Method of Suicide in the Mentally Ill: A National Clinical Survey

Comparisons of psychiatric patients who die by suicide using different methods are scarce. We aimed to establish the methods of suicide used by those who are currently or have recently been in contact with mental health services in England and Wales (N = 6,203), and describe the social and clinical characteristics of suicides by different methods. We found that hanging, self‐poisoning, and jumping (from a height or in front of a moving vehicle) were the most common methods of suicide, accounting for 79% of all deaths. The implications of these and other findings are discussed.     

Election Outcome and Tax Compliance: The Role of Political Party Affiliation,Affect Balance,and Trust in Government

The present study examines partisan reactions to presidential election outcomes. Our model investigates the interactive role of political party affiliation on the relationship between identification with the winning party and affect balance. We subsequently examine how tax compliance intentions are influenced by this moderation relationship through affect balance and trust in government. We conducted a quasi-experiment one week prior to the first mass 2016 presidential primary, where 12 of the 50 US states voted to decide which candidates would represent the Republican and Democratic parties in the 2016 US presidential election. Our sample consisted of 205 Republicans and Democrats. We manipulated press releases showing various presidential candidates winning the presidency to examine how matches / mismatches between partisans’ political party affiliation and the party winning the election influence citizens’ overall feelings, beliefs, and intentions. We find election outcomes generate significant overall positive or negative feelings (i.e., affect balance) among partisans, which influences beliefs about trust in government, and subsequently their tax compliance intentions. Political party moderates the relationship between election outcomes and affect balance in such a way that Democrats experience greater overall positive affect balance when their party wins the election compared to Republicans.     

What causes the isolation effect?

Events that are incongruent with their prevailing context are usually very well remembered. This fact often is described as the distinctiveness effect in memory, an effect that has served as explanation not only of memory phenomena but also of various other phenomena, including social judgment. The core laboratory paradigm for studying distinctiveness in memory research has long been the isolation paradigm. This paradigm, sometimes attributed to H. von Restorff, yields better memory for an item categorically isolated from surrounding items than for the surrounding items and a proper control item. The authors offer an interpretation of the isolation effect based on the analysis of the processing of similarities and differences among the items. Two experiments provide evidence for this interpretation. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of distinctiveness effects in memory. An appeal is made for a different conceptualization of distinctiveness effects, one that treats distinctiveness as a discriminative process in memory that requires processing of both similarities and differences among items.