Search results

Seeking to build an objective scientific approach to psychiatry, American psychiatrists, physiologists, and psychologists began to turn to the conditional reflex method of Ivan Pavlov from the late 1920s. The generation of “neurotic” animals in the laboratory was critical to the emergence of a new experimental psychiatry in the United States. To understand the development of this field of research, the chapter will draw first on Mary Morgan’s identification of the mediatory and intermediary role of models and their ability to surprise and generate new questions, and second, upon her recent work on narratives in science. It will argue that it was through discursive and descriptive techniques that traced over time the tangled and interconnected lives of experimental subjects, that such elements of unpredictability in the animal laboratory were transformed into tools of research and put to disciplinary uses, promoting the clinical relevance of this new objective approach to psychiatric medicine.

There have been long‐standing difficulties with the recruitment of medical students into psychiatry. One of the reasons for this may be the perceived stigma attached to the profession. The aim of this paper is to assess whether a brief intervention could help to alter attitudes towards psychiatry in students undertaking clinical attachments with psychiatry components. An evidence‐based intervention was delivered to fourth year medical students. Their attitudes towards the specialty were measured with the ATP‐30 questionnaire in order to establish any effect. The intervention may have been associated with a temporary improvement in attitudes, which attenuated during the course of their clinical placements. Unexpectedly, it appeared that placements themselves may have contributed to a negative impact. Female students and those from a healthcare background were more likely to have positive views. Although single brief interventions may have only a limited effect in combating stigma in medical student's attitudes, placement experience appears to play a significant role, which requires further study.

Despite the efficacy, political will and numbers of mental health practitioners trained in psychosocial interventions, they remain scarcely available in routine clinical practice. External factors such as the inability of mental health organisations to develop strategies to support the use of psychosocial interventions have been implicated. This study compares data from two groups, one that had completed psychosocial intervention training (n=104) and one that had not received psychosocial intervention training (n=102). Both groups completed measures of self‐efficacy, locus of control and an application of psychosocial interventions to practice. Results showed that psychosocial intervention training significantly increased the level of self‐efficacy for using psychosocial interventions in practice. The group that had received psychosocial interventions training had lower internal locus of control orientation. Self‐efficacy was significantly related to using psychosocial interventions in practice. There is a discussion of the implications of these findings.

We examine whether self-stigmatization may affect the everyday social interactions of individuals with a diagnosed, affective mental health disorder. Past research demonstrates self-stigmatization lowers self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency, leading to the likely adoption of role-identities that are at the periphery of major social institutions. We advance research on self-stigma by examining the likely interactional and emotional consequences of enacting either a highly stigmatized self-identity or a weakly stigmatized self-identity.

Using affect control theory (ACT), we form predictions related to the interactional and emotional consequences of self-stigmatization. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized instantiation of ACT, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder), comparing simulations where the focal actor is a person with a mental illness who exhibits either high or low levels of self-stigma.

Self-stigma is predicted to negatively influence patients’ behavioral expression, leading the highly self-stigmatized to enact behaviors that are lower in goodness, power, and liveliness than the weakly self-stigmatized. Their corresponding emotional expressions during these types of interactions are similarly negatively impacted. Even though these likely interactions are the most confirmatory for people with high levels of self-stigma, they lead to interactions that are behaviorally and emotionally more negative than those who have been better able to resist internalizing stigmatizing beliefs.

This piece has implications for the literature on the interactional and life course challenges faced by psychiatric patients and contributes to the self-stigma literature more broadly. This work will hopefully inform future research involving the collection of non-simulation-based data on the everyday interactional experiences of people with mental health problems.

De‐institutionalisation and resettlement have had a significant impact on offenders with learning disabilities (LD) who are now more visible in the wider community than before. Perhaps because of the challenges presented by people who were previously contained in institutions, there has been a growth of interest in their characteristics, the services and clinical interventions required to support them.This narrative review presents and discusses recent developments concerning offenders with LD. It looks at the historical association between crime and low intelligence, and then examines the evidence concerning the prevalence of offending by people with LD and recidivism rates. Recent research concerning service pathways for this population is summarised and progress in the development of actuarial, dynamic and clinical assessments of the future risk of offending is outlined.The second half of the paper focuses on a review of the evidence for and recent developments in the treatment of offending behaviour (anger/aggression, sexual offending and fire‐setting), utilising broadly cognitive behaviourally‐based approaches. Finally, future directions for research and practice innovation are proposed.

The idea that a significant portion of what consumers do, feel, and think is driven by automatic (or “implicit”) cognitive processes has sparked a wave of interest in the development of assessment tools that (attempt to) capture cognitive processes under automaticity conditions (also known as “implicit measures”). However, as more and more implicit measures are developed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumer scientists and marketing professionals to select the most appropriate tool for a specific research question. We therefore present a systematic overview of the criteria that can be used to evaluate and compare different implicit measures, including their structural characteristics, the extent to which (and the way in which) they qualify as “implicit,” as well as more practical considerations such as ease of implementation and the user experience of the respondents. As an example, we apply these criteria to four implicit measures that are (or have the potential to become) popular in marketing research (i.e., the implicit association test, the evaluative priming task, the affect misattribution procedure, and the propositional evaluation paradigm).