The effects of intranasal oxytocin on the efficacy of psychotherapy for major depressive disorder: a pilot randomized controlled trial.

Background: Although both pharmacotherapy and psychological treatments are considered to be efficacious in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), one third of patients do not respond to treatment and many experience residual symptoms post-treatment. In this double-blind placebo-controlled randomized control trial (RCT), we assessed whether intranasal oxytocin (OT) augments the therapeutic efficacy of psychotherapy for MDD and improves the therapeutic alliance.

Methods: Twenty-three volunteers (12 female) with MDD underwent 16 sessions of interpersonal therapy.

Does Combined Physical and Cognitive Training Improve Dual-Task Balance and Gait Outcomes in Sedentary Older Adults?

Everyday activities like walking and talking can put an older adult at risk for a fall if they have difficulty dividing their attention between motor and cognitive tasks. Training studies have demonstrated that both cognitive and physical training regimens can improve motor and cognitive task performance. Few studies have examined the benefits of combined training (cognitive and physical) and whether or not this type of combined training would transfer to walking or balancing dual-tasks.

Are Age-Related Differences Uniform Across Different Inhibitory Functions?

Objectives: In the current experiment, we examined the relative age-sensitivity of 3 inhibitory functions: access, deletion, and restraint by taking into consideration their underlying control processes: proactive and reactive control.

Methods: The 3 inhibitory functions were measured using a sequential flanker task. Young (age: 18-35, n = 24) and older adults (age: 60-75, n = 25) first memorized a series of 8 animal words in a fixed order.

The role of age and inhibitory efficiency in working memory processing and storage components.

In this study, we examined the extent to which inhibitory efficiency accounted for age-related decline in the processing and storage components of working memory. Older and younger adults performed a sequential task, which served as an index of deletion-type inhibition (the ability to suppress no-longer-relevant information). The reading span task was used to measure working memory components by examining processing accuracy, processing time, and end-word recall of sentences presented.