Exploring Culture-Specific Differences in Beliefs about Causes, Kinship and the Heritability of Major Depressive Disorder: The Views of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese-Australians

The aim of this study was to explore cultural differences in causal attributions and beliefs about heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD). Face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Celtic- and Chinese-Australians community members with a family history of MDD were conducted and subjected to a rigorous qualitative analysis, using the computer software NVivo. Sixteen Anglo-Celtic-Australians and 16 Chinese-Australians were interviewed. Both groups believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to MDD, that stress was an important cause of MDD, and that coping factors were significant moderators of the impact of stress on MDD. Both cultural groups believed that the causes of MDD affecting multiple family members included a shared family environment and a “contagion effect”, in addition to genetics. Unique to the Chinese-Australian group was the beliefs that parental pressures to exceed academically contributed to MDD; this cultural group also reported beliefs that depression was due to God’s will or alternatively fate, which in turn was related to attributions to feng shui and auspicious dates. This study documented key culture-specific differences in beliefs about causes and inheritance of MDD; such differences have major implications for clinician-patient communication about genetic risk associated with having a family history of MDD.     

Lay Definitions of Violence among Swedish Children,Teenagers, and Adults

Definitions of violence vary and are almost always operationalized by the researcher. Perceptions of violence often determine levels of tolerance of violence. Little research has focused on lay definitions. A total of 309 Swedes (78 children, 85 teenagers, 99 younger adults, and 47 adults (30+); 48% male) were interviewed using a specially developed interview protocol. Content analysis was used to assign definitional categories. A folk taxonomy emerged. Immediate physical violence accounted for 73% of all assigned categories. Hit was the word that occurred most frequently. If global physical violence was included, physical violence accounted for 89% of 780 assigned categories. Immediate non-physical violence accounted for 9% and vicarious violence (including media violence) accounted for 2%. Distributions of categories by respondents' gender, age, and participant role in incidents of violence showed the underlying definitions of violence to be extremely stable. The conclusion is that ordinary Swedes share a robust lay definition of violence as a behavior that is immediate, done in close quarters, and physical.     

A Structural Validation of an Inventory Based on the Abridged Five Factor Circumplex Model (AB5C)

Nineteen upper-middle class, pre-marital, college couples volunteered to participate in a study on interpersonal relationships. Couples received a modified Rorschach, thematic test, Marriage Value Inventory, a sex questionnaire, and an intensive depth interview. A Q sort of 100 personality items was used to assess the Ss. It was hypothesized that couples would show smaller discrepancies than randomized pairs, except for items relating to dominance, dependency, nurturance, exhibitionism, masculinity and femininity, where the reverse was predicted. Results confirmed the homogamy prediction, but only the dependency need was significant of the complementary predictions. Perception scores and expressive behavior are seen as potential adjuncts to questionnaires and inventories in predicting marital choice.     

Visual consciousness: dissociating the neural correlates of perceptual transitions from sustained perception with fMRI

To investigate the possible dichotomy between the neurophysiological bases of perceptual transitions versus sustaining a particular percept over time, an fMRI study was conducted with subjects viewing fragmented pictures. Unlike most other perceptually unstable stimuli, fragmented pictures give rise to only one perceptual transition and a continuous period of sustained perception. Earlier research is inconclusive on the subject of which anatomical regions should be attributed to what temporal aspect of perception, and the aim of the present study was to shed more light on the subject. In this study occipitotemporal and fronto-parietal regions were found to be activated for both aspects. However, regions in the medial-temporal lobe were activated specifically for transitions, whereas medial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions were activated specifically for sustained perception. These results provide further support for the theory that the initial creation of perceptual awareness and upholding perceptual awareness over time are separate processes involving different brain regions.     

To fail psychotherapy training: Students’ and supervisors’ perspectives on the supervisory relationship

Previous research showed that supervision during psychotherapy training sometimes includes negative alliance and harmful events. The aim of this study was to investigate how such events were related to failing psychotherapy training. Interviews were made with informants from two separate samples: psychotherapy students who had failed training (n = 6) and supervisors with experience from failing students (n = 6). The interviews were analyzed separately for the two samples with inductive thematic analysis and then compared. The core category for students (‘Paradoxical response’) indicated that they experienced their supervisors as either demanding too much or nothing at all. The core category for supervisors (‘Balancing contradictory demands’) indicated that they wanted to fail students who did not live up to expectations but were pressured by training institutes to let them pass. Both students and supervisors experienced distress but it seemed that they were not fully aware of each other’s vulnerability. The results suggest that a weak supervisory alliance and harmful events may contribute to student failures, independently of students’ actual suitability for psychotherapy.     

Learning of similar complex movement sequences: proactive and retroactive effects on learning

The authors used an interference paradigm to determine the extent to which the learning of 2 similar movement sequences influences the learning of each other. Participants (N=30) produced the sequences by moving a lever with their right arm and hand to sequentially presented target locations. They practiced 2 similar 16-element movement sequences (S1 and S2), 1 sequence on each of 2 consecutive days of practice. Control groups received only 1 day of practice on 1 of the sequences. Early in S2 practice, the experimental group demonstrated a relatively strong level of proactive facilitation arising from previous practice with S1. The advantage was not evident at the end of S2 practice or on the S2 retention test. No advantage of practicing the 1st sequence on the learning of the 2nd sequence (proactive effect) was found in the analysis of element duration in the retention and transfer tests, even though 14 of the 16 elements were common to both sequences. A strong retroactive interference on the switched elements was detected, however. Thus, the memories underpinning S1 seemed to be "overwritten" or adapted in response to the learning of S2.     

Smell your way back to childhood: Autobiographical odor memory

This study addressed age distributions and experiential qualities of autobiographical memories evoked by different sensory cues. Ninety-three older adults were presented with one of three cue types (word, picture, or odor) and were asked to relate any autobiographical event for the given cue. The main aims were to explore whether (1) the age distribution of olfactory-evoked memories differs from memories cued by words and pictures and (2) the experiential qualities of the evoked memories vary over the different cues. The results showed that autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory information were older than memories associated with verbal and visual information. Specifically, most odor-cued memories were located to the first decade of life (<10 years), whereas memories associated with verbal and visual cues peaked in early adulthood (11–20 years). Also, odor-evoked memories were associated with stronger feelings of being brought back in time and had been thought of less often than memories evoked by verbal and visual information. This pattern of findings suggests that odor-evoked memories may be different from other memory experiences. nt|mis|This work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council (No. F0647/2001) to M.L.     

Treatment of chronic stress in employees: subjective, cognitive and neural correlates

This study reports the effect of an affect-focused intervention program, the Affect School, on stress, psychological symptoms, cognitive functioning and neural activity. Fifty employees in social service and education, with high levels of chronic stress, were randomly divided into a treatment (N=27) and control (N=23) group. Complete sets of data were available in 20 participants in the treatment group and 17 in the control group. The Perceived Stress Questionnaire assessed stress and the Symptom Check List-90 psychological symptoms before and after treatment. Episodic-memory functioning under focused and divided attention conditions was also assessed. Prior and after the Affect School, seven participants in the treatment group were studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during episodic memory processing. After the Affect School there was a reduction in stress and psychological symptoms for the treatment group but not in the control group. The controls showed a reduction in episodic memory functioning whereas the performance of the treatment group remained intact. The fMRI scanning indicated a qualitative change in the neural network subserving episodic memory. These preliminary results suggest that the Affect School is effective on individuals with high stress.     

Risky decision making across three arenas of choice: are younger and older adults differently susceptible to framing effects?

In the present study, the authors investigated the effects of framing of options on risky decision making in groups of younger adults (M = 23.8 years, n = 192) and older adults (M = 69.1 years, n = 192). The participants were assigned to one of three scenarios varying in the goods at stake (human lives, paintings, money). The authors observed a majority preference in favor of the risky options after negative, but not positive framing. They also found, as they had predicted, that the type of framing effect varied across scenarios, with a bidirectional framing effect for the life-death scenario and unidirectional (risk averse) framing effects when public property (paintings) or personal property (money) were at stake. It is important to note that these choice preference patterns were highly similar across the age groups, which reinforced the conclusion that younger and older adults are equally susceptible to framing effects.