The CORE‐10: A short measure of psychological distress for routine use in the psychological therapies

Background: There is a need for a generic, short, and easy‐to‐use assessment measure for common presentations of psychological distress in UK primary care mental health settings. This paper sets out the development of the CORE‐10 in response to this need. Method: Items were drawn from the CORE‐OM and 10 items were selected according to a combination of usefulness, coverage of item clusters, and statistical procedures. Three CORE‐OM datasets were employed in the development phase: (1) a primary care sample, (2) a sample from an MRC platform trial of enhanced collaborative care of depression in primary care, and (3) a general population sample derived from the Office of National Statistics Psychiatric Morbidity Follow‐up survey. A fourth dataset comprising a sample from an occupational health setting was used to evaluate the CORE‐10 in its standalone format. Results: The internal reliability (alpha) of the CORE‐10 was .90 and the score for the CORE‐10 correlated with the CORE‐OM at .94 in a clinical sample and .92 in a non‐clinical sample. The clinical cut‐off score for general psychological distress was 11.0 with a reliable change index (90% CI) of 6. For depression, the cut‐off score for the CORE‐10 was 13 and yielded sensitivity and specificity values of .92 (CI=.83–1.0) and 0.72 (CI=.60–.83) respectively. Conclusion: The CORE‐10 is an acceptable and feasible instrument that has good psychometric properties and is practical to use with people presenting with common mental health problems in primary care settings.     

Landscape,nation and globe: Theoretical nuances in the analysis of Asian Christianity

This brief afterword comments on the papers from this special issue, arguing that each explores current complexities of interactions between national and transnational orientations, but also helps to nuance understandings of the global through the invocation of history. As a result, we not only observe the interplay between colonial and post-colonial regimes of religion and politics, but also gain an appreciation of transnational religious impulses that were in operation well before the last few decades of explicitly ‘global consciousness’. Christianisation has a significant history in the regions covered, but it cannot be understood through crude, unilinear models of development or progress.     

Meanings of movement,place and home at Walsingham

This paper examines the revival, over the past 100 years, of the Catholic pilgrimage site of Walsingham. It argues that, for some habitual pilgrims, the site is akin to a second ‘home’, constituting a place for ‘dwelling in movement’. Contemporary pilgrimage practices not only establish links between local parishes and the Walsingham shrines, but also incorporate specific forms of mobility that express connections with personal, collective and institutional representations of the past. An examination of the site encourages the blurring of analytical distinctions between ‘local’ and ‘visitor’, and also poses questions concerning the relationship between culture, place and forms of belonging.     

Children's Antisocial and Prosocial Lies to Familiar and Unfamiliar Adults

Although parents frequently instruct children not to lie, children often observe lie‐telling within the family environment. To date, no empirical research has examined children's spontaneous lie‐telling to different lie‐recipients. The current study examined children's spontaneous deceptive behaviour to parents and unfamiliar adults. In Experiment 1 (N = 98), children's (ages 6–9) antisocial lies to a parent or an unfamiliar adult were examined using a modified Temptation Resistance Paradigm. In Experiment 2, (N = 99) children's (ages 6–9) prosocial lies to a parent versus an unfamiliar adult were examined using the Disappointing Gift Paradigm. Results indicate that, across different types of lies, children are more likely to lie to an unfamiliar adult than to a parent. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inhibitory control over the present and the past

From the perspective of the Hasher, Zacks, and May (1999) inhibitory framework, optimal performance occurs only when there is control over nonrelevant information. Relative to a current, goal-directed task, there are at least two potential sources of nonrelevant information that need to be controlled. The first is no longer relevant information. Such information would include, for example, a previous topic of conversation, or, in our work, a previous list of materials presented for study and recall. The second source of nonrelevant information is currently present (in thought or in the world) stimuli that are not relevant to the task at hand. Inhibitory processes are critical to the effective control of both sources of information?the no longer relevant past and the irrelevant present. If inhibitory processes are inefficient, irrelevant information from both the past and the present will disrupt performance on the current task. We illustrate this with studies showing the role of irrelevant information in reducing the working memory capacity of older adults and in slowing them down as they do even reasonably simple tasks.     

Factores familiares en la recaída de pacientes esquizofrénicos

Resumen

Nuestro estudio de la atmósfera emocional de los hogares de los pacientes esquizofrénicos en California del Sur ha replicado los descubrimientos británicos en relación con la influencia del ambiente familiar sobre el curso de la esquizofrenia. Como en los estudios británicos, las críticas y la implicación emocional excesiva de un familiar clave para el paciente en el momento de su ingreso constituyen el mejor predictor aislado de recaída sintomática en los nueve meses posteriores al alta hospitalaria. Al igual que en los resultados británicos, la asociación entre la emoción expresada de los familiares y la recaída fue independiente de todas las demas variables investigadas. Los resultados transculturales sobre los efectos preventivos de la medicación sugieren que los clínicos deben considerar la atmósfera emocional del hogar, a la hora de explicar los fracasos de la medicación.     

Let's exist again (like we did last summer)

ABSTRACT

This paper is a defence of a psychological view of personal identity against the attack Peter Unger launches against it in his Identity, Consciousness and Value. Unger attempts to undermine the traditional support which a psychological criterion of identity has drawn from thought-experiments, and to show that such a criterion has totally unacceptable implications—in particular, that it allows that persons can go out of and come back into existence. I respond to both aspects of this criticism, arguing that the relevant thought- experiments (and the support they appear to offer) survive Unger's attack intact, and that he does not establish his case against intermittent existence.     

The elephant tied up with string: a clinical case study showing the importance of NHS provision of intensive,time-limited psychoanalytic psychotherapy treatments

Prof. Richard Layard's influential advocacy for greater provision of ‘evidence-based’ psychological therapies, based in part on an economic rationale, has lead to greatly increased provision of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and short-term therapies for depression, through the Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative, whilst longer-term psychodynamic treatments are under threat, criticised as lacking an evidence base. This paper argues for the continuing provision of intensive thrice-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy treatments, time-limited to two years. It does so by describing such a treatment within an NHS psychotherapy department with a patient with a long history of severe personality pathology, including significant levels of perversity. The paper describes the patient's difficulties and his movement through the treatment, focussing on his difficulties making genuine emotional contact, his destructiveness of such contact, his acting out in the treatment, his perversity and the vital working through of the ending. The shifts the patient made are described, and follow-up information on the patient is given. The paper discusses the unique benefits of time-limited treatment and intensive psychoanalytic treatments for this ‘hard-to-help’ group of patients, and the economic rationale that can be made for such treatments.