Do antidepressants work? Statistical significance versus clinical benefits

Ours has been called the Prozac generation but, earlier this year, newspaper front page headlines screamed "Antidepressants don't work". Our authors' reanalysis of drug trials was widely reported as implying that antidepressant drugs such as Prozac are overprescribed and useless. The truth, as Blair T. Johnson and Irving Kirsch explain, is more complex, and more interesting.     

The effect of type of task on children's identification of facial expressions

The performance of children at ages 4, 6, and 8 years was compared on the four types of task most often used in facial expression studies with children. We examined whether the order of mastery of emotions at different ages was constant across tasks, or alternatively, if it was task-specific. The relative difficulty of the tasks was also investigated, with the aim of arranging them into a hierarchy of increasing difficulty. The four tasks used were situation discrimination, matching discrimination, forced choice labeling, and free labeling. Accuracy was found to increase with age, but the interaction between age, type of task, and emotion was not significant. These results suggest that conclusions about the ordering of specific emotions from least to most difficult at different ages is not task dependent. Nevertheless, a significant interaction found between task and emotion suggests that such conclusions should specify which type of task generated the pattern. A hierarchy of difficulty for the tasks was only partially supported. Performance on the first three tasks was very similar but performance on free labeling was significantly poorer.     

Types of female orgasm

This study was designed to evaluate the relationship between child sexual abuse (CSA), family violence, and other negative childhood experiences within the home and adult adjustment (TSC‐40 and Rosenberg's Self‐Esteem Scale) in a sample of first‐year female psychology students (n = 199). An experience of CSA was reported by 23.6% of women. Results of a discriminant function analysis revealed that level of family violence, father's traditional family values and mother's and father's sexual punitiveness were the variables that best discriminated between sexually abused and nonabused women. After other differences in family background were accounted for by using hierarchical multiple regression, level of family violence significantly improved the prediction of adult psychological adjustment. Standard multiple regression revealed that characteristics and severity of CSA were not significant predictors of adult adjustment. These results were interpreted as support for the use of an integrated risk‐sequelae model of CSA in evaluating the relationship between CSA and adult adjustment. Within this model, the interrelationships among CSA, violence, and dysfunctional familial environments should be simultaneously assessed.     

Quality of life indicators and health: Current status and emerging conceptions

Quality of life is an increasingly common theme in the health status and health promotion literatures. Six approaches that consider quality of life and health are reviewed. These are (a) health-related quality of life; (b) quality of life as social diagnosis in health promotion; (c) quality of life among persons with developmental disabilities; (d) quality of life as social indicators; (e) the Centre for Health Promotion (University of Toronto) model, and (f) Lindstrom's quality of life model. Each approach is considered as to its emphasis on objective or subjective indicators, individual or system-level measurement, value-laden or value-neutral assumptions, and potential relationship to social policy and social change goals. The links among the social indicators, quality of life, and health promotions areas are examined.