A Safety and Coping Planning Intervention for Suicidal Adolescents in Acute Psychiatric Care

Transitioning from an acute psychiatric care setting to a less restrictive environment after a suicidal event is arguably the most critical period of suicide risk for adolescents, making comprehensive safety and coping plans for this population ever more critical. In this paper we provide theoretical and empirical rationale for the need for developmental adaptations to current safety planning procedures for suicidal adolescents, as well as the standardization of pediatric safety plans for broader use across settings that provide acute psychiatric care to adolescents. We describe how we developed the Adolescent Safety and Coping Plan (ASCP) using qualitative in-depth interviews with 20 adolescents and their parents, explain the specific components of the ASCP, and give a case example of the ASCP being used with a young adolescent and her parents. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the barriers and facilitators of the use of the ASCP in settings that provide acute psychiatric care, as well as the need for future research to test the ASCP with diverse adolescent and family populations and settings.     

Diverse patterns of vulnerability to visual illusions in children with neurodevelopmental disorders

Cognitive Processing - Research on how children with neurodevelopmental disorders perceive, process, and interpret visual illusions (VIs) has been extensively focused on children with autism...     

Language switching and the effects of orthographic specificity and response repetition

In two experiments, Greek-English bilinguals alternated between performing a lexical decision task in Greek and in English. The cost to performance on switch trials interacted with response repetition, implying that a source of this "switch cost" is at the level of response mapping or initiation. Orthographic specificity also affected switch cost. Greek and English have partially overlapping alphabets, which enabled us to manipulate language specificity at the letter level, rather than only at the level of letter clusters. Language-nonspecific stimuli used only symbols common to both Greek and English, whereas language-specific stimuli contained letters unique to just one language. The switch cost was markedly reduced by such language-specific orthography, and this effect did not interact with the effect of response repetition, implying a separate, stimulus-sensitive source of switch costs. However, we argue that this second source is not within the word-recognition system, but at the level of task schemas, because the reduction of switch cost with language-specific stimuli was abolished when these stimuli were intermingled with language-nonspecific stimuli.     

Orientational manoeuvres in the dark: dissociating allocentric and egocentric influences on spatial memory

Subjects in a darkroom saw an array of five phosphorescent objects on a circular table and, after a short delay, indicated which object had been moved. During the delay the subject, the table or a phosphorescent landmark external to the array was moved (a rotation about the centre of the table) either alone or together. The subject then had to indicate which one of the five objects had been moved. A fully factorial design was used to detect the use of three types of representations of object location: (i) visual snapshots; (ii) egocentric representations updated by self-motion; and (iii) representations relative to the external cue. Improved performance was seen whenever the test array was oriented consistently with any of these stored representations. The influence of representations (i) and (ii) replicates previous work. The influence of representation (iii) is a novel finding which implies that allocentric representations play a role in spatial memory, even over short distances and times. The effect of the external cue was greater when initially experienced as stable. Females out-performed males except when the array was consistent with self-motion but not visual snapshots. These results enable a simple egocentric model of spatial memory to be extended to address large-scale navigation, including the effects of allocentric knowledge, landmark stability and gender.     

Parental Divorce, Familial Risk for Depression, and Psychopathology in Offspring: A Three-Generation Study

Research suggests a link between parental divorce and negative child outcomes; however, the presence of parental depression may confound this relationship. Studies exploring the simultaneous effects of depression and parents’ divorce on the adjustment of their children are scarce and rarely have a longitudinal design. This is the first three-generation study of the relative effects of depression and divorce on offspring psychopathology, based on data from a 25-year longitudinal study with families at high and low risk for depression. One hundred seventy-eight grandchildren (mean age?=?13.9?years) of depressed and nondepressed parents and grandparents were evaluated by raters blind to their parents’ and grandparents’ clinical status. We found that in both low and high-risk children, divorce had a limited impact on child adjustment over and above familial risk for depression. Divorce had a significant effect on child outcomes only among high-risk grandchildren with a depressed grandparent and non-depressed parents, with this group showing a threefold risk for anxiety disorders. Results support previous findings suggesting that familial risk for depression largely overshadows the effect of parental divorce on child psychopathology. Possible reasons for the lack of association between divorce and child psychopathology among low-risk offspring are discussed.     

Gross motor ability of native Greek, Roma, and Roma immigrant school-age children in Greece

The purpose of this study was to estimate and compare gross motor ability of children aged 7 to 10 years, all from Roma minority families (Romas, Roma immigrants) and families of indigenous Greeks. The sample consisted of 180 hildren (60 natives, 60 Romas, 60 Roma immigrants) studying in Greek public primary schools. The Test of Gross Motor Development scores showed that the group of indigenous Greek children had significantly higher performance in terms of locomotion skills, handling skills, and general motor ability compared to the groups of Roma and Roma immigrant children. No statistically significant differences were observed between the two other groups. These findings might be attributed to less participation of minority children in organized physical activities in and outside school, as well as to the reduced parental encouragement for attending related activities.     

The democratic therapeutic and training communities of the Open Psychotherapy Centre: A multifactorial communal approach

This paper describes the structure, function and effectiveness of a multifactorial communal approach which is applied in the therapy department and the four training institutes of the Open Psychotherapy Centre in Athens. The therapeutic philosophy of this approach is based on the principles of group analysis, therapeutic community and emprosopon psychotherapy which are applied in combination with each other.     

Hide and seek: The theory of mind of visual concealment and search

Researchers have investigated visual search behavior for almost a century. During that time, few studies have examined the cognitive processes involved in hiding items rather than finding them. To investigate this, we developed a paradigm that allowed participants to indicate where they would hide (or find) an item that was to be found (or hidden) by a friend or a foe. We found that (i) for friends more than foes, participants selected the pop-out item in the display, and (ii) when the display was homogeneous, they selected nearby and corner items. These behaviors held for both hiding and finding, although hide and find behaviors were not identical. For pop-out displays, decision times were unusually long when hiding an item from a foe. These data converge on the conclusion that the principles of search and concealment are similar, but not the same. They also suggest that this paradigm will provide researchers a powerful method for investigating theory of mind in adults.