Treating patients with driving phobia by virtual reality exposure therapy - a pilot study.

Objectives: Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) is a promising treatment for patients with fear of driving. The present pilot study is the first one focusing on behavioral effects of VRET on patients with fear of driving as measured by a post-treatment driving test in real traffic.

Methods: The therapy followed a standardized manual including psychotherapeutic and medical examination, two preparative psychotherapy sessions, five virtual reality exposure sessions, a final behavioral avoidance test (BAT) in real traffic, a closing session, and two follow-up phone assessments after six and twelve weeks.

Spatial Memory for Patterns of Taps on the Fingers.

Ongoing development of haptic technology has the potential to provide significant improvement in safety and performance in demanding environments where vision and hearing are compromised. Research regarding the cognitive psychology of touch is lacking and could be beneficial in the development of expectations about human performance for the refinement and implementation of haptic technology. This study examines haptic-spatial memory using a novel assessment method based on finger anatomy.

Approaches to handling incomplete data in family-based association testing.

The high throughput of data arising from the complete sequence of the human genome has left statistical geneticists with a rich and extensive information source. The wide availability of software and the increase in computing power has improved the possibilities to access and process such data. One problem is incompleteness of the data: unobserved or partially observed data points due to technical reasons or reasons associated with the patient's status or erroneous measurements of phenotype or genotype, to name a few.

Allele dose analysis in recombinant inbred strains: a tool for multiple phenotype analysis with implications for quantitative trait loci mapping.

A considerable investment in genetic mapping is necessary to confirm linkages of quantitative trait loci for complex traits such as ethanol sensitivity, a significant predictor of alcoholism. Before embarking on such intensive mapping efforts in large intercrosses, we suggest an approach based on genetic marker data in recombinant strains that yield a rationale for selecting a battery of related phenotypes for confirmation studies of quantitative trait loci action. Using this approach with selected strains of mice, we retrospectively consider the relationship between ethanol sensitivity and neurotensin levels in several mammalian brain regions.

Genome scan of European-American schizophrenia pedigrees: results of the NIMH Genetics Initiative and Millennium Consortium.

The Genetics Initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was a multisite study that created a national repository of DNA from families informative for genetic linkage studies of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer's disease. The schizophrenia families were collected by three sites: Washington University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. This article, one in a series that describes the data collected for linkage analysis by the schizophrenia consortium, presents the results for the European-American sample.