Public familiarity with the terms somatoform disorder and functional disorder in Germany: results from a representative population survey.

Objective: The terms somatoform disorder and functional disorder have been criticized for hindering rather than facilitating clinical communication, and physicians may rarely use these terms when communicating with patients who might be eligible for these diagnoses. However, no study has yet examined the extent to which patients at risk for these disorders are familiar with the diagnostic terms. Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to examine whether people at risk for a somatoform disorder (ie, those with medically unexplained somatic symptoms) are more familiar with the 2 terms than others.

Towards positive diagnostic criteria: a systematic review of somatoform disorder diagnoses and suggestions for future classification.

Objectives: The classification of somatoform disorders is currently being revised in order to improve its validity for the DSM-V and ICD-11. In this article, we compare the validity and clinical utility of current and several new diagnostic proposals of those somatoform disorders that focus on medically unexplained somatic symptoms.

Methods: We searched the Medline, PsycInfo, and Cochrane databases, as well as relevant reference lists.

Primes and targets in rapid chases: tracing sequential waves of motor activation.

Single-cell recordings have indicated that visual stimuli elicit rapid waves of neuronal activation that propagate so fast that they might be free of intracortical feedback. Here, the time course of feedforward activation was traced by measuring pointing responses to color targets preceded by color primes initiating either the same or opposite response. The early time course of priming effects was strictly time locked to prime onset and depended only on properties of the primes, but was independent of the onset times of the actual targets as well as the perceptual effects of targets on primes.