Case consultation: Mary Catherine.

A case of the attempted suicide of a 66-year-old female is presented. Comment based on the chapters in this volume is presented. Specific topics of demographics, psychiatric-psychological, object relations, the attempt, and concluding comments provide an idiographic illustration of suicidal behavior in an older adult.     

Emotional scenes elicit more pronounced self-reported emotional experience and greater EPN and LPP modulation when compared to emotional faces

Emotional faces and scenes carry a wealth of overlapping and distinct perceptual information. Despite widespread use in the investigation of emotional perception, expressive face and evocative scene stimuli are rarely assessed in the same experiment. Here, we evaluated self-reports of arousal and pleasantness, as well as early and late event-related potentials (e.g., N170, early posterior negativity [EPN], late positive potential [LPP]) as subjects viewed neutral and emotional faces and scenes, including contents representing anger, fear, and joy. Results demonstrate that emotional scenes were rated as more evocative than emotional faces, as only scenes produced elevated self-reports of arousal. In addition, viewing scenes resulted in more extreme ratings of pleasantness (and unpleasantness) than did faces. EEG results indicate that both expressive faces and emotional scenes evoke enhanced negativity in the N170 component, while the EPN and LPP components show significantly enhanced modulation only by scene, relative to face stimuli. These data suggest that viewing emotional scenes results in a more pronounced emotional experience that is associated with reliable modulation of visual event-related potentials that are implicated in emotional circuits in the brain.     

The motivations for Walter Burley’s theory of the proposition

Walter Burley (born c. 1275; died. c. 1344) claims throughout his career that the mind can make a statement (propositio) out of things. Since things include entities that exist outside of the mind, Burley appears to be claiming that the mind can form a statement out of things that exist outside of it. Most scholars of Burley offer a deflationary reading of this claim, arguing that it confuses two distinct but closely related philosophical issues: the nature of propositional content, on the one hand, and the role of facts in a compelling account of truth, on the other. But I argue that Burley means exactly what he says: that the mind can, quite literally, form statements out of things that exist outside of it. In Burley’s account, statements of this sort function as the propositional contents of our thoughts and written or uttered sentences. This account of propositional content is motivated by three more fundamental theses to which Burley is committed: referentialism, compositionality, and a claim about truth-conditionality I call intellectualism.     

Profiles of Rater Dis/Agreement within Universal Screening in Predicting Distal Outcomes

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - The success of a comprehensive and integrated school mental health system is dependent on data to inform decision-making. Universal screening...     

The effects of leader illegitimacy on leaders' and subordinates' responses to relinquishing power decisions

This research examined how leader illegitimacy affects leaders' and subordinates' responses to relinquishing power decisions. The processes underlying responses to leader illegitimacy and relinquishing power were also examined. Across four studies, participants were placed in leader roles (Studies 1a/1b) or subordinate roles (Studies 2a/2b) in an online competition. In Studies 1a/1b, participants assigned a leadership role learned, via a leadership skills test, that their leadership was illegitimate or legitimate. By contrast, in Studies 2a/2b, participants assigned a subordinate role were confronted with either an illegitimate leader who retained their power after performing poorly or a legitimate leader who received the leader role after a poor‐performing leader had relinquished their power. Results demonstrated that leaders who felt they did not belong in their leadership role relinquished more power when their leadership was illegitimate (vs. legitimate) and subordinates who felt less in control and greater anger supported illegitimate (vs. legitimate) leaders less.     

Computing the real solutions of Fleishman's equations for simulating non-normal data

Fleishman's power method is frequently used to simulate non-normal data with a desired skewness and kurtosis. Fleishman's method requires solving a system of nonlinear equations to find the third-order polynomial weights that transform a standard normal variable into a non-normal variable with desired moments. Most users of the power method seem unaware that Fleishman's equations have multiple solutions for typical combinations of skewness and kurtosis. Furthermore, researchers lack a simple method for exploring the multiple solutions of Fleishman's equations, so most applications only consider a single solution. In this paper, we propose novel methods for finding all real-valued solutions of Fleishman's equations. Additionally, we characterize the solutions in terms of differences in higher order moments. Our theoretical analysis of the power method reveals that there typically exists two solutions of Fleishman's equations that have noteworthy differences in higher order moments. Using simulated examples, we demonstrate that these differences can have remarkable effects on the shape of the non-normal distribution, as well as the sampling distributions of statistics calculated from the data. Some considerations for choosing a solution are discussed, and some recommendations for improved reporting standards are provided.