The relationship between medical and psychiatric symptoms.

The Cornell Medical Index, Taylor scale, and the Saslow Psychosomatic Inventory were administered to in-patients and out-patients in the medical and psychiatric hospitals and clinics of a medical school. The result was that "number of medical symptoms was a good predictor (correlated highly) of psychiatric symptomatology and vice versa." Females had more medical symptoms than men, but no such distinction appeared, re: psychiatric symptoms. From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:3HI55M. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus generalization as a function of clinical anxiety and direction of generalization.

"This experiment studied stimulus generalization in psychiatric patients as a function of direction of generalization and clinical anxiety. It was found that direction of generalization along the height continuum did not significantly affect the gradient of stimulus generalization. Level of clinical anxiety, as measured by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, also did not significantly affect the gradient of stimulus generalization. The validity of the Taylor scale with psychiatric patients was discussed briefly." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some relationships between GSR conditioning and judgments of anxiety.

"The aim of the present study was to investigate… the relationship between GSR conditioning and various clinical judgments of anxiety in a sample of psychiatric patients conditioned under presumably optimal procedures… . anxiety groups ranked on the basis of admission psychological data… were found to be significantly different in conditionability." This was not so with Ss ranked via the Taylor MA scale, and "anxiety groups revealed no significant differences in extinction." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conforming behavior of psychiatric and medical patients.

"A group of ten non-psychotic psychiatric patients in the open ward of a general hospital was compared with seven medical patients without disabling psychiatric symptoms, with respect to the variability of their judgments of the autokinetic phenomenon… . The results indicated that neurotic Ss were consistently more variable than nonneurotic Ss in their judgments and were less affected by the group influence." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and the conditioning of verbal behavior.

Ninety hospitalized psychiatric patients were administered the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. The S's were then required to make up sentences in response to a stimulus card on which were printed a verb and one of six pronouns. E reinforced any sentence starting with I or WE by saying "good" or flashing a light. Scores on the Taylor scale showed a relationship to the amount of conditioning produced by "good." Light, as applied in this study, does not function as a reinforcer in a verbal situation. Implications for further research are described. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mutual achievement strivings: A continuum for mental health.

Mental health is defined in transactional terms, i.e., in terms of the intent of an individual towards equality or mutuality of achievement in relating to others. 4 levels of mutual achievement striving are described and a continuum composed of 8 varieties of intention-transactions is offered. Case histories of 64 patients admitted to a psychiatric hospital were examined to isolate events which could be evaluated in terms of the intention-transaction dimension. Each S was assigned a score on this continuum which reflected his degree of "mental health," and these scores were then compared to a measure of severity of mental illness (see 35: 6569), psychiatric diagnosis, type of treatment recommended, and outcome of treatment. Intention-transaction scores correlated positively with the variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Manifest" anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and the rate of conditioning.

"The validity of the Taylor Scale of Manifest Anxiety was examined with a view to reconciling the contradictory results of the studies of the relation between anxiety and the rate of conditioning… . The results indicated that different scores on the scale do not represent different degrees of manifest anxiety, though the scores within a limited range (19 to 33) are more likely to be associated with a clinical diagnosis of "anxious" than are scores above and below this range." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship of manifest anxiety to stimulus generalization.

This study examined the relationship between anxiety and stimulus generalization in psychiatric patients. The results suggested that "there is no relationship between MAS [Manifest Anxiety Scale] and stimulus generalization in psychiatric Ss. Moreover, situational factors do not seem important in limiting the generality of such an interpretation. Since the relationships between anxiety and learning phenomena are generally well recognized, these negative results presumably reflect the inadequacy of the Taylor scale as a relevant index of anxiety levels in psychiatric subjects." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

DSM-III and the future of applied social science.

Psychiatry's emerging new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) extends current psychiatric thinking by encompassing scores of new behavioral disturbances within the "medical model" and by defining mental disorders circumstantially in terms of psychiatric practice. A conception of behavioral disturbance as a sociobehavioral phenomenon is presented. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beliefs about mental illness as a functon of psychiatric status and psychiatric hospitalization.

Beliefs about mental illness were assessed among psychiatric inpatients at a VA hospital, the mental health staff responsible for their treatment, and a group of medical and surgical (control) patients. Results indicated that: (a) Psychiatric and nonpsychiatric patients generally hold similar opinions regarding mental illness. Severely disturbed psychiatric patients, however, view mental illness in more moralistic terms than do "normals." (b) Psychiatric hospitalization is generally accompanied by a change in the patient's beliefs concerning mental illness, toward those held by the staff. (c) Psychiatric patients whose beliefs about mental illness are most strikingly influenced by the staff tend to respond most favorably to treatment, as measured by length of hospital stay and gains in self-esteem during the 1st month of treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A measure of staff attitudes toward care of physically ill patients.

The development of an instrument for measuring staff attitudes toward patient care in general medical and surgical hospitals, called the Philosophy of Treatment Form (POT), is presented. In this development both a general medical and surgical sample and, for comparative purposes, a psychiatric sample were utilized. The POT measures 7 attitude areas for which reliabilities and intercorrelations are presented. Data from a 3rd sample of 350 general medical and surgical staff members indicate that 3 of these areas reliably differentiated among professional groups and 3 reliably differentiated among wards. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reliability and validity of the Addiction Severity Index among outpatients with severe mental illness.

This study provides psychometric data for the Addiction Severity Index (ASI) when administered to persons with severe and persistent mental disorders. Participants were 97 outpatients (26 women) at a public psychiatric facility. The internal consistency of the composite scores was lower in this psychiatric sample than in previous nonpsychiatric samples. Interrater reliability was acceptable for most composite scores but low for many severity ratings. Several scores showed low temporal stability. Validity evidence was weak for the employment and family-social subscales, acceptable for drug and alcohol subscales, and mixed for psychiatric, medical, and legal subscales. Due to mixed reliability and validity evidence, caution should be exercised when using the ASI with patients having severe mental illness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Risk taking and hedonic mood stimulation in suicide attempters.

Compared risk-taking levels of 15 hospitalized male suicide attempters with those of 15 hospitalized suicide threateners and other psychiatric and medical patient controls (n = 45). Ss were randomly assigned to view depressive, neutral, or elational mood-stimulation films, and pre- and postviewing scores on the Psychiatric Outpatient Mood Scale were compared. Risk-taking was operationalized by 2 paper-and-pencil tests, Kogan and Wallach's Choice Dilemmas instrument and Chance Bets instrument. The principal finding was that suicide attempters displayed an idiosyncratic "risky shift" in high value decision-making situations when confronted with depressive stimulation. They displayed significantly greater Choice Dilemmas risk-taking than suicide threateners and psychiatric or medical controls when all were exposed to depressive stimulation. (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology in the News.

Journal item presents brief synopses of and comments on instances of psychology's use in daily life. These include: the parodies use of the Rorschach inkblots in a television commercial, a psychology-hostile editorial in the journal "Packaging Parade", an article by Marion K. Saunders for the December 1958 issue of "Harpers" entitled "Mutiny on the Bountiful" that focuses mainly on fundraising for research in the medical fields, the magazine "State of Mind" published by is published by CIBA for physicians who are interested in the emotional and psychiatric aspects of medicine, and "The American Weekly" publishing of a story about a psychological "treasure" found in an attic--the treasure turned out to be a set of 179 freshmen scores achieved on an intelligence test in 1919. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dimensions in the perception of psychiatric patients by hospital staff.

Agreement among psychiatric staff and the dimensions underlying such agreement in the perception of psychiatric patients were investigated using 2 Q-sorts, a Behavior (B) deck and an Interpersonal Characteristics (IC) deck. 11 patients were each rated by 5-8 judges. Mean global agreement (r) about patients ranged from .22 to .52 on the B deck, from .20 to .43 on the IC deck; there were significant differences (p     

Latent structure of the alexithymia construct: A taxometric investigation.

Despite a wealth of research on the validity of alexithymia and its association with a number of common medical and psychiatric disorders, the fundamental question of whether alexithymia is best conceptualized as a dimensional or categorical construct remains unresolved. In the current investigation, taxometric analysis is used to examine the nature of the latent structure of alexithymia. Several nonredundant taxometric procedures were performed with item sets from the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (R. M. Bagby, J. D. A. Parker, & G. J. Taylor, 1994) as indicators. These procedures were applied separately in large community (n = 1,933) and undergraduate (n = 1,948) samples and in a smaller sample of psychiatric outpatients (n = 302). The results across various taxometric procedures and the different samples provide strong support that alexithymia is a dimensional construct. Some theoretical implications of these findings for research on the alexithymia construct are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychopathy and suicide: A multisample investigation.

Evidence suggests that behavioral aspects of psychopathy are associated with suicidal behavior, whereas the affective and interpersonal aspects are not. The authors tested the robustness of this bifurcated association across 1,711 persons and 12 samples of adult and juvenile criminal offenders, forensic psychiatric patients, and civil psychiatric patients. The authors observed a small but significant partial correlation (.13) between the behavioral/impulsive lifestyle features of psychopathy and suicidality, but no effect for affective/interpersonal features. Several method and sample features (mental disorder; psychopathy and suicidality measurement format) significantly strengthened or weakened this association. The authors conclude that it is not possible to speak of "the" association between psychopathy and suicide, but that this relationship appears to be partially dependent on methodological (i.e., self-report vs. clinician-administered psychopathy measures) and sample composition (i.e., age; mental illness) factors. Recommendations for practice are provided, including that clinicians should not consider psychopathy a buffer against suicidal behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction of length of stay out of the hospital for released psychiatric patients.

The scores of 104 consecutively released nongeriatric psychiatric patients on the California Psychological Inventory, the Waco Social Adequacy Scale, Opinions about Mental Illness Scale (administered to relatives also) and background variables were correlated with success or failure in achieving a 9-mo. uninterrupted stay in the community after release. Only the Waco, OMI Authoritarianism, Benevolence, and Social Restrictiveness, and 4 of the background variable correlated significantly (p.     

Use of the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment to measure motivational readiness to change in psychiatric and dually diagnosed individuals.

In this report, the original 4-factor structure of the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment (URICA; C. C. DiClemente & S. O. Hughes, 1990) was replicated, and the scale's internal consistency was found to be acceptable in a sample of 120 psychiatric and dually diagnosed inpatient participants, who had participated in a randomized clinical trial comparing standard treatment (ST) and ST plus motivational interviewing. Contrary to the authors' hypotheses, participants classified as having low motivational readiness to change, based on their URICA scores, demonstrated greater treatment adherence than high-readiness participants, in that they attended a greater proportion of therapy groups while hospitalized (54% vs. 39%; p     

If you want to know, consider asking: How likely is it that patients will hurt themselves in the future?

Although self-harming behavior is a common and costly problem for psychiatric inpatients released from the hospital, standardized tools that assess patients' risk for self-harm are rarely used in clinical settings. In this study of dually diagnosed psychiatric inpatients (N = 147), we assessed the utility of patients' self-perceptions of risk in predicting self-harm in the community. Patients' self-perceptions of risk predicted self-harm 8 weeks after discharge from the hospital (Lag 1; area under the curve [AUC] = 0.75). Self-perceptions of risk at the 8-week interview also predicted self-harm 2 months later (Lag 2; AUC = 0.72). Self-perceived risk added predictive utility above and beyond scores on a measure of depression and seemed to capture changes in risk state over time. The results suggest that inpatients can accurately perceive their own risk and therefore may be important collaborators in the risk management process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)