Utah State Hospital

The purpose of this clinical dissemination project was to evaluate changes in intensity of unpleasant auditory hallucinations (AH) and level of anxiety after forensic psychiatric inpatients attended an evidence-based symptom self-management course. The course was taught twice to patients with schizophrenic disorders. Data were collected using five self-rating measures. Seventy percent of participants reported reduced AH and anxiety; 100% reported helpfulness of being with others with similar symptoms; 90% would recommend the course to others. The course facilitator reported: improved communication, comfort, and effectiveness working with people with AH, plans to teach the course again and recommend it to colleagues.

ABSTRACTArchaeologists have begun to understand that many of the challenges facing our technologically sophisticated, resource dependent, urban systems were also destabilizing factors in ancient complex societies. The focus of IHOPE‐Maya is to identify how humans living in the tropical Maya Lowlands in present‐day Central America responded to and impacted their environments over the past three millennia, and to relate knowledge of those processes to modern and future coupled human–environment systems. To better frame variability in ancient lowland Maya development and decline, the area that they once occupied may be subdivided into a series of geographical regions in which the collected archaeological data can be correlated with environmental differences. Although beginning as small agricultural communities occupying a variety of ecological niches in the humid tropics of Mesoamerica, the ancient Maya became an increasingly complex set of societies involved in intensive and extensive resource exploitation. Their development process was not linear, but also involved periods of rapid growth that were punctuated by contractions. Thus, the long‐term development and disintegration of Maya geopolitical institutions presents an excellent vantage from which to study resilience, vulnerability, and the consequences of decision‐making in ancient complex societies.

The Python programming language provides a development environment suitable to both computational and visualization tasks. One of Python's key advantages is that it lets developers use packages that extend the language to provide advanced capabilities, such as array and matrix manipulation, image processing, digital signal processing, and visualization. Several popular data exploration and visualization tools have been built in Python, including Visit (www.llnl. gov/visit), Paraview (www.paraview. org), climate data analysis tools (CDAT; www2-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cdat), and VisTrails (www.vistrails .org). In our work, we use VisTrails; however, nearly any Python-enabled application can produce similar results. The neuroscience field often uses bothmultimodal data and computationally complex algorithms to analyze data collected from study participants. Here, we investigate a study in which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is combined with electroencephalography (EEG) data to examine working memory.

beds) that treat adult, geriatric, and forensic patients. In 1998, USH was awarded a three-year grant from the state academic collaboration committee that provided resources for education and research in the area of outcome assessment. Since then, USH has implemented and refined an outcome management program for monitoring treatment. Although case studies for implementing outcome management programs in managed care (2), private practice (3), and public settings (4) are available, a specialized model may be necessary when working with persons with severe and persistent mental illness. Such a model might facilitate the implementation of outcome management programs by similar facilities. Accordingly, academically based researchers, USH administrators, mental health care providers, and patient advocates teamed together to review current research and experiential information and provide a case study describing the development and application of an outcome management program for a population of patients with severe and persistent mental illness. The method used to select the outcome measures is detailed in a companion article in this issue of Psychiatric Services (5).

Abstract In two studies, self‐choking by a middle‐aged man with mental retardation was controlled both directly and indirectly by positive procedures. In the first study, paced eating procedures were employed to control postmealtime rumination. The frequency of generalized self‐choking increased from periods where meals were paced to periods in which meals were not paced and vice versa. In the second study, redirection of self‐choking and reinforcement for responses other than self‐choking (DRO) reduced the frequency of self‐choking, with the procedures applied successively to a number of different environments, trainers, distances from the client, and DRO parameters. These procedures related to a substantial reduction in generalized self‐choking measured in other environments at other times.

(1961). Does Emphasis on High Grades Reduce Extra-Curricular Participation? The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 32, No. 6, pp. 336-339.