Psychiatric and substance use disorders as risk factors for attempted suicide among adolescents: a case control study

The objective of this research was to test substance-related and non-substance-related psychiatric disorders as predictors of attempted suicide among adolescents. Ninety-six psychiatrically disordered suicide attempters were matched one-to-one to 96 psychiatrically disordered non-attempters on age, race, gender, and the presence/absence of major depression. Conditional logistic regression was used to test psychiatric risk factors for their power to predict attempted suicide among adolescents. Bipolar disorder, cocaine use disorders, and conduct disorder were found to be predictive of attempted suicide in univariate testing. Bipolar disorder, inhalant use disorders, cocaine use disorders, and hallucinogen use disorders were found to be predictive of attempted suicide, after adjusting for all other covariates. Loglinear analyses revealed high odds ratios associated with the comorbidities of alcohol use disorder with conduct disorder and drug use disorders with conduct disorder in both groups. Higher rates of cocaine use disorder/conduct disorder, hallucinogen use disorder/conduct disorder, and alcohol use disorder/ conduct disorder were found among suicide attempters. Evaluation of these particular comorbid conditions should be part of the adolescent suicide risk assessment.     

Maladaptive conflict monitoring as evidence for executive dysfunction in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome

Using an adaptation of the Attentional Networks Test, we investigated aspects of executive control in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (DS22q11.2), a common but not well understood disorder that produces non-verbal cognitive deficits and a marked incidence of psychopathology. The data revealed that children with DS22q11.2 demonstrated greater difficulty than controls in locating and processing target items in the presence of distracters. Importantly, children with DS22q11.2 showed a deficit in the ability to monitor and adapt to stimulus conflict. These data provide evidence of inadequate conflict adaptation in children with DS22q11.2, a problem that is also present in schizophrenia. The findings of specific executive dysfunction in this group may provide a linkage between particular genetic abnormalities and the development of psychopathology.     

A specific role for the human amygdala in olfactory memory

The medial temporal lobe is known to play a role in the processing of olfaction and memory. The specific contribution of the human amygdala to memory for odors has not been addressed, however. The role of this region in memory for odors was assessed in patients with unilateral amygdala damage due to temporal lobectomy (n = 20; 11 left, 9 right), one patient with selective bilateral amygdala damage, and in 20 age-matched normal controls. Fifteen odors were presented, followed 1 h later by an odor-name matching test and an odor-odor recognition test. Signal detection analyses showed that both unilateral groups were impaired in their memory for matching odors with names, these patients were not significantly impaired on odor-odor recognition. Bilateral amygdala damage resulted in severe impairment in both odor-name matching as well as in odor-odor recognition memory. Importantly, none of the patients were impaired on an auditory verbal learning task, suggesting that these findings reflect a specific impairment in olfactory memory, and not merely a more general memory deficit. Taken together, the data provide neuropsychological evidence that the human amygdala is essential for olfactory memory.     

Consequences of Children's Exposure to Community Violence

Much has been learned over the past decade about the way children respond to experiences of violence in their community. The goal of this paper is to review what is known about the effects of community violence on children's development. In addition to main effects, factors that mediate these effects, as well as factors that moderate children's response to community violence are discussed. Special attention is paid to developmental differences in children's responses to community violence and the factors that may promote resilient functioning.     

Evidence for preserved emotional memory in normal older persons

Emotion has been shown to have a modulatory effect on declarative memory. Normal aging is associated with a decline in declarative memory, but whether aging might affect the influence of emotion on memory has not been established. To investigate this, we administered a task that provides a detailed assessment of emotional memory to 80 neurologically normal adults ranging in age from 35 to 85 years. Across ages, memory performance was found to be modulated by the emotional significance of stimuli in a comparable manner (improved memory for gist, compromised memory for visual detail), despite an overall decline in memory performance with increasing age. The results raise the interesting possibility that aging has a differential effect on hippocampal versus amygdala function.     

Computer-Aided Careers Guidance: An Investigation Involving an Artificial System

Customer satisfaction with the occupational suggestions provided by computer-aided guidance systems is uniformly high. User satisfaction and reactions to an artificial system, and two conventional and profile-matching system, were compared. The results suggested that user satisfaction is influenced by several factors which are largely unrelated to the quality or novelty of the occupational suggestions received. The project also raises several issues regarding the validity of profile-matching in comparison to other less-complex databank-reduction procedures.     

Pharmacological dissociation of memory: anisomycin, a protein synthesis inhibitor, and leupeptin, a protease inhibitor, block different learning tasks

Inhibition of protein synthesis by anisomycin for a short duration impairs memory of a one-trial inhibitory avoidance task in rats. Memory of escape conditioning involving eight trials is disrupted only if the duration of protein synthesis is prolonged by repeated injections. In marked contrast, olfactory memory of rats trained on two odor discriminations is not affected by anisomycin even if the duration of inhibition is prolonged and the number of trials is reduced to a minimum. In previous work, leupeptin, a thiol proteinase inhibitor, was shown to impair olfactory discrimination learning, but left inhibitory and avoidance conditioning intact. Together, these results provide a pharmacological double dissociation of memory, and suggest that the same chemistries, or mixtures of chemistries, may not be involved in all types of memory.     

The effectiveness of MMPI-A items in discriminating between normative and clinical samples.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) was released in 1992 and has rapidly become the most widely used objective personality assessment instrument with adolescents. Although the MMPI-A reduced or eliminated several problems associated with the use of the original MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) with adolescents, the MMPI-A does produce a high frequency of within normal limits basic scale profiles for individuals with substantial psychopathology including adolescents in inpatient psychiatric settings. To better understand the reasons for this phenomenon, we compared the item endorsement frequencies for the MMPI-A normative sample with results from two adolescent clinical samples, and these results were contrasted to the item endorsement frequencies for the MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) normative sample and a clinical sample of adult psychiatric inpatients. Results showed that the MMPI-A contains a substantial number of items that do not show a significant difference in item endorsement frequency between normative and clinical samples. Furthermore, MMPI-A basic and content scales generally show a much lower percentage of effective items than do the corresponding scales for the MMPI-2. We discuss the findings in relation to the frequent occurrence of low range MMPI-A profiles in clinical samples and the potential usefulness of these results in future efforts to develop viable short forms for the MMPI-A.     

Domestic Abuse as Terrorism

A number of philosophers and feminist authors have recently equated domestic abuse with the ubiquitous and ill‐defined concept of “terrorism.” Claudia Card, for instance, argues that domestic abuse is a frequently ignored form of terrorism that creates and maintains “heterosexual male dominance and female dependence and service” (Card 2003). Alison Jaggar, in a recent article, also concludes that an acceptable definition of terrorism will find rape and domestic violence to be terrorist acts (Jaggar 2005). Yet there seem to be several obstacles to any simple appropriation of the term “terrorism” for cases of domestic abuse. In this paper I will address what I take to be three significant problems that might be raised with regard to any attempt to identify domestic abuse as an act of terrorism. These problems include the fact that a) definitions of terrorism usually require clear political motivations, b) definitions of terrorism normally require that the terrorist intend to create a climate of terror, and c) adopting the term terrorism for cases of domestic abuse might appear simply inappropriate or unhelpful. I will argue, however, that each of these possible objections can be answered effectively and that domestic abuse rightly falls under the rubric of terrorism.