Systematic Review of Self-Report Measures of General Mental Health and Wellbeing in Adolescent Mental Health

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - The assessment of general mental health and wellbeing is important within child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) for both clinicians and...     

WHAT PREDICTS THE OWN-AGE BIAS IN FACE RECOGNITION MEMORY?

Younger and older adults' visual scan patterns were examined as they passively viewed younger and older neutral faces. Both participant age groups tended to look longer at their own-age as compared to other-age faces. In addition, both age groups reported more exposure to own-age than other-age individuals. Importantly, the own-age bias in visual inspection of faces and the own-age bias in self-reported amount of exposure to young and older individuals in everyday life, but not explicit age stereotypes and implicit age associations, significantly and independently predicted the own-age bias in later old/new face recognition. We suggest these findings reflect increased personal and social relevance of, and more accessible and elaborated schemas for, own-age than other-age faces.     

‘Radical Interpretation’ and the Assessment of Decision‐Making Capacity

The assessment of patients' decision‐making capacity (DMC) has become an important area of clinical practice, and since it provides the gateway for a consideration of non‐consensual treatment, has major ethical implications. Tests of DMC such as under the Mental Capacity Act (2005) for England and Wales aim at supporting autonomy and reducing unwarranted paternalism by being ‘procedural’, focusing on how the person arrived at a treatment decision. In practice, it is difficult, especially in problematic or borderline cases, to avoid a consideration of beliefs and values; that is, of the substantive content of ideas rather than simple ‘cognitive’ or procedural abilities. However, little attention has been paid to how beliefs and values might be assessed in the clinical context and what kind of ‘objectivity’ is possible. We argue that key aspects of Donald Davidson's ideas of ‘Radical Interpretation’ and the ‘Principle of Charity’ provide useful guidance as to how clinicians might approach the question of whether an apparent disturbance in a person's thinking about beliefs or values undermines their DMC. A case example is provided, and a number of implications for clinical practice are discussed.     

Emotion identification across adulthood using the Dynamic FACES database of emotional expressions in younger,middle aged,and older adults

Facial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address the need for more ecologically valid and powerful facial emotional stimuli, we created Dynamic FACES, a database of morphed videos (n?=?1026) from younger, middle-aged, and older adults displaying naturalistic emotional facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, happiness). To assess adult age differences in emotion identification of dynamic stimuli and to provide normative ratings for this modified set of stimuli, healthy adults (n?=?1822, age range 18–86 years) categorised for each video the emotional expression displayed, rated the expression distinctiveness, estimated the age of the face model, and rated the naturalness of the expression. We found few age differences in emotion identification when using dynamic stimuli. Only for angry faces did older adults show lower levels of identification accuracy than younger adults. Further, older adults outperformed middle-aged adults’ in identification of sadness. The use of dynamic facial emotional stimuli has previously been limited, but Dynamic FACES provides a large database of high-resolution naturalistic, dynamic expressions across adulthood. Information on using Dynamic FACES for research purposes can be found at http://faces.mpib-berlin.mpg.de.