American Board of Psychological Specialties

A team made up of mental health professionals, emergency response experts, and researchers from several universities, including Virginia Tech, has published the results of a study that shows serious emotional disturbances among children who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Category 3 storm ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

Following the suicide of a relative or close friend, surviving family members and friends are left with a number of painful questions: "What made them do it?," "Why didn't they get help?"  The most troublesome question is often, "Is there anything I could have done to prevent this?" People who are contemplating suicide tend to conceal their behavior, or deny they are having suicidal thoughts, so it can be difficult to identify warning signs. Even experienced clinicians sometimes do not catch any warning signs and suicide experts have been searching for a clear behavioral marker of suicide risk. Psychological scientist Matthew Nock of Harvard University, along with colleagues from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, adapted the Implicit Association Test (IAT)  to measure associations between life and death/suicide and examined if it could be effective in predicting suicide risk

Dr. John Wylie’s book Diagnosing and Treating Mental Illness: A Guide for Physicians, Nurses, Patients and their Families sets forth a subjective, phenomenological diagnostic system gathered from more than 10,000 patients’ descriptions of their actual experience of serious mental illness.

"Interpreting Chronic Illness, the Convergence of Acupuncture, Homeopathy and Biomedicine," a new book by Jerry Kantor, introduces an accessible, phenomenologically based framework that allows existential meaning encrypted within chronic symptoms to be decoded.

A novel pharmacological approach has been investigated that utilizes d-cycloserine (DCS), a n-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor agonist, to improve the efficacy of short-term cognitive-behavioral anti-anxiety treatment. In fact, recent meta-analyses have suggested that DCS may improve the behavioral treatment outcomes of specific phobias and social anxiety in humans. Because the literature on DCS in human anxiety and other conditions is emerging, controlled studies are needed, including research that compares DCS with other anti-anxiety medications (e.g., benzodiazepines, buspirone) when used in combination with psychotherapy.

A Web-based psychology experiment is investigating whether human beings have a daily requirement for certain kinds of emotions, in the same way that the body has a proven requirement for certain nutrients.

Active listening and good interpersonal communication skills are essential to professional and social settings. These human interactions are commonly becoming secondary to the ring of a cell phone or a twitter of an incoming text, where the other party of the live in-person conversation is placed on hold until the technological communication is completed.

Tech-savvy bullies can torment children at the family computer, warns the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. Warning signs about bullying and what parents can do.

Military installations worldwide invite service members and their families to assess their alcohol use by taking an anonymous alcohol screening.