Faculty Bibliography

The majority of individuals working with justice-involved youth receive limited training addressing the impact of childhood trauma. There is a need for trauma-related training for staff, as well as valid measures to evaluate the effectiveness of training. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network designed a training curriculum, Think Trauma, which educates staff about the impact of trauma on justice-involved youth. A 45-item Think Trauma Evaluation Questionnaire (TTEQ) was developed to assess participants' changes in knowledge and attitudes. This article examines the factor structure and internal consistency of this questionnaire. Two-hundred and ninety-six employees at two secure juvenile detention centers completed the TTEQ. The results suggest that the questionnaire is feasible to administer to a large group and has a factor structure corresponding to areas covered in the curriculum. A reliable and valid measure of trauma knowledge and attitudes is important to identifying the training needs for a particular facility

Olfactory information is synthesized within the olfactory cortex to provide not only an odor percept, but also a contextual significance that supports appropriate behavioral response to specific odor cues. The piriform cortex serves as a communication hub within this circuit by sharing reciprocal connectivity with higher processing regions, such as the lateral entorhinal cortex and amygdala. The functional significance of these descending inputs on piriform cortical processing of odorants is currently not well understood. We have employed optogenetic methods to selectively stimulate lateral and basolateral amygdala (BLA) afferent fibers innervating the posterior piriform cortex (pPCX) to quantify BLA modulation of pPCX odor-evoked activity. Single unit odor-evoked activity of anesthetized BLA-infected animals was significantly modulated compared with control animal recordings, with individual cells displaying either enhancement or suppression of odor-driven spiking. In addition, BLA activation induced a decorrelation of odor-evoked pPCX ensemble activity relative to odor alone. Together these results indicate a modulatory role in pPCX odor processing for the BLA complex. This interaction could contribute to learned changes in PCX activity following associative conditioning, as well as support alternate patterns of odor processing that are state-dependent.

This editorial discuses about psychiatrists. Editor says psychiatrists were once called alienists. It's an interesting word, in some ways more accurate than the Greek portmanteau word psychiatrist, which combines "doctor" (iatros) with a diffuse evocation of spirit, soul, and mind (psyche), a reminder of the uncertainty about, and the magnitude of, what we're treating. Alienist speaks to the absolute stigma of difference afforded the mentally ill: strangers, the estranged, visitors from another world who do not belong, less familiar than animals. Editor says that in this month's Book Forum, they encounter people who are reputedly alienated-the traumatized, the autistic, the hated parent-from writers defying pat notions of alienation and reconsidering the boundaries of recognition.

This article provides an overview of the books featured in the Book Forum section of the present issue of Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. The books seek to understand what one can gain from appreciating the reality of children's immersion in media. The power of the media is enormous for all. Its power comes not from how fantastical or extraordinary or strange it can be, but from how real it is. It is always tempting to think of the media as a vast, undulating metaphor for humanity, but it is not representing humanity: it is humanity.

In this month's Book Forum, the question is raised again: Where does love come from? Francesco Ferrari reviews an academic text on romantic love, full of theories and intellectual curiosity about this most important of topics, and Matthew J. Baker reviews a book that comes at the question from another angle, in a therapeutic guide book for daughters of mothers "who cannot love."