Patterns of utilization and a case illustration of an interactive text-based psychotherapy delivery system.

This paper provides data on the experiences of 267 patients, all with self-reported symptoms of depression or anxiety, engaged in an interactive text-based delivery system for psychotherapy. The paper also offers a case study that illustrates the use of this treatment, indicating ways in which such systems can be useful for patients who may not access or benefit from more traditional therapeutic models.

Effects of childhood trauma on adult moral decision-making: Clinical correlates and insights from bipolar disorder.

Background: Childhood adversity has been shown to exert profound effects on basic psychological processes well into adulthood. Some of these processes, such as those related to reward and emotion, play critical roles in moral decision-making. As a population with high rates of childhood trauma as well as heterogenous clinical presentation, individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) constitute an enriched group in which to examine the correlates of trauma and other clinical variables with moral cognition.

Dimensional symptom severity and global cognitive function predict subjective quality of life in patients with schizophrenia and healthy adults.

Over the last several decades Quality of Life (QoL) has become increasingly important as an indicator of treatment outcomes; particularly in schizophrenia spectrum disorders because of its close association with functional disability. Numerous studies seeking to elucidate the factors that contribute to QoL in this population have implicated both symptom severity and cognition in determining QoL but the findings have been mixed. The critical factors that appear to impede the lack of consensus in the extant literature examining determinants of QoL include the heterogeneity of the samples and measures examined as well as medication effects across different studies.

Organizational Learning Strategies and Verbal Memory Deficits in Bipolar Disorder.

Background: Verbal memory (VM) impairment is prominent in bipolar disorder (BD) and is linked to functional outcomes. However, the intricacies of VM impairment have not yet been studied in a large sample of BD patients. Moreover, some have proposed VM deficits that may be mediated by organizational strategies, such as semantic or serial clustering.

Ecological Assessment of Clinicians' Antipsychotic Prescription Habits in Psychiatric Inpatients: A Novel Web- and Mobile Phone-Based Prototype for a Dynamic Clinical Decision Support System.

Background: Electronic prescribing devices with clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) hold the potential to significantly improve pharmacological treatment management.

Objective: The aim of our study was to develop a novel Web- and mobile phone-based application to provide a dynamic CDSS by monitoring and analyzing practitioners' antipsychotic prescription habits and simultaneously linking these data to inpatients' symptom changes.

Methods: We recruited 353 psychiatric inpatients whose symptom levels and prescribed medications were inputted into the MEmind application.

Coping strategies and real-world functioning in bipolar disorder.

Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) patients encounter significant life adversity, which has contributed to bipolar disorder being a leading cause of disability worldwide. Studies suggest BD patients have more maladaptive coping strategies, some of which can impact their illness course. Yet research on which coping strategies most influence disability is lacking.

Social cognition in patients with schizophrenia spectrum and bipolar disorders with and without psychotic features.

Background: Social cognition may be critical to the impoverished social functioning seen in serious mental illness. However, although social-cognitive deficits are consistently demonstrated in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), studies in bipolar disorder (BD) have produced inconsistent results. This inconsistency may relate to symptom profiles of patients studied, particularly the presence or absence of psychotic features.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SUBCLINICAL SYMPTOMS AND MCCB PERFORMANCE IN NON-PSYCHIATRIC CONTROLS.

Considerable data support the phenomenological and temporal continuity between subclinical psychosis and psychotic disorders. In recent years, neurocognitive deficits have increasingly been recognized as a core feature of psychotic illness but there are few data seeking to elucidate the relationship between subclinical psychosis and neurocogntive deficits in non-clinical samples. The goal of the present study was to examine the relationship between subclinical positive and negative symptoms, as measured by the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE) and performance on the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) in a large (n=303) and demographically diverse non-clinical sample.

Evidence from structural and diffusion tensor imaging for frontotemporal deficits in psychometric schizotypy.

Background: Previous studies of nonclinical samples exhibiting schizotypal traits have provided support for the existence of a continuous distribution of psychotic symptoms in the general population. Few studies, however, have examined the neural correlates of psychometric schizotypy using structural and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

Methods: Healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 68 were recruited from the community and assessed using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and received structural and DTI exams.

The relation between childhood maltreatment and psychosis in patients with schizophrenia and non-psychiatric controls.

Several lines of evidence suggest that childhood maltreatment is associated with an increased risk for both psychotic disorders and subclinical psychotic-like experiences in the general population. Few studies, however, have sought to examine whether the strength of this relationship is comparable across patient and non-patient groups. The present study sought to compare the strength of the association between childhood maltreatment and self-reported psychotic symptoms in 447 healthy adult volunteers and 184 stable outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

MATRICS cognitive consensus battery (MCCB) performance in children, adolescents, and young adults.

Background: Neurodevelopmental models of schizophrenia suggest that cognitive deficits may be observed during childhood and adolescence, long before the onset of psychotic symptoms. Elucidating the trajectory of normal cognitive development during childhood and adolescence may therefore provide a basis for identifying specific abnormalities related to the development of schizophrenia. The MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB), which was designed for use in clinical trials targeting cognitive deficits most common in schizophrenia, may provide a mechanism to understand this trajectory.

Putting up emotional (Facebook) walls? Attachment status and emerging adults' experiences of social networking sites.

Social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook can increase interpersonal connections but also intensify jealousy, envy, and surveillance behaviors. Attachment styles may help explain differences in experiencing SNS. This study investigated the role of attachment in influencing emerging adults' perceptions and feelings about SNS and their disclosures on SNS.