No evidence in favor of a more deleterious impact of a major depressive episode on verbal memory in older patients with antidepressant response.

Background: Older patients may be more vulnerable to the deleterious effect of depressive episodes on delayed narrative memory, a cognitive task which reflects hippocampal activity. We aimed to disentangle which factors could explain such increased vulnerability in the elderly, including the poorer response to treatment, a longer lifetime exposure to past depressive episodes, and lower baseline memory skills.

Methods: From an initial sample of 8,229 depressed outpatients, we focused on the 2,424 treatment responders, and compared older (65 years old and over, N = 233) to younger (N = 2,191) ones.

Clinical and nonclinical predictors of test ordering in psychiatric emergency.

Objective: This naturalistic prospective study explored the predictors of laboratory test ordering in a psychiatric emergency department.

Methods: We used a standardized questionnaire to collect clinical and nonclinical features in 527 consecutive patients.

Results: Test ordering was independently predicted by age, spoken language, referral by relatives, eating disorders, and somatic complaints.

Unconscious masked priming depends on temporal attention.

The cognitive processes at work in masked priming experiments are usually considered automatic and independent of attention. We provide evidence against this view. Three behavioral experiments demonstrate that the occurrence of unconscious priming in a number comparison task is determined by the allocation of temporal attention to the time window during which the prime-target pair is presented.