Bipolar disorder and family communication: effects of a psychoeducational treatment program

Family psychoeducational programs are efficacious adjuncts to pharmacotherapy for patients with schizophrenic and bipolar disorders, but little is known about what these programs change about families. The authors assessed changes in face-to-face interactional behavior over 1 year among families of bipolar patients who received a 9-month family-focused psychoeducational therapy (FFT; n = 22) or crisis management with naturalistic follow-up (CMNF; n = 22), both administered with maintenance pharmacotherapy. Members of families who received FFT showed more positive nonverbal interactional behavior during a 1-year posttreatment problem-solving assessment than families who received CMNF, although no corresponding decreases were seen in negative interactional behaviors. The positive effect of family treatment on patients' symptom trajectories over 1 year was partially mediated by increases in patients' positive nonverbal interactional behaviors during this same interval.     

Reasoning with premises that are not empirically true: evidence for the role of inhibition and retrieval

Two studies examined conditional reasoning with false premises. In Study 1, 12- and 16-year-old adolescents made "if-then" inferences after producing an alternative antecedent for the major premise. Older participants made more errors on the simple modus ponens inference than did younger ones. Reasoning with a false premise reduced this effect. Study 2 examined the relation between performance on a negative priming task (S. P. Tipper, 1985) and reasoning with contrary-to-fact premises in 9- and 11-year-olds. Overall, there was a correlation between the relative effect of negative priming on reaction times and the number of knowledge-based responses to the reasoning problems. The results of these studies are consistent with the idea that reasoning with premises that are not true requires an interaction between information retrieval and inhibition.