Patient Suicide: A Survey of Therapists' Reactions

A substantial proportion of therapists will at some point in their professional life experience the loss of a patient to suicide. Our aims were to assess how therapists react to patient's suicide over time and which factors contribute to the reaction. One third of the therapists, mostly women, suffer from severe distress. The impact is not different for therapists in institutional settings and therapists in private practice. The item “overall distress” immediately after the suicide predicts emotional reactions and changes in behavior. Our data suggest that identifying the severely distressed subgroup could be done using a visual analogue scale for overall distress. As a consequence, more specific and intensified help could be provided to these individuals.     

The effects of total sleep deprivation on the generation of random sequences of key-presses, numbers and nouns

According to a recent hypothesis, executive functions should be particularly vulnerable to the effects of total sleep deprivation. Random generation is a task that taps executive functions. In three experiments we examined the effects of total sleep deprivation on random generation of keypresses, numbers, and nouns, in particular on the suppression of prepotent responses and the selection of next responses by way of applying a local-representativeness heuristic. With random key-presses suppression of prepotent responses did not suffer from lack of sleep, but it became poorer at a sufficiently high pacing rate. In contrast, suppression of prepotent responses suffered when numbers and nouns were generated. According to these findings different types of random generation tasks involve different types of inhibitory process. With only four response alternatives, but not with larger response sets, application of the local-representativeness heuristic was impaired after a night without sleep. In terms of a simple formal model, serial-order representations of the preceding responses are used in selecting the next response only for the small response set, and not for larger response sets. Thus, serial-order representations are likely to suffer from loss of sleep. These findings strongly suggest that random generation involves multiple processes and that total sleep deprivation does not impair all sorts of executive functions, but only some.     

The Effects of Nations and Organisations on Work Value Importance: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

This research examined similarities and differences in the work values of employees of three German multinational organisations across nations and across organisations. Value importance was measured by the strength of the empirical relationship between satisfaction of a job facet or value and overall job satisfaction; satisfaction of more important values is more strongly related to overall satisfaction than is the satisfaction of less important values. Comparisons of value importance across nations and organisations indicated substantial similarity, in contrast to previous research that has measured value importance with direct ratings. Implications of the results for our understanding of work values and the meaning of work in multicultural contexts are discussed.
Cette recherche étudie les points communs et les différences dans les valeurs professionnelles des salariés de trois multinationales allemandes, cela sur plusieurs pays et organisations. L'importance d'une valeur a étéévaluée à partir de la force de la relation empirique entre la satisfaction procurée par un aspect du travail ou l'une de ses valeurs et la satisfaction professionnelle globale; la satisfaction due aux plus importantes des valeurs est davantage corrélée à la satisfaction générale que ne l'est la satisfaction apportée par les valeurs périphériques. La comparaison de l'importance des valeurs dans les divers pays et organisations a mis en évidence une grande proximité en contradiction avec les recherches antérieures qui avaient mesuré l'importance des valeurs avec des évaluations directes. On expose les retombées de ces résultats pour l'étude des valeurs professionnelles et de la signification du travail dans des contextes multiculturels.