Current Regulation of Mobile Mental Health Applications.

In recent years, the availability of software that is targeted toward the general public and designed to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness or to promote general mental health has expanded greatly. Regulation of more traditional health care providers and health care-associated devices is well established by statute, regulatory guidelines, and common law precedents. Applications (apps), in contrast, pose a novel regulatory challenge. This review examines the current regulatory guidelines for psychiatric mobile mental health apps, as well as the current state of case law in the psychiatric mobile mental health realm.

A Resident Perspective on the Goldwater Rule.

Section 7.3 of the Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry, more commonly known as the Goldwater rule, admonishes psychiatrists to avoid offering professional opinions about public figures in the absence of an in-person evaluation. To our knowledge, no peer-reviewed articles have been published considering resident perspectives on the Goldwater rule. Furthermore, we have found little published guidance that deals specifically with teaching the Goldwater rule in a general residency curriculum. We propose that residency programs should incorporate a brief (one hour) but thoughtful discussion of the Goldwater rule into their general curriculum. We recommend that such a didactic hour should introduce arguments for and against the rule in its present form. Covered topics could include whether there should be exceptions to the rule, whether the rule is defensible on ethical grounds, and what contexts exist in which psychiatric opinions can be rendered without personal examination. We hope to make the case that a more nuanced exploration of the Goldwater rule could help open a door to discussions that would foster the growth of a mature professional identity.

Visual determinants of a cross-modal illusion.

Contrary to the predictions of established theory, Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) have shown that visual information can influence the perceived duration of concurrent sounds. In the present study, we deconstruct the visual component of their illusion, showing that (1) cross-modal influence depends on visible cues signaling an impact event (namely, a sudden change of direction concurrent with tone onset) and (2) the illusion is controlled primarily by the duration of post-impact motion. Other aspects of the post-impact motion--distance traveled, velocity, acceleration, and the rate of its change (i.e., its derivative, jerk)--play a minor role, if any. Together, these results demonstrate that visual event duration can influence the perception of auditory event duration, but only when stimulus cues are sufficient to give rise to the perception of a causal cross-modal relationship. This refined understanding of the illusion's visual aspects is helpful in comprehending why it contrasts so markedly with previous research on cross-modal integration, demonstrating that vision does not appreciably influence auditory judgments of event duration (Walker & Scott, 1981).