A Test of the Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression in Elementary and High School Boys and Girls

The applicability of the tripartite model of emotion, which distinguishes the shared aspect of depression and anxiety, negative affect (NA), from their respective specific components of low positive affect (PA) and physiological hyperarousal (PH), was examined in 472 elementary and high school students. The relations among depression, anxiety, and the three tripartite dimensions were examined for the total sample and across four subgroups based on age and gender. High school girls reported more depression, anxiety, NA, and PH than the other groups, and lower PA as assessed by the PANAS-C, but not the AFARS. Using structural equation modeling, the tripartite model proved to be a reasonably good fit for the total sample. Among the subgroups, the best fit was found for high school girls. However, several findings for the total sample and for individual subgroups were not consistent with the tripartite model, raising issues related to the independence and specificity of the tripartite constructs and their measurement. Alternative age- and gender-specific models to better account for the shared and unique aspects of depression and anxiety in children need to be explored.     

The misunderstanding (le malentendu)

The idea that misunderstanding is simply a problem in both the psychoanalytic situation, between analyst and patient, and in translation between one language and another, is turned on its head in this paper. Originally written in French, this paper addresses both Francophone and Anglophone psychoanalytic communities in the realization that misunderstanding is the ground from which we start in analysis. The author portrays two patients who illustrate that, even when analyst and patient speak the same language, the patient may speak in a style that the analyst must first learn to hear as a kind of dialect, to hear his own misunderstanding, in order for meaning to appear.     

Using the impact of event scale to evaluate distress in the context of genetic testing for breast cancer susceptibility

The data obtained with two forms of the Impact of Event Scale were compared, one referring to a BRCA1/2 test result (IES-T) and another to cancer (IES-C). The sample consisted of 272 women with a family history suggestive of a BRCA1/2 mutation who underwent genetic testing and received results: noncarrier, carrier, or inconclusive. Globally, mean scores on the IES-C form were higher than those obtained on the IES-T form. Among carriers of a BRCA1/2 mutation, mean scores on the two forms were similar and agreement was good, as measured by the intraclass correlation coefficient (.83; 95% 95% CI=.72, .91). Agreement between the forms was poor to fair among noncarriers (ICC= .38; CI= .15, .57) and women with an inconclusive result (ICC= .40; 95% CI= .26, .52). Having had cancer increased total scores but had little influence on agreement between scores on forms. These findings highlight the importance of carefully selecting the form of the Impact of Event Scale in the context of genetic testing for breast cancer susceptibility.     

How to hit Scylla without avoiding Charybdis: comment on Perruchet, Tyler, Galland, and Peereman (2004)

M. Pe?a, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a segmented stream, structural generalizations about words are quickly established. P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman criticized M. Pe?a et al.'s work and dismissed their results. In this article, the authors show that P. Perruchet et al.'s criticisms are groundless.     

The speed of individual face categorization

How fast does the human visual system discriminate individual faces? To address this question, we used a continuous-stimulation paradigm in which event-related potentials (ERPs) to a face stimulus are recorded with respect to another face stimulus, rather than to a preceding blank-screen baseline epoch. Following the shift between two face stimuli, posterior sites showed an early negative ERP deflection that started at 130 ms and peaked at 160 ms, the latency of the N170, an ERP component associated with discriminating faces from objects. The ERP we recorded was larger in amplitude when the preceding stimulus was perceived as a different individual face rather than the same individual face, although face pairs were of equal physical distance in the two conditions. These findings provide direct evidence that individual face discrimination in humans can take place as early as 130 ms following stimulus onset, during the same time window as face detection.     

Foreground contextual fear memory consolidation requires two independent phases of hippocampal ERK/CREB activation

Fear conditioning is a popular model for investigating physiological and cellular mechanisms of memory formation. In this paradigm, a footshock is either systematically associated to a tone (paired conditioning) or is pseudorandomly distributed (unpaired conditioning). In the former procedure, the tone/shock association is acquired, whereas in the latter procedure, the context/shock association will prevail. Animals with chronically implanted recording electrodes show enhanced amplitude of the extracellularly recorded field EPSP in CA1 pyramidal cells for up to 24 h after unpaired, but not paired, fear conditioning. This is paralleled by a differential activation of the ERK/CREB pathway in CA1, which is monophasic in paired conditioning (0-15 min post-conditioning), but biphasic (0-1 h and 9-12 h post-conditioning) in unpaired conditioning as revealed by immunocytochemistry and Western blotting. Intrahippocampal injection of the MEK inhibitor U0126 prior to each phase prevents the activation of both ERK1/2 and CREB after unpaired conditioning. Block of any activation phase leads to memory impairment. We finally reveal that the biphasic activation of ERK/CREB activity is independently regulated, yet both phases are critically required for the consolidation of long-term memories following unpaired fear conditioning. These data provide compelling evidence that CA1 serves different forms of memory by expressing differential cellular mechanisms that are dependent on the training regime.     

Methods of killing employed by psychotic parricides

Lewis, et al. in 1998 showed that psychotic women are more likely to use a weapon than nonpsychotic women to kill their children. This study presents data concerning psychotic parricide. Analysis indicated that a higher percentage used a weapon (81% versus 36%) than psychotic filicide. Reasons for this difference are discussed.     

Lexical access without attention? Explorations using dichotic priming

The authors used lexical decision in a dichotic listening situation and measured identity priming across channels to explore whether unattended stimuli can be processed lexically. In 6 experiments, temporal synchronization of prime and target words was manipulated, and acoustic saliency of the unattended prime was varied by embedding it in a carrier sentence or in babble speech. When the prime was acoustically salient, a cross-channel priming effect emerged, and participants were aware of the prime. When the prime was less salient, no identity priming was found, and participants failed to notice the prime. Saliency was manipulated in ways that did not degrade the prime. Results are inconsistent with models of late filtering, which predict equal priming irrespective of prime saliency.     

The rate and amount of food intake as determinants of vomiting

Vomiting of nonmedical origin by retarded persons has been found to be greatly influenced by reinforcement procedures. To explicate the possible influence of the rate and amount of food intake, a satiation procedure and a spaced-eating procedure were provided to three profoundly retarded adults with this problem. Vomiting was found to double or triple after satiation for each subject, and to decrease during spaced eating for each subject; the decrease was especially great for the two subjects who learned to eat most slowly after extended spaced eating training. These results suggest that vomiting is caused in large part by excessive stomach loading and can be effectively treated by reducing the eating rate and/or amount of food intake. This generalization may also apply to infants and to the bulimic binge-purge cycle of nonretarded adults.