Words may not be enough! No increased emotional Stroop effect in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Conflicting evidence has been obtained whether or not patients diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) share an attentional bias towards disorder-related stimuli. Some of these inconsistencies can be accounted for by suboptimal stimuli selection. In consideration of the heterogeneity of OCD, we investigated Stroop interference effects for two classes of OCD items (i.e., washing and checking) in 23 OCD patients and 23 healthy controls. In order to cover prevalent OCD concerns, item compilation was based on experts' appraisals. Patients neither displayed greater immediate as well as delayed Stroop interference nor any bias for OCD and subtype-congruent stimuli. On the contrary, for washing-related items, OCD patients, and here especially washers, displayed facilitation relative to healthy controls. Although the present study at first sight refutes the notion of an attentional bias in OCD in contrast to other anxiety disorders, several potential moderators need to be considered before this account is ultimately dismissed. In particular, an attentional bias may only be elicited using visual material that is more attention-grabbing than verbal stimuli. Finally, blockwise instead of random item administration and greater consideration of individual relevance may be crucial prerequisites for the effect to emerge.     

Kosteneffektivität ambulanter Psychotherapie

Background

There is a lack of cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) of psychotherapeutic treatments.

Material and methods

Cost-effectiveness analysis was applied to a sub-sample of 122 psychotherapy outpatients who participated in a large longitudinal study on outpatient psychotherapy (TRANS-OP study). Participants received either psychodynamic psychotherapy (PD, n=69) or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT, n=53). Effectiveness (change in symptomatic impairment over 2 years) was assessed via the German version of the Outcome Questionnaire (OQ-45.2). Direct health care costs during a 2-year period (psychotherapy and other health care utilizations) were obtained from health insurance claims. Cost-effectiveness analysis methods included incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER) and the net benefit regression approach.

Results

Cost-effectiveness analyses showed no significant differences between the two treatments, neither head-to-head, nor with regard to advantages in certain subgroups of psychotherapy outpatients. A slight dominance of CBT in costs was not maintained after controlling for covariates.

Conclusion

Provided that pivotal covariates such as treatment need are taken into account, cost-effectiveness analyses can contribute to a more equitable distribution of psychotherapeutic resources.     

No Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Under Stress

ABSTRACT— Stress affects memory, yet no study has investigated the effects of stress on memory inhibition: Remembering not only facilitates later recall, but also inhibits retrieval of related material, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting. We investigated the effects of stress on this mechanism, which is thought to adaptively guide memory selection. Participants learned categorized lists and were then exposed to either a psychosocial laboratory stressor or a cognitively challenging control treatment. They then actively retrieved parts of the previously learned material. Finally, memory for all initially learned items was tested. In the stress group, unlike in the control group, intervening retrieval practice did not impair final recall. Moreover, salivary cortisol levels increased and psychological well-being decreased in the stress group only. Thus, psychosocial stress abolishes retrieval-induced forgetting. This effect may result from stress-induced hormone release from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and may have implications for educational, legal, and clinical issues.     

Auditory location negative priming: A case of feature mismatch

In an auditory four-alternative forced choice localization task, participants had to localize one of two simultaneously presented sounds while ignoring the location of the second sound. Negative priming—that is, sloweddown responses to a location that had to be ignored in the previous trial—was found only when the sound at the repeated location changed between prime and probe. There was also no increase in prime response errors to the probes of ignored repetition trials. These findings allow for the conclusion that auditory location priming is caused by feature mismatch only and that other mechanisms, such as inhibition of ignored locations or episodic retrieval of transfer-inappropriate prime information, do not play a role. The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Ma 2610/2-1).     

Perceiving subjectivity in bodily movement: The case of dancers

This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers).     

Psychosomatik der umweltbezogenen Gesundheitsstörungen

Environmental medicine focuses on acute and chronic effects of chemical and physical environmental influences on health as measured objectively and perceived subjectively. Since these influences are very complex, continuously changing and only partially accessible in scientific experiments, subjective causal attributions can be difficult to prove or disprove. Patients with symptoms attributed to environmental triggers perceive health threats from commonly used chemical agents or electromagnetic radiation, frequently without objective findings. Typical examples are “multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)”, a generalized self-reported hypersensitivity towards ubiquitous chemicals, or “amalgam sensitivity”, where symptoms are attributed to amalgam from dental fillings. Here, the reported symptoms are almost invariably unspecific and show a high overlap with other medically unexplained syndromes. Based on modern psychosomatic conceptualizations, many environment associated illnesses can be regarded as somatoform disorders and treated as such. Apart from a high psychiatric comorbidity, special attention should be paid to dysfunctional cognitions, emotions and behaviour, and the patient’s often limited quality of life.     

Der Arztbrief

The right of inspection in the hospital documents, the hospital discharge report for example, is often refused to patients in in-patient psychotherapeutic treatment (psychiatry, psychosomatic and psychotherapeutic medicine) with reference to the protection of the patients themselves, their doctors or relatives. Within a systemic therapy approach patients of an acute psychosomatic care unit in a hospital the patients could inspect the report of their hospital treatment including all ?objective” and ?subjective” data of their hospital stay. The conversation with patients and their relatives about this report and modifications of the details and addresses of the report in case of patients’ objections is considered as a psychotherapeutic tool (narrative of doctor and patient) in order to improve the transparency of the diagnostic and therapeutic process and the insights in the psychosomatic mechanisms of the patient’s disease. We discuss our organisation of cocreating the hospital discharge report and our experiences with this type of patient-doctor-communication.     

Überlegungen zur theoretischen Fundierung der Disziplin Wirtschaftsinformatik, ausgehend von der allgemeinen Systemtheorie

Using general system theory as a theoretical foundation of business information systems science. The science of business information systems is looking for its theoretical foundations. In this article general system theory is adapted to serve as such a theoretical foundation. The adapted general system theory is reconstructed using the structuralistic approach to reveal the empirical claims of this theory and to analyse scientific progress in the science of business information systems. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.