Mixer prototype v.0.1

Associated Press May 12, 2008 WASHINGTON - The Institute of Medicine said in 2004 there was no credible evidence to show that vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal led to autism in children. But thousands of families have a different take based on personal experience.

A practice common to psychology research is to take some measure - let's say amount of support from friends and family - and to compare people with mental health problems and people without mental health problems, on this measure. The trouble, according to Idia Thurston and her co-workers, is where to find people without mental health problems.The tactic used by most researchers is to recruit from the wider community, for example by advertising in the local paper. But Thurston's team argue a large proportion of the general community actually have their own mental health problems, and many of them are receiving therapy, something many researchers fail to screen for. This means that what research papers describe as a "non-clinical community sample" may not be so "non-clinical" after all.Thurston and her colleagues assessed 224 families recruited through adverts in local newspapers in south eastern USA as part of a larger study. They found 11 per cent of the teenagers, 20 per cent of the mothers and 13 per cent of the fathers met the diagnostic criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders. Moreover, 12 per cent of the teenagers, 20 per cent of the mothers and 11 per cent of the fathers were currently in therapy. These two groups didn't completely overlap - for instance, there were 25 mothers who met diagnostic criteria for a psychiatric disorder but who weren't in therapy.Thurston's team said their findings have implications for research validity. Differences previously ide...

I just came across this range of great stats-themed t-shirts from Sassystatistics.com. Surely a must have gift for the stats lecturer in your life.Link to Sassystatistics.com

Houston Chronicle May 09, 2008 May 9--Nearly half of the youths locked up in the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center suffer from mental health problems -- far more than the estimated 20 percent with mental disorders in the general youth population -- figures released Thursday show.

People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are emotionally fragile, impulsive, suffer from low mood, have intense unstable personal relationships and - according to a handful of studies - they also have enhanced empathy.But new research by Judith Flury and colleagues shows the idea that BPD patients have enhanced empathy is a spurious finding reflecting the methodological design of prior studies combined with the fact BPD patients are particularly difficult to read.The 76 lowest and highest scorers on the Borderline Syndrome Index were selected from among 789 students. These 76 were then arranged into pairs of low and high borderline participants. The members of each pair were videoed chatting to each other for ten minutes, after which each person completed a personality questionnaire about themselves, and about how they thought their partner saw themselves. This latter part of the design mirrors the methodology of earlier studies that seemed to show BPD is associated with enhanced empathy.As in the earlier studies, it turned out that the high borderline students were better than the low borderline students at predicting how their partners scored their own personalities - a sign of empathy, you'd think. But further analysis showed that this finding was caused by the fact that all the students tended to score their partners' personalities in a fairly stereotypical way. This tactic worked if a participant's partner was low borderline (with a less unusual personality p...

The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss. May 08, 2008 May 8--Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of Coast children still need mental health counseling and are not be getting help, say local mental health professionals and community organizers. This week is National Children's Mental Health Week, and all over the state people are sporting green ribbons...

Canada NewsWire May 08, 2008 TORONTO, May 8, 2008 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) -- Desjardins Financial Security survey shows that Canadian moms are healthy

You've probably been tormented by a catchy song playing over and over in your head. Spare a thought then for those people for whom this phenomenon is taken to the next level: the song or songs sound real and they play round the clock. They have what's called 'musical hallucinosis'.Besides hearing music that isn't there, such people often have no other psychological complaints. Now Ramon Mocellin and colleagues have described three typical cases and proposed a tentative neurobiological account of why the condition occurs.Case one was an 82-year-old patient who lived in a remote farm house. She reported loud music to the police and even sent her husband driving round the neighbourhood looking for the source. She eventually realised the music was a 'trick of her imagination'. Apart from deafness, the woman had no other neurological or psychiatric abnormalities.Case two was a 62-year-old surfer. He heard the opening bars of Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child for six months, when there was really no sound there. This man had mild deafness and smoked cannabis but otherwise had no other relevant medical history.The last case, a 78-year-old, was profoundly deaf, had Alzheimer's disease and lived in a care home. He heard hymns and songs that were popular in the 1940s and 50s. Although he had cognitive impairments associated with dementia, he had no other psychotic symptoms besides hearing music that wasn't there. Ramon Mocellin and his colleagues explained that people with musical halluci...

International Herald Tribune May 07, 2008 Increased volatility is gripping the stock markets, big investment banks are adding up their losses and jobs are being cut across the financial industry. Being a trader has seldom been more stressful.

Associated Press May 07, 2008 ATLANTA - People who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies.

Eye-catching articles that didn't make the final cut:What's the point of an elaborate recruitment process if employers are biased by what they already know about candidates? A new study looks at whether recruiters are able to ignore this preliminary information.Can people who hear voices be led to perceive those voices as less hostile and malevolent? Compassionate mind training could be one solution.Changing women's feelings about maths.Making choices is mentally exhausting, such that it leaves us with less self-control (pdf).

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News May 06, 2008 May 6--Adolescents adopted as infants are twice as likely to have behavioral disorders as those who are not adopted, according to research published Monday that is the deepest analysis yet of the larger mental health burden carried by some adopted children.