Treatment of urinary urgency and excessive frequency: a case study

A 39-year-old male presenting with a 5 year history of excessive urinary frequency and urgency was treated first with scheduling of urination, use of external urinary catheter and progressive muscular relaxation and then with a urinary retention training procedure. After the first set of procedures, urinary frequency decreased, whereas urgency increased slightly. After completion of retention training, both symptoms were alleviated. Overall, urinary frequency decreased from a baseline average of 14 urinations daily to a post-treatment average of 6.5 urinations per day. Urinary urgency decreased from a baseline average of 35 urges per day to a post-treatment average of 9.3 urges per day. Gains were maintained at 3 and 5 month follow-up.     

Perception of emotions by accepted and rejected children

The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptions of emotions by accepted and rejected children. Peer ratings and peer sociometrics were used to identify accepted and rejected children. All children were administered a task specifically designed to measure their ability to perceive emotions. This task consisted of a series of videotaped interactions involving two individuals—either two adults or two children—portraying one of three affective states: happiness, sadness, and anger. After viewing each interaction, children were asked to identify what the person was feeling. In addition, teachers and peers rated the children on their ability to perceive emotions in others. The results indicated that accepted children obtained significantly higher scores than rejected children on the identification of emotions in the interactions. Teachers and peers also rated accepted children as better perceivers of emotions than rejected children. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Chronic amphetamine exposure during the preweanling period does not affect avoidance learning or novelty-seeking of adult rats

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether exposure to amphetamine during the preweanling period would impact the learning or reward processes of rats tested in adulthood. In three experiments we examined whether amphetamine treatment (0-10 mg/kg per day) on postnatal days 11-17 altered the subsequent performance of adult Sprague-Dawley rats on a step-down passive avoidance, active avoidance, or novelty-seeking task. There was no evidence that postnatal amphetamine exposure affected performance on any of these tasks. These results suggest that the long-term impact of pre- and postnatal psychostimulant exposure differs, because in utero stimulant treatment is known to produce learning deficits and decrease reinforcement efficacy of rats tested in adulthood.     

Exploring rates of transgender individuals and mental health concerns in an online sample

Background: Prevalence estimates of adults identifying as transgender are scarce, particularly in the United States. Method: The current study endeavored to estimate the prevalence of individuals identifying as transgender in a large online sample of adult U.S. residents (n = 6,727) and compare the prevalence of common mental health disorders (depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and the age of onset for individuals identifying as men or women versus those identifying as transgender. Results: The prevalence estimate of individuals identifying as transgender was 0.8%. Individuals identifying as transgender were significantly more likely than individuals identifying as men or women to report having had a single diagnosis or co-occurring diagnoses for all three disorders examined. Additionally, transgender individuals were more likely than individuals identifying as men or women to receive a diagnosis of anxiety or depression at a younger age. Conclusion: Given the prevalence of transgender individuals and the associations with common mental health conditions, clinicians must be informed and competent to care for their clinical needs. This study introduces online crowdsourcing resources as a potentially fruitful option for reaching and researching gender diversity.     

A comparative outcome study of behavioral social-skills training, interpersonal-problem-solving and non-directive control treatments with child psychiatric outpatients

The purpose of the present study was to compare the short- and long-term efficacy of behavioral social-skills training and interpersonal-problem-solving with a control condition (non-directive treatment) with a clinical population of 61 socially-maladjusted outpatient boys. Treatment consisted of 12 weekly 1-hr sessions, with follow-up conducted at 12 months. A comprehensive assessment strategy was employed which included direct behavioral observations, parent, teacher, peer, self-report and academic performance measures. The results of this social-skills comparative outcome study indicated that the behavioral and interpersonal treatments resulted in changes on parent, teacher, self-report and peer sociometric ratings at post-treatment. At the 1-yr follow-up, the behavioral treatment maintained it's gains and continued to show modest improvement. Conversely, the interpersonal treatment manifested significant declines, as did the control group. These findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

The detection and treatment of artifacts in computer-controlled neurophysiological experiments

Pattern recognition algorithms may be employed on time-series data obtained in electrophysiological experiments to detect particular artifacts that would otherwise contaminate the experimental data. Such algorithms may be classified by the statistical properties of the data they test. Four representative algorithms are presented that, on the basis of prior experiments in our laboratory, perform satisfactorily to improve the quality of electrophysiological measurement.