The objective was to develop and test a framework based on a biopsychosocial model that can be used to identify factors associated with subjective (self-estimated) life expectancy (SLE). SLE predicts important work and retirement decisions so a better understanding of the factors that contribute to an individual's thoughts about their likely age at death is essential for late-career and financial planning and for developing interventions aimed at addressing inappropriate estimates. This is a sub-study of the Australian 45 and Up Study cohort.
Academic Psychiatry: The Journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry
OBJECTIVE: This article presents major concepts and research findings from the field of psychosomatic medicine that the authors believe should be taught to all medical students. METHOD: The authors asked senior scholars involved in psychosomatic medicine to summarize key findings in their respective fields.
An increasing number of people report concerns about the amount of stress in their life. At the same time obesity is an escalating health problem worldwide. Evidence is accumulating rapidly that stress related chronic stimulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and resulting excess glucocorticoid exposure may play a potential role in the development of visceral obesity.
Cultural inheritance, a genetic-based inheritance system transmitted by the brain, has previously been proposed to underlie normal behaviour and mental disorders. In cultural inheritance epigenetic mechanisms are involved in gene expression. This paper proposes that since there are marked epigenetic mechanisms involved in the expression of genes underlying primary (idiopathic) mental disorders, epimutations, rather than genetic mutations, underlie these disorders.
The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
Functional capacities, such as attachment and affect regulation, object relations capacity, symbolic function and language development, now documented by neuroscientific research and epigenetics, are reviewed. Results from this research, together with other factors, are posited to have contributed to effective contemporary psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic treatments for the psychoses and schizophrenias.
RATIONALE: Early Life Stress (ELS) increases risk for both adult traumatization and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Adult PTSD may also reflect a continuation of a response to an earlier exposure to adversity. Given similarities between neuroendocrine aspects of PTSD and ELS, such as in reduced cortisol signaling and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) responsiveness, some aspects of the biology of PTSD may reflect biological correlates of risk.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America
This article provides a selective review of the neuroscience and child-psychoanalytic literature, focusing on areas of significant overlap and emphasizing comprehensive theories in developmental neuroscience and child psychoanalysis with testable mechanisms of action.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Punishment of free-riding has been implicated in the evolution of cooperation in humans, and yet mechanisms for punishment avoidance remain largely uninvestigated. Individual variation in these mechanisms may stem from variation in the serotonergic system, which modulates processing of aversive stimuli. Functional serotonin gene variants have been associated with variation in the processing of aversive stimuli and widely studied as risk factors for psychiatric disorders.
This paper is written from a psychodynamic clinician's perspective, juxtaposing a psychoanalytic-attachment model of depression with recent developments in neuroscience. Three main components of the attachment approach are described: the role of loss, of childhood trauma predisposing to depression in later life, and failure of co-regulation of role of primitive emotions, such as fear, despair, and helplessness. Blatt's distinction between anaclitic and introjective depression is delineated and related to hyper- and de-activation of the attachment dynamic.
BACKGROUND: Clinically relevant posttraumatic stress disorders are almost always associated with physical symptoms, which are, on the one hand, classified as somatoform and, on the other hand, may also present as somatic comorbidities. The psychological, neurobiological, endocrinological and immunological correlations are only now beginning to be understood. Thereby, integration into a meaningful biopsychosocial model is still pending.
