scholarly journals Life-event specificity: bipolar disorder compared with unipolar depression

2012 ◽  
Vol 201 (6) ◽  
pp. 458-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina M. Hosang ◽  
Ania Korszun ◽  
Lisa Jones ◽  
Ian Jones ◽  
Peter McGuffin ◽  
...  

BackgroundLittle is known about the impact of different types of stressful events (for example divorcev.bereavement) on unipolar depression compared with bipolar disorder. Inconsistencies exist concerning the association between independent events (beyond an individual's control, such as bereavement) and bipolar disorder.AimsTo examine the role of specific, independent and dependent events in mood disorders.MethodLife-event information was collected from 512 people with bipolar disorder, 1448 people with unipolar depression and over 600 controls.ResultsVarious events were associated with unipolar depression and bipolar disorder, but some event specificity was detected. For example, financial crisis was more strongly related to bipolar disorder rather than unipolar depression. Independent events were only related to unipolar depression and not bipolar disorder.ConclusionsThe events that were linked to bipolar disorder and unipolar depression were similar. Independent events were not associated with bipolar episodes, suggesting that life stress may be a consequence of, rather than a trigger for, bipolar episodes.

Author(s):  
Lauren B. Alloy ◽  
Madison K. Titone ◽  
Tommy H. Ng ◽  
Corinne P. Bart

Environmental experiences play an important part in the development and maintenance of bipolar spectrum disorders (BSDs). Consequently, in this chapter, we review evidence on the role of life stress in the onset and course of BSDs. We begin with methodological issues relevant to demonstrating life stress’s role in the development and course of BSDs. We consider the effects of exposure both to recent life events and childhood stressors, as well as whether the influence of stressor exposure changes over the course of BSDs. We also address whether the effects of different types of life event exposure depend on mood episode polarity (hypomanic/manic versus depressive episodes) and whether there are specific theoretically relevant types of life events that are particularly likely to trigger bipolar episodes or symptoms. We end with suggestions for future research that may lead to a more complete understanding of the bipolar disorder–stress association.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryl Brian O'Connor

Suicide is a global health issue accounting for at least 800,000 deaths per annum. Numerous models have been proposed that differ in their emphasis on the role of psychological, social, psychiatric and neurobiological factors in explaining suicide risk. Central to many models is a stress-diathesis component which states that suicidal behavior is the result of an interaction between acutely stressful events and a susceptibility to suicidal behavior (a diathesis). This article presents an overview of studies that demonstrate that stress and dysregulated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity, as measured by cortisol levels, are important additional risk factors for suicide. Evidence for other putative stress-related suicide risk factors including childhood trauma, impaired executive function, impulsivity and disrupted sleep are considered together with the impact of family history of suicide, perinatal and epigenetic influences on suicide risk.


Author(s):  
Anne Nassauer

This book provides an account of how and why routine interactions break down and how such situational breakdowns lead to protest violence and other types of surprising social outcomes. It takes a close-up look at the dynamic processes of how situations unfold and compares their role to that of motivations, strategies, and other contextual factors. The book discusses factors that can draw us into violent situations and describes how and why we make uncommon individual and collective decisions. Covering different types of surprise outcomes from protest marches and uprisings turning violent to robbers failing to rob a store at gunpoint, it shows how unfolding situations can override our motivations and strategies and how emotions and culture, as well as rational thinking, still play a part in these events. The first chapters study protest violence in Germany and the United States from 1960 until 2010, taking a detailed look at what happens between the start of a protest and the eruption of violence or its peaceful conclusion. They compare the impact of such dynamics to the role of police strategies and culture, protesters’ claims and violent motivations, the black bloc and agents provocateurs. The analysis shows how violence is triggered, what determines its intensity, and which measures can avoid its outbreak. The book explores whether we find similar situational patterns leading to surprising outcomes in other types of small- and large-scale events: uprisings turning violent, such as Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, and failed armed store robberies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Davide Vittori

Abstract Scholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003329412110021
Author(s):  
Sizhe Liu ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Xianyou He ◽  
Xiaoxiang Tang ◽  
Shuxian Lai ◽  
...  

There is evidence that greater aesthetic experience can be linked to artworks when their corresponding meanings can be successfully inferred and understood. Modern cultural-expo architecture can be considered a form of artistic creation and design, and the corresponding design philosophy may be derived from representational objects or abstract social meanings. The present study investigates whether cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design is perceived as more beautiful and how architectural photographs and different types of descriptions of architectural appearance designs interact and produce higher aesthetic evaluations. The results showed an obvious aesthetic preference for cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design (Experiment 1). Moreover, we found that the aesthetic rating score of architectural photographs accompanied by an abstract description was significantly higher than that of those accompanied by a representational description only under the difficult-to-understand design condition (Experiment 2). The results indicated that people preferred cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design due to a greater understanding of the design, providing further evidence that abstract descriptions can provide supplementary information and explanation to enhance the sense of beauty of abstract cultural-expo architecture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 74-74
Author(s):  
Lun Li ◽  
Yeonjung Lee ◽  
Daniel W L Lai

Abstract Compared to men, women undertake more family caregiving responsibilities, and thus take more toll in health and wellbeing when they are employed. The current study examined the gender difference in mental health among employed family caregivers, focusing on the role of workplace support in balancing work and caregiving roles. Guided by the social role theory and the moderated-mediation model of employment adjustment and mental health, we analyzed a nationally representative data from the 2012 Canada General Social Survey - Caregiving and Care Receiving with a sample of 2,426 participants selected. Moderated-mediation analysis based on the SPSS macro PROCESS 3.3 was used. Women employed family caregivers are more likely to undertake higher intensive caregiving, make more employment adjustment, and further report worse mental health status than their men counterparts. Gender difference was apparent in regards to the workplace support. For women, the moderating effect of workplace support is significant only when there are at least 5 different types of workplace support available at their workplaces, while for men, the moderating effect is significant when there are at least 2-3 different types of workplace support available. Women employed family caregivers experience worse mental health when employment adjustment is needed for their care responsibility. Findings have implications for providing workplace support for family caregivers given that women benefit less from workplace support compared to men. Further study is needed to explore the impact of various types of workplace support for women employed family caregivers, and to provide tailored support to them.


Author(s):  
Zerrin Doganca Kucuk ◽  
Defne Yabas ◽  
Hayriye Sinem Boyaci ◽  
Mehmet Sencer Corlu

This research aimed to investigate and compare teachers’ conceptualizations of their students’ and their own outcomes of our earlySTEM program at the K4 level in two distinct roles: practitioners only and practitioners and program developers jointly. The study group included 66 teachers, 26 of whom had actively contributed to the development of the earlySTEM program. Teachers in both roles were supported by teacher guides, student books and workshops throughout the 8-month long academic year. Data was collected at the end of the academic year through an open-ended survey. The program developer teachers identified more student outcomes under more diverse categories while the practitioner teachers mainly concentrated on cognitive outcomes and limited their conceptualizations to the national curriculum. In addition, the program developer teachers valued their involvement in the program development process and expressed more diverse professional outcomes referring to different types of teacher knowledge.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Jacquemin ◽  
Annabelle Wurmser ◽  
Mathilde Huyghe ◽  
Wenjie Sun ◽  
Meghan Perkins ◽  
...  

AbstractTumours are complex ecosystems composed of different types of cells that communicate and influence each other. While the critical role of stromal cells in affecting tumour growth is well established, the impact of mutant cancer cells on healthy surrounding tissues remains poorly defined. Here, we uncovered a paracrine mechanism by which intestinal cancer cells reactivate foetal and regenerative Yap-associated transcriptional programs in neighbouring wildtype epithelial cells, rendering them adapted to thrive in the tumour context. We identified the glycoprotein Thrombospondin-1 (Thbs1) as the essential factor that mediates non-cell autonomous morphological and transcriptional responses. Importantly, Thbs1 is associated with bad prognosis in several human cancers. This study reveals the Thbs1-YAP axis as the mechanistic link mediating paracrine interactions between epithelial cells, promoting tumour formation and progression.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 813-813
Author(s):  
A. Schosser ◽  
M.Y. Ng ◽  
A.W. Butler ◽  
S. Cohen-Woods ◽  
N. Craddock ◽  
...  

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) has a central role in brain dopamine, noradrenalin and adrenalin signaling, and has been suggested to be involved in the pathogenesis and pharmacological treatment of affective disorders. The functional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in exon 4 (Val158Met, rs4680) influences the COMT enzyme activity. The Val158Met polymorphism is a commonly studied variant in psychiatric genetics, and initial studies in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder presented evidence for association with the Met allele. In unipolar depression, while some of the investigations point at an association between the Met/Met genotype and others have found a link between the Val/Val genotype and depression, most of the studies cannot detect any difference in Val158Met allele frequency between depressed individuals and controls.In the present study, we further elucidated the impact of COMT polymorphisms including the Val158Met in MDD. We investigated 1,250 subjects with DSM-IV and/or ICD-10 diagnosis of major depression (MDD), and 1,589 control subjects from UK. A total of 24 SNPs spanning the COMT gene were successfully genotyped using the Illumina HumaHap610-Quad Beadchip (22 SNPs), SNPlex™ genotyping system (1 SNP), and Sequenom MassARRAY® iPLEX Gold (1 SNP). Statistical analyses were implemented using PASW Statistics18, FINETTI (http://ihg.gsf.de/cgi-bin/hw/hwa1.pl), UNPHASED version 3.0.10 program and Haploview 4.0 program.Neither single-marker nor haplotypic association was found with the functional Val158Met polymorphism or with any of the other SNPs genotyped. Our findings do not provide evidence that COMT plays a role in MDD or that this gene explains part of the genetic overlap with bipolar disorder.


Author(s):  
Rhys Jenkins

The chapter documents the growth of economic relations between China and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focussing on trade, foreign direct investment, Chinese construction and engineering projects, loans, and aid. The chapter highlights the way in which these are sometimes combined in resources-for-infrastructure deals. It shows the variety of different actors involved in these relationships, including state and non-state actors, on both the Chinese and African sides. It then discusses the role of strategic diplomatic, strategic economic, and commercial objectives in the growing Chinese involvement in SSA. It also addresses questions of African agency and the interests of African actors in economic relations with China. The impact of political, strategic economic and commercial factors on different types of economic relations is then analyzed econometrically.


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