Suicide survivors' perceptions of the treating clinician

Seventy-one suicide survivors were surveyed about their perceptions of the clinicians who were treating their loved one at the time of death. Survivors provided information regarding their perceptions and attitudes toward clinician behaviors before and after the suicide and their perceptions of helpful and troubling aspects of clinician behaviors. Results indicated that survivors share a number of common opinions regarding the mental health care providers treating their loved ones. Several differences existed between survivors who consider lawsuits against mental health care providers versus those who do not. The implications of these findings for clinical practice, legal issues, surviving suicide, and future research are discussed.     

Feeling Good Despite EDS: The Effects of a 5-Week Online Positive Psychology Programme for Ehlers–Danlos-Syndromes Patients

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - Ehlers–Danlos-Syndromes (EDS) is a group of hereditary, chronic and potentially disabling conditions. Few studies have tested the effects of...     

Stress and emotional valence effects on children's versus adolescents’ true and false memory

Despite considerable interest in understanding how stress influences memory accuracy and errors, particularly in children, methodological limitations have made it difficult to examine the effects of stress independent of the effects of the emotional valence of to-be-remembered information in developmental populations. In this study, we manipulated stress levels in 7–8- and 12–14-year-olds and then exposed them to negative, neutral, and positive word lists. Shortly afterward, we tested their recognition memory for the words and false memory for non-presented but related words. Adolescents in the high-stress condition were more accurate than those in the low-stress condition, while children's accuracy did not differ across stress conditions. Also, among adolescents, accuracy and errors were higher for the negative than positive words, while in children, word valence was unrelated to accuracy. Finally, increases in children's and adolescents’ cortisol responses, especially in the high-stress condition, were related to greater accuracy but not false memories and only for positive emotional words. Findings suggest that stress at encoding, as well as the emotional content of to-be-remembered information, may influence memory in different ways across development, highlighting the need for greater complexity in existing models of true and false memory formation.     

Acceptance and commitment therapy: model, processes and outcomes

The present article presents and reviews the model of psychopathology and treatment underlying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is unusual in that it is linked to a comprehensive active basic research program on the nature of human language and cognition (Relational Frame Theory), echoing back to an earlier era of behavior therapy in which clinical treatments were consciously based on basic behavioral principles. The evidence from correlational, component, process of change, and outcome comparisons relevant to the model are broadly supportive, but the literature is not mature and many questions have not yet been examined. What evidence is available suggests that ACT works through different processes than active treatment comparisons, including traditional Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT). There are not enough well-controlled studies to conclude that ACT is generally more effective than other active treatments across the range of problems examined, but so far the data are promising.     

EEG correlates of behavioural laterality: ear dominance

To examine whether ear dominance in a dichotic pitch-discrimination task is associated with asymmetrical activation of the two cortical hemispheres, ear dominance scores and electroencephalographic (EEG) laterality were correlated in two independent samples (ns=46 and 128). The results indicate that ear dominance can partly be attributed to a relatively stronger activation of the contralateral prefrontal cortex. The observed association may reflect the tendency to direct attention preferably to one ear.