The Health-Related Quality of Life, Work Productivity, Healthcare Resource Utilization, and Economic Burden Associated with Levels of Suicidal Ideation Among Patients Self-Reporting Moderately Severe or Severe Major Depressive Disorder in a National Survey.

BACKGROUND: Suicidal ideation (SI) is a cardinal aspect of major depressive disorder (MDD); however, patient-reported outcomes data from large-scale surveys are limited concerning SI in the context of MDD. This study aims to understand the association between varying levels of SI and health-related quality of life (HRQoL), work productivity, healthcare resource utilization (HRU), and associated costs in patients with moderately severe/severe MDD. METHODS: This was a retrospective, cross-sectional analysis of 2013 national survey data. Patients who self-reported moderately severe or severe MDD and completed the Short Form Survey Version 2 (SF-36v2), Work Productivity Loss and Activity Impairment questionnaire (WPAI), and questions related to HRU were analyzed. Direct and indirect costs were calculated. Patients were categorized and analyzed by the level of SI (no SI, low, moderate, and high) based on their response to Item 9 of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. RESULTS: Among 75,000 respondents, 15.3% self-reported receiving a physician diagnosis of moderately severe or severe MDD and 2.8% of the total sample endorsed some level of SI. Patients with high SI showed a higher burden than patients with no SI, reporting lower mean SF-36v2 mental component summary scores (p<0.001), higher work productivity loss (p=0.039), and higher numbers of per patient per month hospitalizations (p=0.002) and emergency room visits (p=0.011). High SI was associated with greater per patient per month direct costs ($1220 vs $796; p=0.002) and indirect costs ($1449 vs $1058; p=0.001) compared with no SI. When patients with low or moderate SI were compared with patients with no SI, the results were mixed. CONCLUSION: Higher levels of SI were associated with lower HRQoL, greater HRU, and more work impairment resulting in higher direct and indirect costs compared with patients with MDD but no SI. These results highlight the need to implement effective treatment models and interventions in the employed population.

Gendered Facial Cues Influence Race Categorizations.

Race and gender categories, although long presumed to be perceived independently, are inextricably tethered in social perception due in part to natural confounding of phenotypic cues. We predicted that target gender would affect race categorizations. Consistent with this hypothesis, feminine faces compelled White categorizations, and masculine faces compelled Asian or Black categorizations of racially ambiguous targets (Study 1), monoracial targets (Study 2), and real facial photographs (Study 3). The efficiency of judgments varied concomitantly. White categorizations were rendered more rapidly for feminine, relative to masculine faces, but the opposite was true for Asian and Black categorizations (Studies 1-3). Moreover, the effect of gender on categorization efficiency was compelled by racial phenotypicality for Black targets (Study 3). Finally, when targets' race prototypicality was held constant, gender still influenced race categorizations (Study 4). These findings indicate that race categorizations are biased by presumably unrelated gender cues.

Reverse-correlating mental representations of sex-typed bodies: the effect of number of trials on image quality.

Sex categorization is a critical process in social perception. While psychologists have long theorized that perceivers have distinct mental representations of men and women that help them to achieve efficient sex categorizations, researchers have only recently begun using reverse-correlation to visualize the content of these mental representations. The present research addresses two issues concerning this relatively new methodological tool. First, previous studies of reverse-correlation have focused almost exclusively on perceivers' mental representations of faces. Our study demonstrates that this technique can also be used to visualize mental representations of sex-typed bodies. Second, most studies of reverse-correlation have employed a relatively large number of trials (1000+) to capture perceivers' mental representations of a given category. Our study demonstrated that, at least for sex-typed representations of bodies, high quality reverse-correlation images can be obtained with as few as 100 trials. Overall, our findings enhance knowledge of reverse-correlation methodology in general and sex categorization in particular, providing new information for researchers interested in using this technique to understand the complex processes underlying social perception.