Faculty Bibliography

Aims of this study were (a) to summarize the psychometric literature on the Mobility Inventory for Agoraphobia (MIA), (b) to examine the convergent and discriminant validity of the MIA's Avoidance Alone and Avoidance Accompanied rating scales relative to clinical severity ratings of anxiety disorders from the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule (ADIS), and (c) to establish a cutoff score indicative of interviewers' diagnosis of agoraphobia for the Avoidance Alone scale. A meta-analytic synthesis of 10 published studies yielded positive evidence for internal consistency and convergent and discriminant validity of the scales. Participants in the present study were 129 people with a diagnosis of panic disorder. Internal consistency was excellent for this sample, alpha=.95 for AAC and .96 for AAL. When the MIA scales were correlated with interviewer ratings, evidence for convergent and discriminant validity for AAL was strong (convergent r with agoraphobia severity ratings=.63 vs. discriminant rs of .10-.29 for other anxiety disorders) and more modest but still positive for AAC (.54 vs. .01-.37). Receiver operating curve analysis indicated that the optimal operating point for AAL as an indicator of ADIS agoraphobia diagnosis was 1.61, which yielded sensitivity of .87 and specificity of .73.

OBJECTIVE: To determine lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis. DATA SOURCES: Keyword term searches using "sleep paralysis", "isolated sleep paralysis", or "parasomnia not otherwise specified" were conducted using MEDLINE (1950-present) and PsychINFO (1872-present). English and Spanish language abstracts were reviewed, as were reference lists of identified articles. STUDY SELECTION: Thirty five studies that reported lifetime sleep paralysis rates and described both the assessment procedures and sample utilized were selected. DATA EXTRACTION: Weighted percentages were calculated for each study and, when possible, for each reported subsample. DATA SYNTHESIS: Aggregating across studies (total N=36,533), 7.6% of the general population, 28.3% of students, and 31.9% of psychiatric patients experienced at least one episode of sleep paralysis. Of the psychiatric patients with panic disorder, 34.6% reported lifetime sleep paralysis. Results also suggested that minorities experience lifetime sleep paralysis at higher rates than Caucasians. CONCLUSIONS: Sleep paralysis is relatively common in the general population and more frequent in students and psychiatric patients. Given these prevalence rates, sleep paralysis should be assessed more regularly and uniformly in order to determine its impact on individual functioning and better articulate its relation to psychiatric and other medical conditions.

This meta-analysis assessed efficacy of pharmacologic and psychological interventions for treatment of perinatal depression. A systematic review identified 27 studies, including open trials (n=9), quasi-randomized trials (n=2), and randomized controlled trials (n=16) assessing change from pretreatment to posttreatment or comparing these interventions to a control group. Uncontrolled and controlled effect sizes were assessed in separate meta-analyses. There was significant improvement in depressive symptoms from pretreatment to posttreatment, with an uncontrolled overall effect size (Hedges' g) of 1.61 after removal of outliers and correction for publication bias. Symptom levels at posttreatment were below cutoff levels indicative of clinically significant symptoms. At posttreatment, intervention groups demonstrated significantly greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to control groups, with an overall controlled effect size (Hedges' g) of 0.65 after removal of outliers. Individual psychotherapy was superior to group psychotherapy with regard to changes in symptoms from pretreatment to posttreatment. Interventions including an interpersonal therapy component were found to have greater effect sizes, compared to control conditions, than interventions including a cognitive-behavioral component. Implications of the findings for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

The relation between patients' beliefs about the causes of their depression, treatment preferences, and demographic variables was studied in a sample of 156 patients in a randomized controlled trial for depression (supportive-expressive psychotherapy vs. medication vs. placebo). No gender differences were found in beliefs or preferences. Racial differences were found for causes endorsed, but not preferences. Treatment experience predicted endorsement of characterological and biological causes. Psychotherapy experience predicted preference for medication. Finally, patients preferring psychotherapy endorsed childhood and complex causes more than those preferring medication, but the groups did not differ in other reasons endorsed. Implications of findings are discussed.

OBJECTIVE: Given the data that depression is common during pregnancy and that pregnant women prefer non-medication treatment options, we hypothesize repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) may be a treatment option. Given the novelty of TMS, we sought to assess whether patient acceptability would be a barrier to enrolling pregnant women in TMS studies. METHODS: In Study 1, 500 pregnant women were surveyed in an outpatient, urban obstetrics clinic using the Edinburgh Depression Rating Scale (EPDS) and a treatment acceptability survey. In Study 2, 51 women were surveyed with the EPDS and acceptability survey using an informational video to increase participant knowledge about TMS. RESULTS: Approximately 25% of participants had an EPDS score of >/=12 in both studies. Psychotherapy was identified as the most acceptable treatment option. TMS was considered an unacceptable treatment option to virtually all women before the informational video. After the video, 15.7% considered TMS an acceptable treatment option. CONCLUSION: Psychotherapy is the most acceptable treatment option for depression to pregnant women. Increasing participant knowledge about TMS increased its acceptability significantly. Large-scale multi-center trials are needed for confirmation of these results.

What options are available to mental health providers helping clients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? In this paper we review many of the current pharmacological and psychological interventions available to help prevent and treat PTSD with an emphasis on combat-related traumas and Veteran populations. There is strong evidence supporting the use of several therapies including prolonged exposure (PE), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and cognitive processing therapies (CPT), with PE possessing the most empirical evidence in favor of its efficacy. There have been relatively fewer studies of non-exposure based modalities (e.g., psychodynamic, interpersonal, and dialectical behavior therapy perspectives), but there is no evidence that these treatments are less effective. Pharmacotherapy is promising (especially paroxetine, sertraline, and venlafaxine), but more research comparing the relative merits of medication vs. psychotherapy and the efficacy of combined treatments is needed. Given the recent influx of combat-related traumas due to ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is clearly an urgent need to conduct more randomized clinical trials research and effectiveness studies in military and Department of Veterans Affairs PTSD samples. Finally, we provide references to a number of PTSD treatment manuals and propose several recommendations to help guide clinicians' treatment selections.

OBJECTIVE: The Ad Hoc Subcommittee for Evaluation of the Evidence Base for Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of the APA Committee on Research on Psychiatric Treatments developed the Randomized Controlled Trial Psychotherapy Quality Rating Scale (RCT-PQRS). The authors report results from application of the RCT-PQRS to 94 randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic psycho-therapy published between 1974 and May 2010. METHOD: Five psychotherapy researchers from a range of therapeutic orientations rated a single published paper from each study. RESULTS: The RCT-PQRS had good interrater reliability and internal consistency. The mean total quality score was 25.1 (SD=8.8). More recent studies had higher total quality scores. Sixty-three of 103 comparisons between psychodynamic psychotherapy and a nondynamic comparator were of "adequate" quality. Of 39 comparisons of a psychodynamic treatment and an "active" comparator, six showed dynamic treatment to be superior, five showed dynamic treatment to be inferior, and 28 showed no difference (few of which were powered for equivalence). Of 24 adequate comparisons of psychodynamic psychotherapy with an "inactive" comparator, 18 found dynamic treatment to be superior. CONCLUSIONS: Existing randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic psychotherapy are promising but mostly show superiority of psychodynamic psychotherapy to an inactive comparator. This would be sufficient to make psychodynamic psychotherapy an "empirically validated" treatment (per American Psychological Association Division 12 standards) only if further randomized controlled trials of adequate quality and sample size replicated findings of existing positive trials for specific disorders. We do not yet know what will emerge when other psychotherapies are subjected to this form of quality-based review.

Responds to a comment by C. J. Douglas (see record 2011-15374-015) on the authors' original review (see record 2011-02156-007) of the quality of randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic psychotherapy. While we agree that the general issues raised by Dr. Douglas are important ones, we believe that there is insufficient evidence to accept either of her arguments as fact, nor is there reason to be too skeptical about the findings of randomized controlled trials on these bases. First, it is not clear that randomized controlled trials do not include complex cases. Second, we have relatively limited systematic data on how seasoned clinicians really practice or whether adherence to one approach or a blend of approaches is better for patients of all diagnoses under all conditions. While randomized controlled trials certainly do impose constraints on the treatment (most notably, with random assignment to treatment groups) that may limit generalizability, we believe that they remain the best method we have for minimizing the impact of researcher and therapist bias when evaluating differential treatment outcomes.