Suicidal behaviour and HIV disease: A case report

This case history describes the attempted suicide by jumping in front of a London Underground train of a man with advanced HIV disease. It illustrates the complex relationship between HIV disease and suicidal behaviour. Although the attempt was made by a man with AIDS, it is by no means evident that this disease was the sole or even the primary cause of his wish to die. This account is also interesting because of the unusual method used, the sudden onset of suicidal feelings and the patient's interpretation of the reason for his survival.     

Quantitative depictions of threatening phenomena in news reports. The scary world of frequency data

Two experiments addressed the question of whether news reports depicting base‐rate data indicative of increasing population size over time would assuage the apprehension and victimization risk associated with another news story depicting frequency increases in a threatening phenomenon during the same time period. Men exposed to the population data manifested lower levels of apprehension and victimization risk than men not exposed to such data, but women showed no reduction in either apprehension and victimization risk than men not exposed to such data, but women showed no reduction in either apprehension or victimization risk after exposure to population data. This interaction was replicated in both experiments. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the same interaction can be produced using base‐rate data other than that depicting population increases over time and that the effects of the base‐rate stories are not merely a product of distraction from the threatening story. Differences in apprehension levels, information processing styles, mathematical problems solving skill, and sex role response sets were considered as alternative explanations for the interaction.     

Encoding and Retrieval Processes in Learning-Disabled,Head-Injured,and Nondisabled Young Adults

Using a multi-trial, free-recall paradigm (Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test; Lezak, 1983), the acquisition and retention by learning disabled (LD) young adults with a Halstead Impairment Index less than or equal to 0.3 (low LD) or greater than or equal to 0.4 (high LD) was compared with that of nondisabled and head-injured (HI) young adults. Significant group differences, particularly during the last three acquisition trials, confirmed the effectiveness of this method in revealing subtle learning and retention deficits. Analyses of Trial 1 recall showed group differences in the prerecency but not the recency portion of the serial position curve, thus implicating long-term but not short-term memory differences between the groups. Analyses of pair frequency (Sternberg & Tulving, 1977) data showed that the three clinical groups had difficulty organizing the to-be-learned material for effective retrieval. Following an interpolated task, retention was poorer for the clinical groups than for the nondisabled and varied inversely with the degree of neuropsychological impairment. Finally, during retention, the nondisabled and low LD groups retained and used the list organization established during acquisition whereas the high LD and HI groups did not.     

Barriers to condom use in primary and nonprimary relationships among Hispanic STD clinic patients

Some programs designed to reduce the spread of AIDS and other STDs encourage consistent condom use among sexually active, at-risk individuals. A random sample of 283 Hispanic men and women seeking services at a public STD clinic in New York City were surveyed in an examination of differences in their attitudinal patterns, normative beliefs, and practices related to condom use with primary and nonprimary sex partners. 60% of the participants were male. The group was of mean age 30.9 years, with 46% having graduated from high school. 44.5% were born in the US, although 73.8% had lived in mainland US for the previous ten years or longer. 52.7% were single, 19.8% married, and the remaining 27.5% were either divorced, separated, or widowed. Only 3.2% of men and women reported having same-sex relationships, although the authors suggest that the respondents may have underreported the extent of their bisexual and homosexual behavior. 58.3% of men and 53.3% of women reported having had a prior STD, 82.2% of men and 74.8% of women had experience using a condom, and 31.3% of men and 13.3% of women reported having nonprimary partners. Both the men and women report that they are more likely to use condoms in nonprimary than primary relationships and that they perceive fewer barriers to doing so. Issues related to trust and social acceptability are more salient in primary relationships. Interventions to promote condom use among Hispanics must acknowledge the different psychosocial influences upon condom use in different relationships and target the specific attitudinal and behavioral changes desired.     

Multimodal imaging in psychiatry: the electroencephalogram as a complement to other modalities

The use of different imaging modalities provides the clinician and researcher with different views of anatomy and physiology at unprecedented levels of detail. Multimodal imaging allows for noninvasive measurement of structure and function in humans during complex behavior, and thus provides information about the inner workings of the brain previously unavailable. The present paper examines the various imaging techniques available, and describes their application to the clinic-in the case of epilepsy-and to research-in the case of schizophrenia. Because the electroencephalogram has a dynamic response in milliseconds, it provides the best temporal sensitivity of functional measures of brain activity. When coupled with high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging measures of brain structure, this multimodal approach provides a powerful tool for understanding brain activity. Clinically, the use of multimodal imaging has provided greater precision in localization of the epileptogenic focus. For researchers attempting to determine the underlying causes of schizophrenia, the use of multimodal imaging has helped lead the field away from a specific lesion view to a more distributed system abnormality view of this disorder.