Helping Callers to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Who Are at Imminent Risk of Suicide: Evaluation of Caller Risk Profiles and Interventions Implemented

Crisis lines are settings where identifying individuals at imminent risk of suicidal behavior and intervening to keep them safe are critical activities. We examined clinical characteristics of crisis callers assessed by telephone crisis helpers as being at imminent risk of suicide, and the interventions implemented with these callers. Data were derived from 491 call reports completed by 132 helpers at eight crisis centers in the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network. Helpers actively engaged the callers in collaborating to keep themselves safe on 76.4% of calls and sent emergency services without the callers' collaboration on 24.6% of calls. Four different profiles of imminent risk calls emerged. Caller profiles and some helper characteristics were associated with intervention type. Our findings provide a first step toward an empirical formulation of imminent risk warning signs and recommended interventions.     

Rate and accuracy of vowel recognition as a function of spoken reinforcers and age

Developmental differences among the effectiveness of three spoken reinforcers were evaluated by measuring rate and accuracy of performance on a vowel recognition task. Eighty-seven males were selected from grades 1 to 3, 6 to 7, and 11 to 12 of a predominantly urban, Black, parochial school. The effectiveness of approval and affirmation of correctness was related to grade level for accuracy of performance, but not for rate. For accuracy of performance a decreasing linear trend was found when approval effectiveness was evaluated across grades. For correctness, an increasing linear trend was found. The results were discussed in terms of a developmental hierarchy of reinforcers and information processing.     

Some Results from an Automated Statewide Comparison among Attempted,Committed, and Nonsuicidal Patients

ABSTRACT: In the Missouri Division of Mental Health statewide automated Standard System of Psychiatry, 151 patients who had attempted suicide were compared with 424 who had not and with 97 who had committed suicide. Much of the data was provided from relatives using an automated history. Compared with nonattempters, attempters were younger and more often female, depressed, assaultive, and had a family history of suicide. Actual suicides were more often male, better educated, and in general more resembled the attempters than nonattempters.     

Functional and anatomical profile of visual motion impairments in stroke patients correlate with fMRI in normal subjects

We used six psychophysical tasks to measure sensitivity to different types of global motion in 45 healthy adults and in 57 stroke patients who had recovered from the initial results of the stroke, but a large subset of them had enduring deficits on selective visual motion perception tasks. The patients were divided into four groups on the basis of the location of their cortical lesion: occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal, rostro-dorsal parietal, or frontal-prefrontal. The six tasks were: direction discrimination, speed discrimination, motion coherence, motion discontinuity, two-dimensional form-from-motion, and motion coherence – radial. We found both qualitative and quantitative differences among the motion impairments in the four groups: patients with frontal lesions or occipito-temporal lesions were not impaired on any task. The other two groups had substantial impairments, most severe in the group with occipito-parietal damage. We also tested eight healthy control subjects on the same tasks while they were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The BOLD signal provoked by the different tasks correlated well with the locus of the lesions that led to impairments among the different tasks. The results highlight the advantage of using psychophysical techniques and a variety of visual tasks with neurological patients to tease apart the contribution of different cortical areas to motion processing.     

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

ABSTRACT

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science – research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field.