Suicidal Ideation in Elderly Bereaved: The Role of Complicated Grief

This study examined whether symptoms of complicated grief at baseline predicted suicidal ideation during a depressive episode in elderly bereaved individuals. Over a 17-month period, serial ratings of suicidal ideation, hopelessness, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and complicated grief were obtained from 130 elderly participants who had lost their spouses within the past 2 years. Groups of active and passive suicidal ideators, as well as nonideator controls, were compared via analysis of variance (ANOVA) with respect to levels of complicated grief, depression, and anxiety. Elderly bereaved with both active and passive suicidal ideation were found to have higher symptomatic levels of depression, hopelessness, complicated grief, and anxiety, as well as lower levels of perceived social support, than nonideators at study entry. Fifty-seven percent of the patients with high complicated grief scores were found to be ideators during the follow-up versus 24% of the patients with low complicated grief scores. Patients with any suicidal ideation had higher symptom levels of depression, anxiety, and complicated grief when they were ideators as compared with periods when they denied ideation. Fifteen out of the 39 ideators had recurrent depressive episodes versus 5 of the 91 nonideators. Patients with a history of suicide attempts were more likely to be ideators after loss than other bereaved. Thus, the condition of having high levels of complicated grief symptoms and depressive symptoms appears to make bereaved individuals vulnerable to suicidal ideation. Detection of high levels of complicated grief could help clinicians identify patients who may be at heightened risk for suicide.     

Trajectories of Suicidal Ideation from Sixth through Tenth Grades in Predicting Suicide Attempts in Young Adulthood in an Urban African American Cohort

The trajectory of suicidal ideation across early adolescence may inform the timing of suicide prevention program implementation. This study aimed to identify developmental trajectories of suicidal ideation among an urban cohort of community‐residing African Americans (AA) longitudinally followed from middle school through early adulthood (ages 11–19 years). Subtypes based on the developmental course of suicidal ideation from late childhood through mid‐adolescence were identified using longitudinal latent class analysis (LLCA) with 581 AA adolescents (52.7% male; 71.1% free or reduced school meals). The developmental trajectories of suicidal ideation were then used to predict suicide attempts in young adulthood. Our LLCA indicated two subtypes (i.e., ideators and nonideators), with 8% of the sample in the ideator class. This trajectory class shows a peak of suicidal ideation in seventh grade and a steady decline in ideation in subsequent grades. Additionally, suicidal ideation trajectories significantly predicted suicide attempt. Results of these analyses suggest the need for suicide prevention approaches prior to high school for AA youth.     

Model-Based Wisdom of the Crowd for Sequential Decision-Making Tasks

We study the wisdom of the crowd in three sequential decision-making tasks: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), optimal stopping problems, and bandit problems. We consider a behavior-based approach, using majority decisions to determine crowd behavior and show that this approach performs poorly in the BART and bandit tasks. The key problem is that the crowd becomes progressively more extreme as the decision sequence progresses, because the diversity of opinion that underlies the wisdom of the crowd is lost. We also consider model-based approaches to each task. This involves inferring cognitive models for each individual based on their observed behavior, and using these models to predict what each individual would do in any possible task situation. We show that this approach performs robustly well for all three tasks and has the additional advantage of being able to generalize to new problems for which there are no behavioral data. We discuss potential applications of the model-based approach to real-world sequential decision problems and discuss how our approach contributes to the understanding of collective intelligence.     

Sex Domination of Occupations and the Tendencies to Approach and Avoid Success and Failure

To test a theory that approach and avoidance imagery would be associated with both success and failure, female and male college students wrote stories to sentence cues. The sentence cues described a female or male stimulus person as succeeding or failing in one of six occupations. Two of the occupations were dominated by females, two by males, and two were approximately equal in sex domination. The imagery content of the stories yielded independent evidence of success-approach, success-avoidance, failure-approach, and failure-avoidance imagery. Success-approach and failure-avoidance imagery increased as the current male domination of the occupation increased; failure-approach imagery increased as the current female domination of the occupation increased. Success-approach imagery appeared more often in stories written by female respondents; success-avoidance imagery appeared more often in stories written by male respondents. The results were consistent with an achievement model that provides for approach and avoidance tendencies to success and failure. Differential results for the respondents of the two sexes are theoretically attributable to different weightings of the four motives mediated by the anticipated consequences of success and failure.