Improvements to Suicide Prevention Training for Prison Staff in England and Wales

Suicide prevention training for the prison service in England and Wales has been criticized. STORM is a package emphasizing the practice and review of interactions with suicidal persons and was evaluated in a pilot study for use in prisons. Trainees completed questionnaires immediately before and after training and at 6 to 8 months follow‐up. Training significantly improved attitudes, knowledge, and confidence, and improvements were maintained at follow‐up. Satisfaction with training was very high. STORM was successfully adapted for prison settings, and showed good effects among staff trained. It should be provided to the wider prison estate, with regular refresher training.     

How are pictures registered in memory?

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that pictorial memory is much less dependent on rehearsal than is verbal memory. Experiment I examined incidental learning since this is assumed to reflect learning with little or no rehearsal. Following a classification task, intentional and incidental learning for pictures and for words was compared. The superiority of pictorial memory was especially marked in incidental learning. Experiment II showed that this result was not due to differences in the amount of processing required to classify pictures and words. RTs to classify words and pictures did not differ, and incidental learning was again superior for pictures. In Experiment III rehearsal opportunity was restricted by a concurrent task during presentation of word and picture lists, and the decrement was very much greater for word learning than for picture learning. It was concluded that manipulation of rehearsal opportunity has relatively little effect on pictorial memory.     

A fertile matrix: the birth of the Forensic Psychotherapy Society

This paper traces some aspects of the fertile matrix within which, over many years, the application of a psychoanalytic perspective to clinical work with the most severely mentally ill, difficult and at times frightening patients in secure and community settings has evolved and now led to the recent inauguration of the Forensic Psychotherapy Society (FPS), a new Member Institution of the British Psychoanalytic Council. The Society provides both a framework for a national, multidisciplinary professional training in psychodynamic forensic psychotherapy and the potential launching pad for an active post-qualification organisation supporting CPD and all other forms of professional development. The particular contributions to the birth of the FPS of the Forensic Psychotherapy Department at West London Mental Health NHS Trust, partly because we know it best but also because it is part of the largest forensic psychiatric service in the United Kingdom, are described.     

Perceptual Load Induces Inattentional Blindness in Drivers

Perceptual load theory states that the level of perceptual load in a task predicts the processing of task‐irrelevant information. High perceptual load has been shown to result in increased inattentional blindness; however, there is little evidence that this extends beyond artificial computer‐based tasks to real‐world behavior. In this study, we adapted a typical load‐blindness paradigm for use in a driving simulator. Forty‐two drivers performed a series of gap perception tasks where they judged if their vehicle could fit between two parked vehicles, with the task imposing either low or high perceptual load. Awareness for an unexpected pedestrian or animal at the side of the road was found to be significantly lower in the high perceptual load condition. This study is the first to demonstrate perceptual load effects on awareness in an applied setting and has important implications for road safety and future applied research on the perceptual load model.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.