The Impact of Police Behavior During Death Notifications on Mental Health of the Bereaved: A Cross-Sectional Study.

The delivery of death notifications may affect the mental health of bereaved individuals. Police officers are often the first people with whom the bereaved have contact in this exceptional situation. Therefore, it is essential to assess the behavior of police officers and the impact on the bereaved. We examined the experiences of 86 individuals who received the notification through the police and assessed symptoms of prolonged grief, depression, and posttraumatic stress symptoms. The interaction with police was associated with posttraumatic avoidance behavior and the presence of another supporting person was associated with higher scores of depression. Handing out information material and staying with the bereaved was related to a positive evaluation of police behavior. It appears important to identify helpful and problematic behavior for a better understanding and for an adaptation of existing guidelines.

An Evaluation of a Suicide Prevention E-Learning Program for Police Officers (COPS): Improvement in Knowledge and Competence.

Background: Police officers are at high risk for mental and physical health problems and suicidal ideation. The specific risk factors are numerous and concern stressful missions and administrative aspects of the police profession. So far, the police get only little training on specific missions as well as on coping with stress and suicidal ideation in the police profession. In this study we test the efficacy of the online training COPS (Coping with Suicide) for police officers. Methods: A total of 142 police officers from Germany and Switzerland participated in the study; complete data (baseline and post) are available from 102 participants. The training consisted of three modules covering the topics of delivering death notifications, dealing with individuals with suicidal ideation and dealing with one's own distress and suicidal ideation in the police profession. The primary outcomes are perceived knowledge and self-rated competence regarding the contents of the program, actual knowledge as well as symptoms of depression and anxiety (PHQ-9), and attitudes toward suicide (ATTS). The data are collected at baseline and after completing the training. Results: We found a significant increase in knowledge as well as in perceived competence after completing the training. Mental health and attitudes toward suicide did not change significantly. Years on the job had no moderating effect on the effectiveness of the training. Discussion: The results suggest that a short e-learning program significantly improves knowledge and self-rated competence in delivering death notifications, in suicide prevention and stress management. It can be easily integrated into the daily routine of police-officers, and participants could participate at their own pace and from any location. One limitation of this study is the lack of a control-group. Further advantages and limitations of this study are discussed. Clinical Trial Registration: https://www.drks.de/drks_web/, identifier: DRKS00023882.

Navigating Motivation: A Semantic and Subjective Atlas of 7 Motives.

Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive. Instead, a literature review suggests that at least seven distinct motives are likely to affect human decisions: "consumption/resource seeking," "care," "affiliation," "achievement," "status-power," "threat approach" (or anger), and "threat avoidance" (or fear). To explore the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task. Here, participants were to assign provided words to one of the motives. By applying principal component analysis to the categorization assignments we represent the semantic inter-relations of these motives on a two-dimensional space, a "semantic atlas." This atlas suggests that, while care and affiliation are conceptually close, affiliation is closer to threat avoidance (or fear); opposite to these motives we find achievement, consumption and power, with the latter lying closer to threat approach (or anger). In a second study, we asked participants to rate how well the motive-specific words obtained in the first study described their currently experienced feelings. We find that semantically close motives are also more likely to be experienced together, that is, we replicate most of the semantic relations in the "subjective atlas." We discuss our findings in comparison to other multi-dimensional models of motivation, which show clear similarities. In addition to these motivational atlases, we provide a database of motive-specific words, together with the valence and arousal scores. These can be used for future research on the influence of motives on decision making.

Experiencing meditation - Evidence for differential effects of three contemplative mental practices in micro-phenomenological interviews.

Despite increasing interest in effects of meditation, systematic in-depth research on how it qualitatively feels to engage in different kinds of contemplative practices is still missing. To fill this gap, we explore the validity of Micro-phenomenological Interviews (MpI) to assess experiences during breathing meditation (BM), observing-thought meditation (OTM), and loving-kindness meditation (LKM). We performed psycholinguistic analyses, quantitative ratings and qualitative explorations of 104 MpI (N = 57). All results reveal differential affective, bodily and sensorial fingerprints: BM-transcripts contain the most body-related vocabulary, specifically sensations in nose and abdomen. OTM-transcripts contain the most cognition-related vocabulary. OTM is experienced in head and face. LKM-transcripts contain the most vocabulary related to socio-affective processes. LKM is associated to love, sensations around the heart, and warmth. The LKM-outcomes were replicated with another independent set of MpI. These findings verify the merit of MpI as a scientific tool to gain reliable first-person data beyond questionnaires or rating scales.

Illuminating the dark matter of social neuroscience: Considering the problem of social interaction from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives.

Successful human social interaction depends on our capacity to understand other people's mental states and to anticipate how they will react to our actions. Despite its importance to the human condition, the exact mechanisms underlying our ability to understand another's actions, feelings, and thoughts are still a matter of conjecture. Here, we consider this problem from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives. In a critical review, we demonstrate that attempts to draw parallels across these complementary disciplines is premature: The second-person perspective does not map directly to Interaction or Simulation theories, online social cognition, or shared neural network accounts underlying action observation or empathy. Nor does the third-person perspective map onto Theory-Theory (TT), offline social cognition, or the neural networks that support Theory of Mind (ToM). Moreover, we argue that important qualities of social interaction emerge through the reciprocal interplay of two independent agents whose unpredictable behavior requires that models of their partner's internal state be continually updated. This analysis draws attention to the need for paradigms in social neuroscience that allow two individuals to interact in a spontaneous and natural manner and to adapt their behavior and cognitions in a response contingent fashion due to the inherent unpredictability in another person's behavior. Even if such paradigms were implemented, it is possible that the specific neural correlates supporting such reciprocal interaction would not reflect computation unique to social interaction but rather the use of basic cognitive and emotional processes combined in a unique manner. Finally, we argue that given the crucial role of social interaction in human evolution, ontogeny, and every-day social life, a more theoretically and methodologically nuanced approach to the study of real social interaction will nevertheless help the field of social cognition to evolve.