Revisiting the association of aggression and suicidal behavior in schizophrenic inpatients

Our study investigated the association of aggression and suicidal behavior in schizophrenic inpatients. Eight thousand nine hundred one admissions for schizophrenia (1998-2007) to a psychiatric university hospital were included. Schizophrenic suicides (n = 7)/suicide attempters (n = 40) were compared to suicides (n = 30)/suicide attempters (n = 186) with other diagnoses and to schizophrenic non-attempters regarding aggression. Logistic regression analysis was performed to explore risk factors for attempted suicide. Schizophrenic suicides/suicide attempters did not differ from other suicides/suicide attempters or from schizophrenic non-attempters with regard to aggression. Risk of inpatient suicide attempt was increased for patients with attempted suicide at admission, high school graduation, and disorganized subtype. Aggression could not be found to be a predictor of attempted suicide. Aggression seems to have a minor role for suicidal behavior in schizophrenia.     

Religion and Addiction

Religion with its rituals can become an object of addiction, especially when a child while growing up experiences neglect and abuse. It is also very common that such individuals transfer their feelings of anger, rage and sometimes even true hatred to God. Then God becomes the substitute for their displaced vengeance (upon those who abused them as children).     

Disagreement, Error and Two Senses of Incompatibility—The Relational Function of Discursive Updating

In Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Robert B. Brandom puts forward a general method of formally representing relations between meaning and use (between vocabularies and practices-or-abilities) and shows how discursive intentionality can be understood as a pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In this context, the activity that pragmatically mediates the semantic relations characteristic of discursive intentionality is specified as a practice of discursive updating—a practice of rectifying commitments and removing incompatibilities. The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at the practice of discursive updating and to show that the role of inconsistencies and disagreements in discursive practice can only be fully understood if the interactional dimension of updating processes is taken into account—i.e. if one looks at the explicitly social, interactional role of discursive updating in cases of disagreements between different subjects.     

Prominence vs. aboutness in sequencing: A functional distinction within the left inferior frontal gyrus

Prior research on the neural bases of syntactic comprehension suggests that activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) correlates with the processing of word order variations. However, there are inconsistencies with respect to the specific subregion within the IFG that is implicated by these findings: the pars opercularis or the pars triangularis. Here, we examined the hypothesis that the dissociation between pars opercularis and pars triangularis activation may reflect functional differences between clause-medial and clause-initial word order permutations, respectively. To this end, we directly compared clause-medial and clause-initial object-before-subject orders in German in a within-participants, event-related fMRI design. Our results showed increased activation for object-initial sentences in a bilateral network of frontal, temporal and subcortical regions. Within the lIFG, posterior and inferior subregions showed only a main effect of word order, whereas more anterior and superior subregions showed effects of word order and sentence type, with higher activation for sentences with an argument in the clause-initial position. These findings are interpreted as evidence for a functional gradation of sequence processing within the left IFG: posterior subportions correlate with argument prominence-based (local) aspects of sequencing, while anterior subportions correlate with aboutness-based aspects of sequencing, which are crucial in linking the current sentence to the wider discourse. This proposal appears compatible with more general hypotheses about information processing gradients in prefrontal cortex (Koechlin & Summerfield, 2007).     

Parental involvement in home visiting: Interpersonal predictors and correlates

Parents' commitment to and usage of early intervention are key variables in understanding discrepancies in families' susceptibility to these services. Although the important role of fathers in infant development is widely recognized, early interpersonal predictors of paternal involvement in home‐visiting programs have been understudied. This article aims to fill this gap by regressing parents' postnatal involvement on prenatal partnership satisfaction and quality of the helping relationship in a sample of 124 socially and financially disadvantaged families. Paternal program engagement was predicted by partnership satisfaction whereas the perceived quality of the helping relationship best predicted maternal program engagement, with demographical characteristics controlled. Maternal program engagement also mediated the relationship between partnership satisfaction and paternal program engagement. The results are discussed against the theoretical background.     

Learning and development of embodied numerosity

Recent empirical evidence indicates that seemingly abstract numerical cognitions are rooted in sensory and bodily experiences. In particular in finger counting finger-based representations reflect a specific case of embodied cognition, we termed embodied numerosity. Furthermore, we suggest that finger-based representations should be considered a distinct representation of number (magnitude) and argue that this representation is activated automatically whenever we encounter a number. We discuss in what way such a theoretical framework can account for the associations of fingers and numbers observed so far. In the final part, we evaluate whether the concept of embodied numerosity should be generalized beyond finger-based representations with particular focus on whether bodily-sensory experiences (such as moving the whole body along the mental number line) may corroborate numerical capabilities. In a series of intervention studies, we consistently observed more pronounced training effects for our embodied numerosity trainings for different age groups, different digital media, different number ranges, and different control conditions. Taken together, we conclude that embodied representations of number (magnitude) exist, are not limited to finger-based representations, and influence number processing in a systematic and functional way that can be used to foster the efficiency of numerical trainings.     

Factor Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Modified Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index in a Sample of Croatian Children and Adolescents

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) refers to a person’s tendency to fear anxiety-related symptoms due to the belief that they have harmful consequences. The Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI) is a well accepted operationalization of the AS construct in children and adolescents. This study evaluated the factor structure, gender stability and psychometric properties of the CASI, modified to a 5-point scale, in a sample of Croatian children and adolescents (N = 1,679). Exploratory and confirmatory analysis and a Schmid-Leiman solution confirmed the multidimensional and hierarchical structure of the CASI, which consisted of three lower-order factors and a single higher-order factor. Further, the modification of the CASI to a 5-point scale resulted in higher reliability, while maintaining acceptable levels of factor stability and validity.     

Factor structure and psychometric properties of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index in a sample of Croatian adults

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) refers to a person's tendency to fear anxiety-related symptoms due to the belief that these symptoms may have harmful consequences. The most widely used operationalization of AS in adults is the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI). The factor structure, gender stability, and psychometric properties of the ASI in a sample of Croatian adults (N = 984) were evaluated. Results confirm the multidimensional and hierarchical structure of the ASI, which consisted of three lower-order factors (Physical Concerns, Psychological Concerns, and Social Concerns) and a single higher-order factor, AS. Furthermore, the achievement of normative scores for the ASI in a Croatian adult sample demonstrates the cross-national stability of the ASI. Reliability coefficients for the ASI, Physical Concerns, and Psychological Concerns are high and satisfactory in the total sample and for both genders. Overall, the results confirmed the cross-national stability, gender stability, reliability, and validity of the ASI in a sample of Croatian adults.