Clinicians' Emotional Reactions toward Patients with Depressive Symptoms in Mood Disorders: A Narrative Scoping Review of Empirical Research.

The purpose of this article is to narratively review the empirical literature on clinicians' emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses (i.e., countertransference) to depressive and other symptoms of patients with mood disorders. Therapist subjective responses (countertransference) can negatively affect both diagnostic and therapeutic processes, especially when they are not recognized and managed promptly. However, at the same time, countertransference recognition, processing, and management can help inform the diagnostic process and improve the therapy process and outcome. In the last couple of decades, the number of studies that empirically explore countertransference toward mood disordered patients, as well as its relationship with various characteristics of both patients and treatment, has increased. Current evidence suggests that patients with depression tend to elicit more positive feelings among clinicians than patients with other severe mental disorders such as borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. Furthermore, it documents the existence of associations between patients' severity of depressive symptoms and clinicians' subjective reactions, although the results regarding which specific countertransference patterns are evoked in relation to the different phases of the treatment are not entirely consistent. Lastly, growing evidence suggests the presence of clinicians' specific emotional reactions towards patients with suicidal ideation and behavior.

Improving Amnesia Diagnostic Accuracy with RAVLT Single Scores and Composite Indices: Italian Normative Data.

OBJECTIVE: The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) is a widely used verbal memory measure that provides scores for different aspects of memory. It involves repeated auditory presentation and recall of a 15-item word list (List A) followed by presentation and recall of a distractor list (List B) and then un-cued immediate and delayed recalls (at 15 min and 1 week) of List A as well as recognition testing. Aims of this study are to provide Italian normative data for certain RAVLT Scores and Composite Indices to improve the diagnostic accuracy of the test in clinical settings and to provide further evidence on how RAVLT can differentiate different amnesia profiles due to focal lesions. METHODS: We enrolled 440 healthy participants and RAVLT Single Scores and Composite Indices have been analyzed by means of multiple regression to verify the influence of age, education, and gender. RESULTS: We computed the best linear models with RAVLT Single Scores and Composite Indices, as dependent variables, and the most suitable transformation of independent variables. By reversing the signs of the regression coefficients, the adjustment factors for each level of age and, if needed, education and gender have been computed and the adjusted scores have been standardized into Equivalent Scores. CONCLUSION: Using these standardized measures, we differentiate three profiles of amnesia due to selective hippocampal sclerosis with severe encoding deficit, fornix lesions with source memory problems, and temporal lobe epilepsy with consolidation failure.