Patient experiences with treatment in private practice compared with public mental health services

The study compared patient experiences with psychiatric treatment provided by private practitioners and public outpatient clinics. Questionnaires were completed by 642 outpatients in private practice and 6,677 outpatients in public clinics. The questionnaire included a measure of patient experiences comprising six items: treatment outcome, enough time for contact and dialogue with clinician, clinicians' understanding of patient's situation, suitability of therapy and treatment, clinician follow-up of planned actions, and influence on treatment. Patients in private practice had generally better experiences than patients in public outpatient treatment. The difference between private and public patients was largest for patients with poor self-evaluated mental health or those who had just one consultation in the previous three months. Private practitioners appear to have an important role in mental health services delivery, and patients have relatively good experiences with services. Further studies that assess the patient - clinician interaction in different mental health services may give further insights into potential service improvements.     

A new perspective on human reward research: How consciously and unconsciously perceived reward information influences performance

The question of how human performance can be improved through rewards is a recurrent topic of interest in psychology and neuroscience. Traditional, cognitive approaches to this topic have focused solely on consciously communicated rewards. Recently, a largely neuroscience-inspired perspective has emerged to examine the potential role of conscious awareness of reward information in effective reward pursuit. The present article reviews research employing a newly developed monetary-reward-priming paradigm that allows for a systematic investigation of this perspective. We analyze this research to identify similarities and differences in how consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards impact three distinct aspects relevant to performance: decision making, task preparation, and task execution. We further discuss whether conscious awareness, in modulating the effects of reward information, plays a role similar to its role in modulating the effects of other affective information. Implications of these insights for understanding the role of consciousness in modulating goal-directed behavior more generally are discussed.     

Effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are related to striatal dopaminergic functioning

Reward cues have been found to increase the investment of effort in tasks even when cues are presented suboptimally (i.e. very briefly), making them hard to consciously detect. Such effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are assumed to rely mainly on the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the ventral striatum. To provide further support for this assumption, we performed two studies investigating whether these effort responses vary with individual differences in markers of striatal dopaminergic functioning. Study 1 investigated the relation between physical effort responses and resting state eye-blink rate. Study 2 examined cognitive effort responses in relation to individually averaged error-related negativity. In both studies effort responses correlated with the markers only for suboptimal, but not for optimal reward cues. These findings provide further support for the idea that effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are mainly linked to the mesolimbic dopamine system, while responses to optimal reward cues also depend on higher-level cortical functions.     

Relations between emotions,display rules,social motives,and facial behaviour

We report research on the relations between emotions, display rules, social motives, and facial behaviour. In Study 1 we used a questionnaire methodology to examine how respondents would react to a funny or a not funny joke told to them by a close friend or a stranger. We assessed display rules and motivations for smiling and/or laughing. Display rules and social motives (partly) mediated the relationship between the experimental manipulations and self‐reported facial behaviour. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment in which funny or not funny jokes were told to participants by a male or female stranger. Consistent with hypotheses, hearing a funny joke evoked a stronger motivation to share positive affect by showing longer Duchenne smiling. Contrary to hypotheses, a not funny joke did not elicit greater prosocial motivation by showing longer “polite” smiling, although such a smiling pattern did occur. Rated funniness of the joke and the motivation to share positive affect mediated the relationship between the joke manipulation and facial behaviour. Path analysis was used to explore this mediating process in greater detail.