interpretations of this paradoxical finding are discussed.     

Neural correlates of the first-person-perspective

Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one's own mental and bodily states. First-person-perspective taking is not sufficient, but necessary for human self-consciousness. To assign a first-person-perspective is to center one's own multimodal experiential space upon one's own body, thus operating in an egocentric reference frame. The brain regions involved in assigning first-person-perspective comprise medial prefrontal, medial parietal and lateral temporoparietal cortex. These empirical findings complement recent neurobiologically oriented theories of self-consciousness which focus on the relation between the subject and his/her environment by supplying a neural basis for its key components.     

The effects of advance location cueing on latencies in a single-letter recognition task

Summary This study investigates facilitating effects of foreknowledge of position in single-letter recognition tasks with latency as the dependent variable. Three kinds of cue are used: symbolic cues, location cues and neutral cues. For the effects of symbolic and location cues the following predictions are derived from the literature: increasing benefits with increasing SOAs for symbolic cues and constant benefits with increasing SOAs for location cues.Cue-detection times and letter-recognition times with the different cues were determined in three experiments. In the experiments the same general paradigm was used. In Experiment 1 cue-detection times appeared to differ as a function of cue eccentricity; in Experiments 2 and 3 cues were adjusted in such a way that cue-detection times were about the same. Cues reliably indicated the target position in Experiments 1 and 2; in Experiment 3 cue validity was reduced to 50%.The cueing results conformed partly to the predictions. All experiments suggested a small benefit under symbolic cueing and a larger benefit under location cueing. Except for the smallest SOA used, for both types of cue benefits were invariant over SOAs. The implications of these results in relation to other single-letter recognition studies are briefly discussed.     

Response dependency and processing dependency of line orientation and position in a single-item task

The relation between the processing of line-orientation information and position information was studied in two single-item recognition experiments with percentage correct as the dependent variable. In Experiment 1 subjects had to name the position and the orientation of a small oriented line segment in an otherwise empty field. In Experiment 2 subjects had to indicate in addition whether a line segment had been presented or not. Both experiments showed that orientation responses and position responses are highly and positively correlated. Inconsistencies in the results of two equivalent signal-detection analyses in Experiment 2 are interpreted as indicating that in the present type of task subjects often have no information about the target and have to guess. It is concluded that in such a situation a high-threshold model (subjects respond correctly if adequate information is available, and otherwise guess) is best suited to describe the results. After an appropriate correction for guessing, no orientation processing without position processing was found.