Practical guide for prescribing MAOIs: debunking myths and removing barriers

Despite the fact that monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) can be highly effective therapeutic agents for depression and some anxiety disorders, they tend to be underutilized in clinical practice. This is due at least in part to the fact that there is a great deal of misinformation and mythology about their dietary and drug interactions. This article is intended to serve as a guide for clinicians who are not particularly familiar with MAO inhibitors; its aim is to help these clinicians competently integrate these agents into clinical practice when appropriate.     

Using Creative Techniques With Children Who Have Experienced Trauma

Verbal and emotional forms of expression can be difficult for young children who have experienced trauma. Creative methods and approaches such as puppets, sandtray, letter writing, and art are therapeutic mediums that provide an outlet for a young client’s story of trauma to be told. Children can use puppets to depersonalize and share feelings with a counselor that would provide insight into their coping strategies. Similarly, sandtray is another nonverbal approach that gives children the opportunity to externalize their feelings safely and can be easily used with extroverted and introverted clients. Letter writing and art can empower children and give them hope for the future. In summary, creative techniques can allow counselors to help explore stories of trauma with young clients.     

Responding to Those Who Hope for a Miracle: Practices for Clinical Bioethicists

Significant challenges arise for clinical care teams when a patient or surrogate decision-maker hopes a miracle will occur. This article answers the question, “How should clinical bioethicists respond when a medical decision-maker uses the hope for a miracle to orient her medical decisions?” We argue the ethicist must first understand the complexity of the miracle-invocation. To this end, we provide a taxonomy of miracle-invocations that assist the ethicist in analyzing the invocator's conceptions of God, community, and self. After the ethicist appreciates how these concepts influence the invocator's worldview, she can begin responding to this hope with specific practices. We discuss these practices in detail and offer concrete recommendations for a justified response to the hope for a miracle.     

Multiple family groups for adult cancer survivors and their families: a 1-day workshop model

With marked advances in early detection and aggressive multimodality treatment, many adult cancers are now associated with good prognoses for disease-free survival. A burgeoning literature examining posttreatment quality-of-life issues has highlighted the numerous challenges experienced by patients and families in the aftermath of cancer treatment, further underscoring a need for new family-based psychosocial support interventions for cancer survivors and their families. This paper describes the clinical protocol for one such intervention, a 1-day "workshop" version of a multiple family group (MFG) for head and neck cancer survivors and their families. Data are reported from our experiences in running five 1-day workshops. Families uniformly reported that they were highly satisfied with their MFG participation, leading us to conclude that the abbreviated 1-day MFG model we are advocating is a promising family-focused support intervention for cancer survivors and their families.     

Performance of rats on the Maier three-table task following septal lesions occurring 24 hours after birth

The purpose of this study was to determine whether behavioral sparing would be demonstrated when septal lesions occurred prior to the age at which the tested behavior first appears in normal rats. Rats given septal lesions at 1 day or 7 days after birth performed at approximately chance on the Maier three-table task when tested at 90 days of age. Rats that had control electrode insertions at the same ages performed at a level similar to normal animals. Animals given septal lesions at either age explored significantly more than did control animals. Results are discussed in terms of the constancy over time of the septal contribution to performance on the three-table task and the involvement of the septum and hippocampus in the processing of spatial information.     

Design and use of a U.S. census data computer laboratory for teaching undergraduate research methods

This paper discusses the design and development of an interdisciplinary social science computer laboratory for teaching undergraduate research methods courses and research components of applied and theoretical courses. The U.S. Census of the Population, a database commonly used in all of the social sciences, is used in order to give students research experience and to avoid ethical problems involved in working with animal and human subjects in an undergraduate course. Some issues in laboratory design and required changes in teaching methods are discussed.     

An interactive multiobjective programming approach to combinatorial data analysis

Combinatorial optimization problems in the social and behavioral sciences are frequently associated with a variety of alternative objective criteria. Multiobjective programming is an operations research methodology that enables the quantitative analyst to investigate tradeoffs among relevant objective criteria. In this paper, we describe an interactive procedure for multiobjective asymmetric unidimensional seriation problems. This procedure uses a dynamic-programming algorithm to partially generate the efficient set of sequences for small to medium-sized problems, and a multioperation heuristic to estimate the efficient set for larger problems. The interactive multiobjective procedure is applied to an empirical data set from the psychometric literature. We conclude with a discussion of other potential areas of application in combinatorial data analysis.Stephanie Stahl is a freelance writer and editor. She can be reached via e-mail at s-stahl@worldnet.att.net.