Explaining prejudice toward the mentally ill: A test of sociopolitical,demographic, and socioeconomic factors

People with mental disorders often face prejudices that can further deteriorate their condition. We tested whether Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), and Belief in a Just World (BJW), and characteristics of the mentally ill predict such prejudices. Both in a general population sample and a sample of health professionals and trainees, SDO, but not RWA and BJW, predicted more prejudice, although this pattern was less pronounced among health professionals/trainees. BJW interacted with the targets' gender in Study 1, predicting less empathy toward a male but not toward a female mentally ill person. In Study 2, depressed individuals were blamed more for their illness than those with schizophrenia or cancer. Implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Generalization of the disruptive effects of alternative stimuli when combined with target stimuli in extinction

Differential‐reinforcement treatments reduce target problem behavior in the short term but at the expense of making it more persistent long term. Basic and translational research based on behavioral momentum theory suggests that combining features of stimuli governing an alternative response with the stimuli governing target responding could make target responding less persistent. However, changes to the alternative stimulus context when combining alternative and target stimuli could diminish the effectiveness of the alternative stimulus in reducing target responding. In an animal model with pigeons, the present study reinforced responding in the presence of target and alternative stimuli. When combining the alternative and target stimuli during extinction, we altered the alternative stimulus through changes in line orientation. We found that (1) combining alternative and target stimuli in extinction more effectively decreased target responding than presenting the target stimulus on its own; (2) combining these stimuli was more effective in decreasing target responding trained with lower reinforcement rates; and (3) changing the alternative stimulus reduced its effectiveness when it was combined with the target stimulus. Therefore, changing alternative stimuli (e.g., therapist, clinical setting) during behavioral treatments that combine alternative and target stimuli could reduce the effectiveness of those treatments in disrupting problem behavior.     

Cognitive behavior therapy vs exposure in vivo in the treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia (corrected from agrophobia)

Seventy-three psychiatric outpatients with DSM-IV diagnosis of panic disorder with agoraphobia were assessed with a battery of independent assessor, self-observation, self-report and behavioral measures before and after therapy, and at a 1-yr follow-up. They were randomly assigned to Exposure in vivo (E; n = 25), Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT; n = 26), or a Wait-list control (WLC; n = 22) and received 12-16 individual therapy sessions, once weekly. The treatments yielded significant improvements, both on panic/agoraphobia measures and on measures of general anxiety, depression, social adjustment and quality of life, which were maintained at follow-up. However, there were no significant differences between E and CBT. The three criteria of clinically significant improvement were achieved by 67% of the E-patients and 79% of the CBT-patients at post-treatment, and 74% and 76%, respectively, at follow-up. The conclusion that can be drawn is that adding cognitive therapy to exposure did not yield significantly better results than for exposure alone.     

Connecting terror management and dissonance theory: Evidence that mortality salience increases the preference for supporting information after decisions

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to pursue cognitive consistency. The authors investigated this notion with regard to dissonance theory starting from the finding of research on "selective exposure to information" that after having made a decision, people prefer consonant over dissonant information. The authors found that following mortality salience, people indeed showed an increased preference for information that supported their decision compared to information conflicting with it. However, this only occurred with regard to a worldview-relevant decision case. For a fictitious decision scenario, mortality salience did not affect information seeking. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Amnesic effect of GMP depends on its conversion to guanosine

Extracellular guanine-based purines, namely the nucleotides GTP, GDP, GMP and the nucleoside guanosine, exert important neuroprotective and neuromodulator roles in the central nervous system, which may be related to inhibition of the glutamatergic neurotransmission activity. In this study, we investigated GMP effects on mice inhibitory avoidance performance and the dependence on its conversion to guanosine for such effect, by using the ecto-5'-nucleotidase specific inhibitor AOPCP. We also investigated if this conversion occurs in the central nervous system or peripherally, and if guanosine and GMP affect nociception by the tail-flick test. I.p. GMP or guanosine (7.5 mg/kg) or i.c.v. GMP (480 nmol) pretraining administration was amnesic for the inhibitory avoidance task. I.c.v. AOPCP (1 nmol) administration completely reversed the amnesic effect of i.c.v. GMP, but not of i.p. GMP, indicating that peripheral conversion of GMP to guanosine is probably relevant to this effect. AOPCP alone did not interfere with the performance. Furthermore, tail-flick measurement was unaffected by i.p. GMP and guanosine, suggesting that the amnesic effect of both purines was not due to some antinociceptive effect against the footshock used in the task. All these data together, in accordance to those previously observed in studies involving glutamate uptake and seizures reinforce the idea that guanosine is the specific extracellular guanine-based purines effector and indicate that its conversion occurs not only in the central nervous system but also peripherally.     

rCBF/SPECT in the evaluation of inner-city minority patients with a history of impaired memory: a pilot blind read pre- and poststudy

Eight patients (seven women), mean +/- SD T1 age 68.57 +/- 12.43 years, average educational level 5.83 +/- 3.70 years, had two Tc-99m ECD SPECT examinations separated by an average 8.49 +/- 5.59 months. Patients were imaged using standard Harlem Hospital acquisition and processing protocols with approximately 30 mCi of ECD on a Prism 3000 triple head gamma camera. Images were interpreted by an independent reader blinded to the patients' clinical history and imaging date. T1 psychiatric diagnosis was seven Alzheimer's dementia (AD) and one depression. Eight T1 images were interpreted as abnormal, six indicative of AD. Binomial 95% two-tail confidence interval for T1 agreement between diagnosis and interpretation was 0.25 0.63 0.92. T2 diagnosis was seven AD and one none. Seven T2 images were abnormal and indicative of AD, and one was normal. T2 confidence interval was 0.34 0.75 0.97. These findings suggest SPECT's value in assessing AD in uneducated socioeconomically disadvantaged geriatric patients.     

Philosophy and the real reasons for action: G. H. von Wright's understanding explanations

According to the received view, philosophy of action took a justified turn towards causalism because anti-causalists failed the causalist challenge about efficacious reasons. This paper contests that view by examining the ways in which Georg Henrik von Wright responded to causalism in his later philosophy. First, von Wright attacked the subjectivism of causalism by arguing for an objectivist view that construes reasons not as subjective mental states but as external facts of the agent's situation. Second, von Wright fundamentally disagreed with the view of philosophical inquiry that underpinned causalism. For von Wright, the task of philosophy was conceptual: to explicate what one is looking for when one is looking for the real reasons for action. In contrast, for causalists the task was ontological: to determine what kind of item in the world the real reason for action is. Examining von Wright's account contributes to contemporary assessments of the metaphilosophical dimension of the reasons/causes debate.     

Being modest makes you feel bad: Effects of the modesty norm and mortality salience on self‐esteem in a collectivistic culture

Terror management research shows that existential terror motivates people to live up to social norms. According to terror management theory (TMT), people can achieve a sense of self‐worth through compliance with social norms. However, this has not yet been empirically tested. Modesty has long been known as an important social norm in Eastern cultures, such as China, Japan, and Korea. The current research examined whether conforming to the modesty norm in response to reminders of death concerns increases self‐esteem for Chinese. In Study 1, following the modesty norm (i.e., explicit self‐effacement) led to decreased implicit self‐esteem, however, this was only the case if mortality was salient. In Study 2, violating the modesty norm (i.e., explicit self‐enhancement) increased implicit self‐esteem – however – again, this was only the case when mortality was salient. These findings indicate that self‐esteem cannot be maintained through compliance with the modesty norm. Implications of this research for understanding the interplay between self‐esteem and social norms in terror management processes are discussed.     

Putting action memory to the test: testing affects subsequent restudy but not long-term forgetting of action events

Testing memory typically enhances subsequent re-encoding of information (“indirect” testing effect) and, as compared to restudy, it also benefits later long-term retention (“direct” testing effect). We investigated the effect of testing on subsequent restudy and 1-week retention of action events (e.g. “water the plant”). In addition, we investigated if the type of recall practice (noun-cued vs. verb-cued) moderates these testing benefits. The results showed an indirect testing effect that increased following noun-cued recall of verbs as compared to verb-cued recall of nouns. In contrast, a direct testing effect on the forgetting rate of performed actions was not reliably observed, neither for noun- nor verb-cued recall. Thus, to the extent that this study successfully dissociated direct and indirect testing-based enhancements, they seem to be differentially effective for performed actions, and may rely on partially different mechanisms.     

Development and Validation of a Brief Version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale: The DERS-16

The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is a widely-used, theoretically-driven, and psychometrically-sound self-report measure of emotion regulation difficulties. However, at 36-items, the DERS may be challenging to administer in some situations or settings (e.g., in the course of patient care or large-scale epidemiological studies). Consequently, there is a need for a briefer version of the DERS. The goal of the present studies was to develop and evaluate a 16-item version of the DERS – the DERS-16. The reliability and validity of the DERS-16 were examined in a clinical sample (N = 96) and two large community samples (Ns = 102 and 482). The validity of the DERS-16 was evaluated comparing the relative strength of the association of the two versions of the DERS with measures of emotion regulation and related constructs, psychopathology, and clinically-relevant behaviors theorized to stem from emotion regulation deficits. Results demonstrate that the DERS-16 has retained excellent internal consistency, good test-retest reliability, and good convergent and discriminant validity. Further, the DERS-16 showed minimal differences in its convergent and discriminant validity with relevant measures when compared to the original DERS. In conclusion, the DERS-16 offers a valid and brief method for the assessment of overall emotion regulation difficulties.