Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor discontinuation syndrome: Understanding, recognition, and management for psychologists.

Psychologists increasingly provide psychotherapeutic services to patients receiving concomitant pharmacotherapy. Ongoing experience with the relatively new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other atypical antidepressants has revealed a discontinuation syndrome that emerges following abrupt or tapered withdrawal from these agents. The syndrome has both somatic and psychological characteristics, which tend to be mild and transient but can also be more distressing and become temporarily debilitating. Psychologists need to be aware of the potential for these events, as they are in an optimal position to collaborate with physicians and other prescribing clinicians to prevent or manage this syndrome. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of self-efficacy on stressor–strain relations: Coping style as an explanatory mechanism.

The present study was designed to examine whether coping style influences the impact of self-efficacy on stressor–strain relations. It was hypothesized that high self-efficacy would weaken stressor–strain relations when accompanied by frequent use of active coping and infrequent use of avoidance coping. Data collected from 2,293 members of the U.S. Army revealed 3-way interactions among self-efficacy, role clarity, and active coping and among self-efficacy, work overload, and avoidance coping. As predicted, self-efficacy mitigated the effects of low role clarity on strain only when active coping was high. Also as expected, strain levels were lower for participants with high self-efficacy than for participants with lower self-efficacy when work overload was low but avoidance coping was high. Implications of these findings for occupational stress research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Instructional approaches that significantly increase reading comprehension.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the most widely used literacy instructional approaches on the reading comprehension of Grade 2–6 students. Participants (N = 660) were enrolled in 4 districts in the United States; 53% were male (n = 348) and 47% were female (n = 312); 51% were Caucasian (n = 338), 23% were African American (n = 149), 21% were Hispanic (n = 138), and 5% represented other ethnic backgrounds (n = 35). Sixty-two percent came from low to low-middle socioeconomic status schools, and 38% came from middle to high socioeconomic status schools. The study was a quantified experimental versus controlled group comparison. Analyses of variance were used to determine the differences between literacy scores. Two-level hierarchical linear modeling analyses were used to examine the effects of school variables on academic achievement. The highest comprehension scores for all populations occurred through three approaches. When struggling readers received 20 min of instruction with 1 of these 3 approaches, their literacy growth was equal to or greater than that of their peers. Implications are that treatments using classroom books produced significantly higher comprehension scores than workbook practice or extending basal treatments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Coherence and Specificity of Information-Processing Biases in Depression and Social Phobia.

Research has not resolved whether depression is associated with a distinct information-processing bias, whether the content of the information-processing bias in depression is specific to themes of loss and sadness, or whether biases are consistent across the tasks most commonly used to assess attention and memory processing. In the present study, participants diagnosed with major depression, social phobia, or no Axis I disorder, completed several information-processing tasks assessing attention and memory for sad, socially threatening, physically threatening, and positive stimuli. As predicted, depressed participants exhibited specific biases for stimuli connoting sadness; social phobic participants did not evidence such specificity for threat stimuli. It is important to note that the different measures of bias in memory and attention were not systematically intercorrelated. Implications for the study of cognitive bias in depression, and for cognitive theory more broadly, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early hormonal influences on cognitive functioning in congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Administered a cognitive test battery that emphasized spatial ability, verbal fluency, and perceptual speed and accuracy to 17 females (aged 12.7–23.2 yrs) and 8 males (aged 13–29.9 yrs) with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and 13 normal female relatives (aged 11.4–31.1 yrs) and 14 unaffected male relatives (aged 12.5–28.8 yrs). In addition, 13 fathers and 15 mothers of CAH patients participated. Ss also completed the Progressive Matrices, a vocabulary test, and an early life activities questionnaire (ELAQ). Findings indicate that CAH females, as compared with normal females, showed significantly enhanced performance on hidden pattern, card rotation, and mental rotation tests of spatial ability. On the ELAQ, CAH females, relative to normal females, showed significantly lower frequencies of participation in activities involving verbal expression and a trend toward greater participation in spatial manipulation activities. However, differences between CAH females and normal females in early childhood activities did not account for observed differences in spatial ability, given the absence of a significant correlation between the spatial manipulation activity scale and spatial ability. There was an absence of reliable differences between male CAH patients and controls across spatial tasks. Results are consistent with an effect of pre- and perinatal androgenizing hormones on the development of spatial ability. (58 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parent–child interaction among depressed fathers and mothers: Impact on child functioning.

Relatively little is known about whether children of depressed mothers versus fathers demonstrate similar difficulties and whether parent-child interaction moderates the effects of maternal depression, paternal depression, or both. In the current study, intact families with a depressed father (n?=?50), a depressed mother (n?=?41), and normal control families (n?=?50) completed questionnaires and participated in videotaped problem-solving interactions. Results indicate that paternal and maternal depression were similarly associated with child adjustment problems and more impaired parent-child communication. Interestingly, maternal versus paternal depression was associated with increased parent-child negativity, whereas father-child interactions were more influential than mother-child interactions in predicting child outcome after controlling for parental depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serotonergic function, two-mode models of self-regulation, and vulnerability to depression: What depression has in common with impulsive aggression.

Evidence from diverse literatures supports the viewpoint that two modes of self-regulation exist, a lower-order system that responds quickly to associative cues of the moment and a higher-order system that responds more reflectively and planfully; that low serotonergic function is linked to relative dominance of the lower-order system; that how dominance of the lower-order system is manifested depends on additional variables; and that low serotonergic function therefore can promote behavioral patterns as divergent as impulsive aggression and lethargic depression. Literatures reviewed include work on two-mode models; studies of brain function supporting the biological plausibility of the two-mode view and the involvement of serotonergic pathways in functions pertaining to it; and studies relating low serotonergic function to impulsiveness, aggression (including extreme violence), aspects of personality, and depression vulnerability. Substantial differences between depression and other phenomena reviewed are interpreted by proposing that depression reflects both low serotonergic function and low reward sensitivity. The article closes with brief consideration of the idea that low serotonergic function relates to even more diverse phenomena, whose natures depend in part on sensitivities of other systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resolving the long-term trends of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the Canadian Arctic atmosphere

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) air concentrations measured over the period 1992-2000 at the Canadian High Arctic station of Alert were subject to time-series analysis using dynamic harmonic regression (DHR). For most of the PAHs, the DHR model fit to the observed data was good, with DHR capable of interpolating over missing data points during periods when air concentrations were below detection limits. As expected, DHR identified seasonal increases in PAH air concentrations. However, it has also identified additional, subtler "seasonal" patterns as a series of harmonics with varying periodicity. For example, a regular summer high in air concentrations was apparent for many PAHs, particularly the lower molecular weight (two- to three-ringed) compounds, which may be attributed to summertime regional combustion events such as forestfires and/or revolatilization from surfaces (e.g., soil and oceans, as well as arctic surfaces). Comparison of wintertime PAH concentrations (where sigmaPAH ranged from 260 to 516 pg m(-3)) with an earlier arctic study did not reveal a reduction in PAH levels. However, removal of the seasonal components by DHR revealed a declining trend in PAH concentrations over the 1992-2000 period. For many lighter PAHs, this was typified by a linear decrease over the whole time series, although, for the higher molecular weight PAHs, a marked reduction was apparent in the first few years of sampling followed by a leveling off in concentrations by the mid/late-1990s. This behavior is similar to reported trends of other air pollutants in the Arctic, may be attributed to the decline in Soviet industry during the early 1990s, and has implications regarding the major PAH sources affecting the Arctic.     

Spatial- and locomotion-related neural representation in rat hippocampus following long-term survival from ischemia.

Spatial and locomotion-related behavioral correlates of hippocampal cell discharge were compared between ischemic and sham-control rats performing a spatial maze. Ischemic rats showed impaired choice accuracy during maze acquisition, but not during asymptote performance. Single-unit correlates during asymptote performance revealed enhanced spatial selectivity of CA2/3 complex-spike cells coincident with attenuated place-specific firing by hilar complex-spike or subicular cells. Responsivity to locomotion state by stratum granulosum interneurons was exaggerated, and locomotion-induced changes in firing of hilar and subicular interneurons were reduced. Ischemic rats showed recovered spatial learning abilities as evidenced by the fact that acquisition of the spatial task in a second environment was not impaired. Because representational reorganization was also observed in ischemic, maze-naive rats, brain injury per se appears to change information coding schemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)