Helping Parents Cope with Suicide Threats: An Approach Based on Nonviolent Resistance

Parent training in nonviolent resistance was adapted to deal with situations of suicide threat by children, adolescents, and young adults. The approach aims at reducing the risk potential and the mutual distress surrounding the threat‐interaction. Parent training in nonviolent resistance has been shown to help parents move from helplessness to presence, from isolation to connectedness, from submission to resistance, from escalation to self‐control, and from mutual distancing and hostility to care and support. Those emphases can be crucial for the diminution of suicide risk. Parents show good ability to implement the approach and report gains on various areas over and beyond the reduction in suicide threat. A particular advantage is that the method can be used also in cases where the young person threatening suicide is not willing to cooperate.     

Connecting Eating Pathology with Risk for Engaging in Suicidal Behavior: The Mediating Role of Experiential Avoidance

Individuals with eating pathology, particularly those with diagnosed eating disorders, are at high risk for suicide. It is less clear whether undiagnosed eating pathology and subsyndromal eating disorders carry the same risk and, if so, what mechanisms may explain why higher levels of eating pathology yield greater risk for engaging in suicidal behaviors. The indirect relationship between disordered eating and risk for suicidal behaviors via facets of experiential avoidance was tested using a multiple‐mediator model. The model was tested using bootstrapping estimates of indirect effects in a sample of 218 noncollege student adults (Mage = 32.33, 66.1% women) with a history of suicidal attempt and/or history of nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI). Results revealed that disordered eating indirectly predicted risk for suicidal behaviors, distress aversion (i.e., negative attitudes or dislike of distress), and procrastination (i.e., delaying engagement with distressing activities). Results suggest that targeting experiential avoidance and helping those who have a history of engaging in suicidal behaviors and/or NSSI develop regulation strategies to use during times of distress may be of utmost importance for treatment and prevention of eating pathology.     

A temporally distinct role for group I and group II metabotropic glutamate receptors in object recognition memory

Recognition memory, involving the ability to discriminate between a novel and familiar object, depends on the integrity of the perirhinal cortex (PRH). Glutamate, the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the cortex, is essential for many types of memory processes. Of the subtypes of glutamate receptor, metabotropic receptors (mGluRs) have received less study than NMDA receptors; thus, the reported experiments examined the role of mGluRs in familiarity discrimination in the rat PRH. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of systemic administration of MPEP, a group I mGluR (specifically mGluR5) antagonist, and/or LY341495, a group II mGluR antagonist, on a spontaneous object novelty preference task. Simultaneous antagonism of both group I and II mGluRs impaired familiarity discrimination following a 24-h but not a 15-min delay, while antagonism of either mGluR subtype alone had no effect at either delay. The impairment was in acquisition, as in Experiment 3 coadministration of MPEP and LY341495 did not affect recognition memory performance when administered either after the sample phase or prior to test. The impairment in long-term recognition memory was mediated by mGluRs in the PRH, as localized intracortical antagonism of group I and II mGluRs also produced a deficit (Experiment 4). No evidence was found for an involvement of group III mGluRs in the acquisition of long-term familiarity discrimination (Experiment 5). These findings establish that glutamatergic neurotransmission in the PRH via group I and II mGluRs is crucial for the acquisition, but not for the consolidation or retrieval of long-term object recognition memory.     

Age-related differences in ambulatory blood pressure during daily stress: evidence for greater blood pressure reactivity with age

Prior research on age and emotions has found that older adults may show better physiological regulation to stressful stimuli than do younger adults. However, the stress reactivity literature has shown that age is associated with higher cardiovascular reactivity to laboratory stress (J. R. Jennings et al., 1997). The authors investigated these conflicting findings further by examining daily ambulatory blood pressure in 428 middle-aged to older adults. Consistent with the age and reactivity literature, relatively old individuals showed significantly greater increases in ambulatory diastolic blood pressure compared with younger individuals when dealing with daily stressors. However, results also revealed that relatively old individuals reported less of an increase in negative affect during daily stress compared with their younger counterparts. The results of this study are consistent with the age-related increase in cardiovascular risk but highlight the complex links between stress and different facets of the aging process.