Community responses to a suicidal crisis: implications for suicide prevention

We conducted a cross‐sectional, random‐digit‐dial survey to evaluate public responses to a hypothetical question: “If someone you knew was suicidal, what would you do first?” Younger people were more likely to call a suicide hotline, and less likely to go to an emergency room (ER) or call 911; immigrants (in the U.S. <15 years) were more likely to call 911, and less likely to call a suicide hotline; African Americans were more likely to go to the ER and call 911; Hispanics were more likely to call 911 but less likely to call a suicide hotline. These results suggest that public messages about hotlines and emergency options for suicidal patients need to be tailored to relevant population characteristics including age, education, ethnicity, and language preferences.     

Altruistic Celibacy, Kin-Cue Manipulation, and The Development of Religious Institutions

Abstract. Building on a model first proposed by Gary Johnson, it is hypothesized that religious institutions demanding celibacy and other forms of altruism from members take advantage of human predispositions to favor genetic relatives in order to maintain and reinforce these desired behaviors in non‐kin settings. This is accomplished through the institutionalization of practices to manipulate cues through which such relatives are regularly identified. These cues are association, phenotypic similarity, and the use of kin terms. In addition, the age of recruits and their contact with actual kin are factors that relate to kinship recognition and that are similarly manipulated by institutions in order to reinforce altruistic behavior directed toward non‐kin. Support for this set of predictions is presented from historical and ethnographic sources on monastic life in Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, as well as Islamic dervish groups, the Essenes, Shakers, and others. Potential implications of the model for understanding the development of religious institutions are preliminarily explored by reviewing Joachim Wach's model of religious developmental stages as well as some of the literature on the relationship between individualism and communalism in incipient religious organizations, in light of the kin‐cue manipulation model.     

Psychiatric Disorders Associated with Substance Use Among Children and Adolescents: Findings from the Methods for the Epidemiology of Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders (MECA) Study

The relationships between specific quantities and frequencies of alcohol, cigarette, and illicit substance use and substance use (SUD) and other psychiatric disorders were investigated among 1,285 randomly selected children and adolescents, aged 9 to 18, and their parents, from the Methods for the Epidemiology of Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders (MECA) Study. Logistic regressions indicated that daily cigarette smoking, weekly alcohol consumption, and any illicit substance use in the past year were each independently associated with an elevated likelihood of diagnosis with SUD and other psychiatric disorders (anxiety, mood, or disruptive behavior disorders), controlling for sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, family income). The associations between the use of specific substances and specific psychiatric disorders varied as a function of gender.     

Protection from light-rays by cold-weather goggles

To arrive at transmittance standards for cold-weather goggles, the levels of natural radiation were estimated, and the amounts by which they must be reduced to fall below the damage thresholds for various bands of electromagnetic radiation were calculated. No more than 16% of UV from 320 to 40 nm, and no more than 5% of UV from 290 to 320 nm should be transmitted. If the short wavelengths of the visible spectrum (less than 500 nm) are filtered out, the remaining wavelengths appear to pose no danger. Measurements of the transmittances of a random selection of 13 commercial skigoggles showed that most offer satisfactory protection.     

The Prevalence of Serious Emotional Disturbance: A Re-Analysis of Community Studies

The goal of these analyses was to use existing data to provide an empirically-based estimate of the prevalence in the population of Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED) in children and adolescents, to assist States in their task, required under PL 102-321, of including such estimates in their applications for Block Grant funds. Seven data sets were identified that could provide estimates of SED. The principal investigators agreed on common definitions of the key components of SED: a psychiatric diagnosis and significant functional impairment. Two definitions of impairment were used: domain-specific (impairment in one or more of three areas of functioning) and global (in the worst 10% over all). They also defined a set of correlates and risk factors for SED: age, gender, race/ethnicity, and poverty. Investigators then reanalyzed their own data, using these standard definitions, and calculated the proportion of SED youth who received mental health care. The median estimate of SED with global impairment was 5.4%, with a range from 4.3% to 7.4%. Estimates of SED with domain-specific impairment ranged from 5.5% to 16.9% (median 7.7%). Rates were slightly higher in boys. There were no clear ethnic differences. Poverty doubled the risk of SED. Only one SED child in four had recently received mental health care. Estimates of SED are critically dependent on the method used to define diagnosis and functional impairment. Using common definitions, seven studies produced fairly consistent estimates, which were similar to the estimate of prevalence of Serious Mental Illness (SMI) in adults. Implications for the estimate of State-by-State prevalence rates are discussed.     

Can people strategically control the encoding and retrieval of some morphologic and typographic details of words?

This study investigated whether the encoding and retrieval of plurality information and letter-case information of words in recognition memory can be inhibited. Response-deadline experiments (Hintzman & Curran, 1994) using single words have indicted a controlled processing mode, whereas studies using meaningful sentences (e.g., Jou & Harris, 1991) have indicated an automatic mode of processing plurality information. Two similar opposing views have existed on the processing of letter-case information. The abstractionist view contends that we retain the abstract lexical information and discard the superficial perceptual case information. The proceduralist view holds that perceptual details cannot be separated from the lexical information. Using an intentional and an attention-diverted learning procedure and instructions to ignore plurality and case, we found that subjects experienced a consistent interference effect of changed plurality from study to test but slightly less interference from changed case, suggesting strong automaticity for plurality, and comparatively less automaticity, for case processing.     

How inherently noisy is human sensory processing?

Like any physical information processing device, the human brain is inherently noisy: If a participant is presented with the same sensory stimulus multiple times and is asked to press one of two buttons in response to some property of the stimulus, the response may vary even though the stimulus did not. This response variability can be used to estimate the amount of so-called internal noise—that is, noise that is not present in the stimulus (such as random dynamic dots on the screen) but in the participant’s brain. How large is this internally generated noise? We obtained >400 independent estimates on 40 participants for a range of protocols (yes/no, two-, four-, and eight-alternative forced choice), modalities (auditory and visual), attentional state, adaptation state, stimulus types (static, moving, stereoscopic), and other parameters (timing, size, contrast). Our final estimate at ～1.3 (units of external noise standard deviation) is generally somewhat larger than that previously inferred from smaller and less varied data sets. We discuss the impact of high levels of internal noise on a number of experimental and computational efforts aimed at understanding and characterizing human sensory processing.