Impact of Death by Suicide of Patients on Thai Psychiatrists

The objective of this study was to identify the impact of a patient's suicide on psychiatrists in Thailand. A confidential coded postal questionnaire survey was sent to 320 eligible psychiatrists; with a response rate of 52.18%). The results showed that 94 (56.28%) of responding psychiatrists had a patient die by suicide, consistent with high rates found in similar large‐scale studies in the United States and United Kingdom. Less than half (41.5%) of patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, 33% had a depressive disorder, and the others had a wide array of diagnoses. More than 50% of psychiatrists reported personally experiencing sadness, depression, hopelessness, and guilt; 74.5% reported professional reactions, most frequently a review of their practice (93.4% reported being more aggressive in assessment of suicidality). Respondents were diverse in their postvention; 90% of Thai psychiatrists reported that working through with colleagues was most helpful. Family and friends helped. A majority (72.4%) of psychiatrists prayed or did “merit” for the dead patient; 86.8% found it helpful. This finding suggests that cultural sensitivity may be needed to understand the impact of suicide on psychiatrists but also to its response.     

Behavioral Risk Assessment of the Guarded Suicidal Patient

Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are trained to assess patients by direct observation and examination. Short inpatient length of stay, brief outpatient visits, emergency room evaluations, and other time‐limited clinical settings require rapid assessment of suicide risk. Recognition of behavioral suicide risk factors can assist in the early identification of the guarded suicidal patient, thus avoiding total reliance on the patient's reporting.     

Risk Factors for Attempting Suicide in Prisoners

We wished to examine determinants of suicidal behavior in prisoners. 903 male prisoners had a psychiatric interview which included various psychometric tests. Suicide attempters were compared with prisoners who had never attempted suicide. Significantly more of the attempters had a history of psychiatric disorder, substance abuse, a family history of suicidal behavior, convictions for violent crime, had exhibited aggressive behavior in jail, and had higher BGLHA aggression scores. A similar pattern of risk factors was found for prisoners with suicidal ideation. A lifetime history of attempting suicide, or of having suicidal ideation, is frequent in prisoners. Risk factors include family, developmental, aggression, personality, psychiatric, and substance abuse factors.     

Context effects in visual word recognition: Lexical relatedness and syntactic context

In three experiments, we investigated how associative word-word priming effects in German depend on different types of syntactic context in which the related words are embedded. The associative relation always concerned a verb as prime and a noun as target. Prime word and target word were embedded in visually presented strings of words that formed either a correct sentence, a scrambled list of words, or a sentence in which the target noun and the preceding definite article disagreed in syntactic gender. In contrast to previous studies (O’Seaghdha, 1989; Simpson, Peterson, Casteel, & Burgess, 1989), associative priming effects were not only obtained in correct sentences but also in scrambled word lists. Associative priming, however, was not obtained when the definite article and the target noun disagreed in syntactic gender. The latter finding suggests that a rather local violation of syntactic coherence reduces or eliminates word-word priming effects. The results are discussed in the context of related work on the effect of gender dis-/agreement between a syntactic context and a target noun.     

Learning to Teach: The Acquisition and Maintenance of Teaching Skills

We reviewed 49 studies which used direct observation procedures to provide data on the effects of pre-service and inservice training in practical classroom teaching behaviors and skills. We found stronger effects for training packages which included classroom practice with performance feedback. The research provided conflicting evidence regarding the value of modeling, role-play, cueing systems, and contingency management components in practical skills training. The weakest training effects were those produced by microteaching, Minicourse, and protocol training packages. Twenty of the evaluations also provided follow-up data but the design of these studies did not permit any conclusions to be drawn regarding the training conditions which are necessary for the maintenance of newly acquired classroom teaching skills. We concluded that identification of the training conditions which are necessary for the maintenance of new teaching skills will require more thoughtful conceptualizations of maintenance and its measurement, and more carefully designed component analyses of those factors suggested by basic research as being necessary for maintenance.     

Two critical periods of protein and glycoprotein synthesis in memory consolidation for visual categorization learning in chicks

A protein synthesis inhibitor, anisomycin (ANI), and an inhibitor of glycoprotein synthesis, 2-deoxygalactose (2-D-gal), were used to investigate memory consolidation following visual categorization training in 2-day-old chicks. ANI (0.6 micromole/chick) and 2-D-gal (40 micromoles/chick) were injected intracerebrally at different time intervals from 1 hr before to 23 hr after the training. Retention was tested 24 hr post-training. Both ANI and 2-D-gal injections revealed two periods of memory sensitivity to pharmacological intervention. ANI impaired retention when injected from 5 min before to 30 min after the training or from 4 hr to 5 hr post-training, thus demonstrating that consolidation of long-term memory in this task requires two periods of protein synthesis. 2-D-Gal first produced an amnesia when it was injected in the interval from 5 min before to 5 min after the training. Injections made between 5 min and 5 hr post-training were without effect on the retention. The second period of memory impairment by 2-D-gal started at 5 hr post-training and lasted until 21 hr after the training. Administration of 2-D-gal made 23 hr after the training did not influence retention in the test at either 24 hr or 26 hr. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that two waves of protein and glycoprotein synthesis are necessary for the formation of long-term memory. The prolonged duration of performance impairment by 2-D-gal in the present task might reflect an extended memory consolidation period for a categorization form of learning.     

The function of concrete emotions in rational decision making

The present study investigates the role of anticipated concrete emotions in preferential decision making. Concrete emotions are conceptualized as a special set of attributes in a multi-attribute utility framework. It is argued that emotions cannot be reduced to patterns of objective attribute values. It is hypothesized that decisions are determined by both concrete emotions and objective attributes. Furthermore, the relative impact of emotions is hypothesized to vary with characteristics of the decision task, namely, the decision domain (persons vs. cities), the similarity of the decision options (similar vs. dissimilar), and the response mode (rating vs. ranking). Four sets of decision options were presented to subjects on a questionnaire. For each option, subjects indicated a preference rating, a ranking of the option within its set, the intensity of four concrete emotions, and the degree to which the option is characterized by four objective attributes. Regression analyses show that including emotions as predictors significantly increases the portion of explained variance of preferences. The relative impact of emotions is moderated by the response mode. Factor analyses yield two independent factors of positive and negative emotions. Surprisingly, only positive emotions are significantly correlated with preferences. We conclude that concrete emotions are a necessary and non-redundant part of the decision process.     

Judgments of differences and ratios of numerals

Each subject performed two tasks, dividing a line segment so that either (a) theratio of subjective lengths corresponded to the ratio of the magnitudes of two numerals or (b) thedifference in length was proportional to the numerical difference. Had subjects actually performed two operations on the same scale, the responses would have been nonmonotonically related. Instead, data for the two tasks were nearly identical and ordinally compatible with either a ratio or a subtractive model. The ratio model implied scale values for numerals that were a positively accelerated function of numerical value, inconsistent with previous results. With a nonlinear response function for graphic length, the subtractive model fit well, yielding scale values that were a negatively accelerated function of numerical value and a linear function of previously obtained scales. These results, together with other recent findings, suggest that subjects may perform the same operation in spite of instructions to judge “ratios” or “differences” and that this operation can be best represented by a subtractive model.