Spiritual support for caregivers of dementia patients

Dementia is considered the major psychiatric disorder of old age and affects over 4 million people in the United States. As Alzheimer's disease and other dementias progress, the patient can become increasingly dependent on the family for care. This dependency can place the caregiver in a role that is both difficult and demanding. In this study coping strategies used by family caregivers of dementia patients and caregivers' sense of burden were assessed. Burden scores were significantly correlated with spiritual support, an external coping strategy. When spiritual well-being is integrated with medical and psychosocial needs, the clergy and spiritual community can play an integral role in the care for families and dementia patients.     

Catastrophe theory applications in clinical psychology: A review

Catastrophe theory is a new mathematical science that permits some insight into the way in which sudden changes or discontinuities of behavior may occur even though the underlying causative forces are essentially continuous. This article aims to present a nonmathematician’s view of catastrophe applications in clinical psychology. Areas covered include anorexia nervosa, binge eating and drinking, affective disorders, schizophrenia, aggressiveness, and prison disturbances. Where appropriate, therapeutic implications and possible physiological correlates are offered. Examples are given of catastrophe theory’s ability to explain previously inexplicable findings. Attention is drawn to its refutability and predictive value, and hence its scientific respectability.     

Time perception and attention: The effects of prospective versus retrospective paradigms and task demands on perceived duration

This research was designed to compare time judgments obtained under prospective conditions (in which subjects are instructed to attend to time) and retrospective conditions (in which subjects are unaware that they will be required to judge time). In Experiment 1, subjects prospectively or retrospectively judged the duration of intervals spent performing a perceptual-motor task at different levels of difficulty. The results showed that subjects tested under both research paradigms tended to give increasingly shorter and/or more inaccurate time judgments with increases in nontemporal task demands. Experiment 2 was designed to test the effects of attentional deployment on perceived time by comparing prospective and retrospective judgments under control, selective attention, and divided attention conditions. Both types of time judgments became increasingly inaccurate as attention was more broadly deployed. The results of these experiments are consistent with an attentional allocation model, and they suggest that nontemporal task demands disrupt or interfere with timing in both prospective and retrospective situations.     

Symptomatology of adopted and nonadopted adolescents in a psychiatric hospital

This study compared the symptomatology and diagnoses of adopted and nonadopted adolescents in a psychiatric hospital. Data were gathered from the hospital charts of adolescents who already had been discharged from the hospital. Contrary to expectations, adoptees were no more likely than nonadoptees to have received personality disorder diagnoses, nor were they more likely to be hospitalized as the result of antisocial behavior. However, in comparison with nonadopted adolescents, the adopted adolescents were younger upon admission to the hospital, significantly less often diagnosed psychotic, and significantly more often diagnosed adjustment reaction. It was suggested that adopted adolescents may be less likely than nonadopted adolescents to require severe or prolonged pathology in order to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It was also suggested that the antisocial symptomatology so frequently observed in adopted children in mental health settings does not account for the hospitalizations of those receiving inpatient treatment.     

Exner's Four Square: useful index in appraisal of learning disability?

Rorschach protocols, focusing on Exner's Four Square, were obtained for 14 boys who had been referred for a second opinion following an initial diagnosis as learning disabled. The findings indicated wide diversity, suggesting that a significant proportion of students manifest fundamental problems which are not essentially cognitive in nature. For these students, traditional psychoeducational decisions may be inappropriate and unproductive.     

Mechanisms underlying satiation of feeding behavior of the mollusc Aplysia

Animals filled almost to satiation by nonnutritive bulk do not satiate when they ingest a small amount of seaweed. This suggests that satiation is not triggered by chemostimulation of an anteriorly located "hot spot." Inflation of a balloon placed in the gut of the animal results in satiation as reflected in a number of different parameters of feeding behavior. The suppressive effect of a relatively brief inflation is rapidly and fully reversible, although repeated inflation and deflation appeared to produce slowly reversible or irreversible effects. The parameters of the changes in feeding during gut inflation are comparable to those of normal animals that are slowly fed individual pieces of food. The inflation volume needed to satiate the animal is a function of the rate of inflation--more rapid inflations requiring larger volumes. Cutting of the esophageal nerves results in a significant increase in the volume needed to satiate the animals, but nevertheless they eventually cease feeding and generally do not show a burst gut. The evidence indicates that the satiation that eventually occurs in nerve-sectioned animals, at least in part, is due to depression of feeding following very prolonged sensory stimulation. The data suggest that for a rapidly consumed meal, satiation results primarily due to distension-related gut signals conveyed by the esophageal nerves, whereas for very slowly consumed meals, the former factor interacts with a process associated with sensory stimulation, such as receptor adaptation. The current results indicate that balloon distension can serve as a reasonable stimulus in experiments in simplified preparations in which the nervous system can be studied.