Different yet similar? Prisoners versus psychiatric patients - A comparison of their mental health.

BACKGROUND: Previous research indicates that prisoners have severe psychological distress. To assess their distress level and potential need for treatment, the present study compared the subjective psychological distress of long- and short-term prisoners with that of psychiatric and forensic patients. METHODS: Long- (n=98) and short-term prisoners (n=94) and forensic (n=102) and psychiatric (n=199) patients completed the German versions of the Symptom Checklist Revised (SCL-90-R) and Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). RESULTS: In general, long-term prisoners showed the same level of mental distress as psychiatric patients and more than that reported by forensic patients. Short-term prisoners reported the least level of distress. Long- but not short-term prisoners showed clinically significant results on the scales for depression, paranoid ideation, and psychosis. CONCLUSIONS: The improvements in psychiatric treatment for inmates demanded by many stakeholders need to differentiate between long- and short-term prisoners. Because depression seems to cause the most psychological distress among inmates, suicide prevention seems to be an important issue in prisons.

[Questionnaire for Investigating Therapeutic Alliance in Forensic Setting (FTBF): Results of a Pilot Study]. / Fragebogen zur therapeutischen Beziehung in der Forensik (FTBF): Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie.

The relation between patient and therapist has a substantial effect on the success of psychotherapy. So far, in German-speaking regions questionnaires translated from English have been used, particularly for studying outpatients. Studies investigating and concerned with specialised features of hospitalised forensic psychiatry patients are sparse. The preliminary results of this study evaluating a recently developed questionnaire aimed to investigate the quality of the therapeutic relationship in forensic psychiatry ("Fragebogen zur therapeutischen Beziehung in der Forensik, FTBF") are reported. The data were collected both in general and forensic psychiatry departments. Factor analyses yielded two essential factors, namely "positive emotional aspects" (12 items, main features trust, respect, helpfulness, harmony, and sympathy; Cronbach's α = .933) and "negative emotional aspects" (4 items, main features power divide and punishment; Cronbach's α = .805). Forensic patients experienced power divide and punishment tendencies more intensively than general psychiatry patients (p < 0.001). Our questionnaire therefore demonstrates not only excellent reliabilities but also differential validity, enabling a differentiation between general and forensic psychiatry patients. Studies with larger samples would enable conclusions about the impact of the therapists' perspective, specific diagnostic subgroups and different psychotherapeutic orientations, on the patient-therapist relationship in forensic psychiatry.

Event-related brain potentials evoked by verbs and nouns in a primed lexical decision task.

We investigated whether verbs and nouns evoke comparable behavioral and N400 effects in a primed lexical decision task. Twenty-nine students were tested, 13 in a pilot study in which only response times and error rates were collected and 16 in a study in which ERPs were recorded from 124 scalp electrodes. Stimuli were noun-noun and verb-verb pairs with the targets bearing either a strong, a moderate, or no semantic association to the prime or being a pseudoword. Behavioral data revealed comparable priming effects for both word categories. These proved to be independent from the SOA (250 and 800 ms) and they followed the well-known pattern of decreasing response times and error rates with increasing relatedness between target and prime. ERPs revealed pronounced N400 effects for both word categories with a larger amplitude for noun than for verb pairs. A systematic analysis of topographic differences between noun- and verb-evoked ERPs and N400 effects, respectively, gave no convincing support to the hypothesis that the two word categories activate distinct neuronal networks.

Cloning of a novel retinoid-inducible serine carboxypeptidase from vascular smooth muscle cells.

Retinoids block smooth muscle cell (SMC) proliferation and attenuate neointimal formation after vascular injury, presumably through retinoid receptor-mediated changes in gene expression. To identify target genes in SMC whose encoded proteins could contribute to such favorable biological effects, we performed a subtractive screen for retinoid-inducible genes in cultured SMC. Here, we report on the cloning and initial characterization of a novel retinoid-inducible serine carboxypeptidase (RISC). Expression of RISC is low in cultured SMC but progressively increases over a 5-day time-course treatment with all-trans-retinoic acid. A near full-length rat RISC cDNA was cloned and found to have a 452-amino acid open reading frame containing an amino-terminal signal sequence, followed by several conserved domains comprising the catalytic triad common to members of the serine carboxypeptidase family. In vitro transcription and translation experiments showed that the rat RISC cDNA generates an approximately 51-kDa protein. Confocal immunofluorescence microscopy of COS-7 cells transiently transfected with a RISC-His tag plasmid revealed cytosolic localization of the fusion protein. Western blotting studies using conditioned medium from transfected COS-7 cells suggest that RISC is a secreted protein. Tissue Northern blotting studies demonstrated robust expression of RISC in rat aorta, bladder, and kidney with much lower levels in all other tissues analyzed; high level RISC expression was also observed in human kidney. In situ hybridization verified the localization of RISC to medial SMC of the adult rat aorta. Interestingly, expression in kidney was restricted to proximal convoluted tubules; little or no expression was observed in glomerular cells, distal convoluted and collecting tubules, or medullary cells. Radiation hybrid mapping studies placed the rat RISC locus on chromosome 10q. These studies reveal a novel retinoid-inducible protease whose activity may be involved in vascular wall and kidney homeostasis.

Missed prime words within the attentional blink evoke an N400 semantic priming effect.

When subjects identified a target among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation task, the detection of a subsequent target is impaired (attentional blink). By measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated if the processing of an unidentified prime word elicits the N400 semantic priming effect. Subjects (N = 12) had to identify three target words among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation task. We varied the association strength between a prime (second target) and a probe (third target). The detection of the prime was impaired. Missed primes did not elicit a P300, indicating that they were not explicitly recognized. Despite this difference between recognized and missed primes, the N400 effect was present in both cases. This result suggests that automatic spread of activation (ASA) can be evoked by missed primes within the attentional blink. It furthermore demonstrates that ASA is sufficient to evoke the N400 effect.

Individual cortical current density reconstructions of the semantic N400 effect: using a generalized minimum norm model with different constraints (L1 and L2 norm).

Event-related brain potentials were recorded to study whether verbs and nouns activate topographically distinct cortical generators. Fifteen subjects performed a primed lexical decision task with verb/verb and noun/noun pairs. The relatedness between prime and target items was varied in three steps (unrelated, moderately, and strongly related) and the EEG was recorded from 124 scalp electrodes. The topography of cortical sources of the N400 effect was evaluated by standardized differences scores and by cortical current source estimates which were constrained by the individual MRI-determined cortex anatomy. A behavioral priming effect and a substantial N400 effect was found for both word categories. However, the topography of the grand average N400 effect of verbs and nouns did not differ, neither for raw nor for standardized amplitudes. Cortical current source estimates of the N400 effect revealed a very broad and scattered distribution of active locations with pronounced interindividual differences. Cortical current source estimates obtained with the L1-norm and L2-norm model, respectively, differed in the distribution of sources over the cortex but converged on the same "hot spots." The data give no indication that the N400 effect is generated by word category-specific networks which have a different topography. The marked individual differences are discussed with respect to the involved processes and the current source estimation procedures.

Event-related responses to pronoun and proper name anaphors in parallel and nonparallel discourse structures.

The present study investigated event-related potential (ERP) effects of pronoun and proper name anaphors in both parallel and nonparallel discourse structures. Thirty-seven students processed 400 semantically different text passages. Each trial consisted of two sentences and a comprehension question. The first sentence introduced a protagonist who was referred to by an anaphoric word in the second sentence. The anaphoric word was either a pronoun or a repetition of the proper name of the protagonist and had either the same or a different syntactic role as its antecedent (subject or object). The sentences were presented word by word as rapid serial visual display. Event-related potentials were recorded from 61 scalp electrodes. In agreement with the parallel function strategy, nonparallel discourse structures required longer decision times and exhibited higher error rates than parallel structures. The ERPs revealed two effects: First, pronoun anaphors evoked a more pronounced negativity than proper name anaphors between 270 and 420 ms latency over the frontal cortex electrodes. Another relative negativity occurred between 510 and 600 ms over the parietal cortex electrodes. Second, anaphors in nonparallel positions were accompanied by a more pronounced negativity over the parietal cortex. These data support the idea that an anaphor in nonparallel position triggers extra processing steps, probably search processes in working memory which integrate currently encountered information with previously activated representations.

[Memory traces in EEG]. / Gedächtnisspuren im EEG.

The paper gives a brief overview of five experimental approaches in which memory processes were studied by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Some of the results were already published in English (Study 1), while others are new and will be reported in greater length as full paper elsewhere (Studies 2, 3, 4, and 5). Study 1 revealed that retrieval of information from episodic long-term memory is accompanied by a systematic slow negative potential. The topography of this slow wave depends on the quality of the reactivated information (spatial vs. verbal), and its amplitude reflects the difficulty of the retrieval process. In experiment 2 ERPs were recorded while subjects acquired either explicit or implicit knowledge about a sequential stimulus-response pattern. The data suggest that explicit learners who posses verbalizable knowledge about sequential dependencies have formed both perceptual and motor representations, while implicit learners have formed motor representations only. In study 3 fact retrieval in mental arithmetic was activated by a verification task. Incongruent solutions evoked an arithmetic N400-effect whose amplitude varied with the associative distance between an expected and an actually perceived solution to a multiplication problem. In study 4 ERPs were recorded during mental rotation tasks. A set of experiments revealed that mental rotation is always accompanied by a systematic negative variation over the parietal cortex. The amplitude of this "rotation specific negativity" increases with an increasing angular disparity between a perceived sign and its normal upright template. It was shown that this negativity is functionally distinct from a P300-complex which is often superimposed on it within the same latency window. Finally, study 5 examined ERPs in a sentence reading task in which grammatically legal but infrequent sentence constructions had to be processed. A left-anterior negativity was observed whenever an explicit case marker (the definite article in German) signalled a nominal phrase at a noncanonical position. The LAN phenomenon appears to be a manifestation of a syntax processor which performes a first-pass formal analysis of a sentence and which possibly allocates working memory resources whenever a word cannot be assigned immediately to an expected propositional role.