Treating Young Adult Depression With Text-Delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial

Young adults (ages 18 to 25) in the U.S. suffer from the highest rates of past-year major depressive episode and are the least likely to receive treatment compared to other age groups. As such, we examined the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of a text-message delivered cognitive behavioral therapy: CBT-txt with young adults. The study was a 2-month pilot RCT to test a 4-week intervention for depression that contained 197 text messages (average 12 texts every other day). The sample, recruited via Facebook and Instagram, was 102 U.S. young adults who presented with at least moderate depressive symptomatology. Assessments occurred at baseline prior to randomization and at 1 and 2 months post enrollment. The primary outcome, severity of depressive symptoms, was assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory II. Feasibility benchmarks were met and participants reported high levels of engagement with and acceptability of the intervention. Logistic regression indicated that treatment participants were three times as likely to have minimal or mild depression symptoms at 2 months compared to waitlist control participants. Latent change score modeling found that the strongest significant treatment effect appeared at the 1-month follow-up period, particularly for participants who began with severe depressive symptoms. Mediation analysis revealed significant indirect treatment effects of increases in behavioral activation on reducing depressive symptoms, suggesting a mechanism of change. Limitations were that the sample was relatively small and consisted of primarily women. These results provide initial evidence for the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of a text-delivered treatment for young adult depression.     

Stop the blame game: An analysis of blaming on Weibo during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in rice and wheat areas in China

In the pandemic era, social media has provided the public with a platform to make their voice heard. One of the most important public opinions online during a pandemic is blame. Blame can lead to stigma towards patients as well as potential patients and decrease social cooperation, which might impede prevention and control measures during epidemics. Thus, studying online blame during the early days of COVID-19 can facilitate the management and control of future pandemics. By analyzing 3791 posts from one of the most popular social media sites in China (Weibo) over the 10 days immediately after COVID-19 was declared to be a communicable disease, we found that there were four main agents blamed online: Individuals, corporations, institutions, and the media. Most of the blame targeted individual agents. We also found that there were regional-cultural differences in the detailed types of blamed individual agents, that is, between rice- and wheat-farming areas in China. After controlling influence of distance from the epicenter of Wuhan, there were still stable differences between regions: people in wheat areas had a higher probability of blaming agentic, harmful individuals, and people in rice areas had a higher probability of blaming individuals with low awareness of social norms for preventive health behavior. Findings have implications for preventing and predicting blame across cultures in future pandemics.     

Behavioral consequences of intergroup sensitivity

Communication of criticism between groups is important to productive societal discourse, but may serve to inflame conflict. The defensive rejection of intergroup, relative to intragroup, criticism (intergroup sensitivity effect [ISE]) may contribute to such divides. The ISE has been observed in self-report measures, but such measures are weak and biased predictors of actual (divisive) behavior. We review recent research demonstrating that the ISE does have costly behavioral consequences. We next consider the debate concerning whether the ISE reflects defense of a valued social identity or enforcement of a conversational norm. We therefore review recent evidence for an ISE among individuals lacking identification with the target of the criticism. Third, we examine how the ISE may affect a variety of behaviors relevant to societal divisions, including political reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and vaccination. Lastly, we outline future research that can clarify the underlying mechanisms of the ISE and promote conciliatory intergroup behavior.     

BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract. The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many-body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles.     

Psychometric properties and factor structure of the Fear Questionnaire phobia subscale items in two normative samples

Normative data for the Fear Questionnaire (Marks & Mathews, 1979), a popular self-report instrument measuring phobic concerns, were collected from both a community and a collegiate sample. The covariation and internal consistency of the blood-injury phobia (BI), social phobia (SO), and agoraphobia (AG) subscales were assessed in each sample, and the factor structure of the items from these three subscales was examined. Results indicated that, in general, community subjects reported more phobic concerns than did collegiate subjects, and females reported greater phobic concerns than did males. Results from confirmatory factor analyses suggest that the three factors of BI, SO, and AG did not emerge from either data set. Follow-up exploratory factor analyses did identify the general factors of blood-injury phobia and agoraphobia. Normative data from the present study are compared to those obtained previously, and directions for future research are provided.     

Clinical interpretation: The hermeneutics of medicine

I argue that clinical medicine can best be understood not as a purified science but as a hermeneutical enterprise: that is, as involved with the interpretation of texts. The literary critic reading a novel, the judge asked to apply a law, must arrive at a coherent reading of their respective texts. Similarly, the physician interprets the text of the ill person: clinical signs and symptoms are read to ferret out their meaning, the underlying disease. However, I suggest that the hermeneutics of medicine is rendered uniquely complex by its wide variety of textual forms. I discuss four in turn: the experiential text of illness as lived out by the patient; the narrative text constituted during history-taking; the physical text of the patient's body as objectively examined; the instrumental text constructed by diagnostic technologies. I further suggest that certain flaws in modern medicine arise from its refusal of a hermeneutic self-understanding. In seeking to escape all interpretive subjectivity, medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient.     

Medical hermeneutics: Where is the “text” we are interpreting?

The present paper is a commentary on an article by Drew Leder [1]. Leder identifies a series of texts in the clinical encounter, emphasizes the central role of interpretation in making sense of each of these texts, and articulates ordering principles to guide the interpretive work.The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found. Such an expectation invites doctors and patients to search for the text and runs the risk of conceptualizing patients as more static than they are. If one is to use the textual metaphor, one must appreciate the radical extent to which the clinical encounter is a mutually produced and shifting entity. The qualities of mutuality and indeterminacy are not those one usually associates with texts. One might ultimately be better served by a different metaphor based more directly on uncertainty.     

Medicine as business and profession

This paper analyzes one dimension of the frequently alleged contradiction between treating medicine as a business and as a profession, namely the incompatibility between viewing the physician patient relationship in economic and moral terms. The paper explores the utilitarian foundations of economics and the deontological foundations of professional medical ethics as one source for the business/medicine conflict that influences beliefs about the proper understanding of the therapeutic relationship. It, then, focuses on the contrast and distinction between medicine as business and profession by critically analyzing the classic economic view of the moral status of medicine articulated by Kenneth Arrow. The paper concludes with a discussion of some advantages associated with regarding medicine as a business.     

孟子的心理学思想研究

该文较系统地论述了孟子的普通心理思想。主要问题是:心理学思想的基本观点,知虑心理思想,情欲心理思想,志意心理思想,智能心理思想,性习心理思想。