A pilot study of two-day cognitive-behavioral therapy for panic disorder

The present study investigated the short-term efficacy of brief, intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for panic disorder (PD). The treatment involved 9h of therapist contact over two consecutive days and was developed for the purpose of delivering CBT for PD to a largely rural patient population that must travel long distances to find a treatment provider. Ten patients who elected to participate in brief, intensive CBT instead of weekly CBT were recruited from routine clinical practice in a hospital-based anxiety disorders clinic. Patients were not excluded based on the presence of agoraphobia, diagnostic comorbidity, concurrent use of PRN benzodiazepine medications, or previous nonresponse to psychotherapy for PD. Assessments conducted at pre-treatment and 1-month follow-up revealed large, clinically significant reductions in PD symptoms, anxiety sensitivity, body vigilance, and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Most patients (60%) were panic-free after treatment and evidenced normative levels of symptomatology at follow-up. The present study suggests that brief, intensive treatment may be an effective means of delivering CBT for PD.     

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross‐modal priming study

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English‐speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime‐target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly‐bell), moderate (e.g., lately‐late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly‐bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach‐spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage‐trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.     

DISCUSSION OF THE CONCEPTUAL BASIS OF BIOSEMIOTICS

Kalevi Kull and colleagues recently proposed eight theses as a conceptual basis for the field of biosemiotics. We use these theses as a framework for discussing important current areas of debate in biosemiotics with particular reference to the articles collected in this issue of Zygon.