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BACKGROUND: Several quantitative studies support the effectiveness of the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) psychosocial skills training group component for adolescents with impulse-control disorder and/or emotional dysregulation. However, qualitative research to assess this psychotherapeutic tool in the adolescent population is sparse. This study aims to examine the subjective experience of adolescents with behavioral issues who have completed DBT skills training group, as well as using this experience to extract hypotheses regarding its usefulness which can then be verified at a later time by means of quantitative instruments. METHODS: We developed a qualitative study by using focus groups with adolescents (N=20) whose diagnosis includes symptoms such as behavior disorder, impulse-control disorder and/or emotional dysregulation, and good informants, who have completed DBT skills training. Three focus groups were created. RESULTS: The subjective experience of adolescents who have completed a DBT skills training group is collected in four main categories: experience of illness, motivation for therapy, experience of therapy and results of the therapy. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescents with behavioral problems assess their participation in the DBT skills training group positively, even recommending its usefulness to healthy population. Beyond learning skills, they emphasize the intrapsychic changes (as improvement in reflective activity) that they objectify after the group experience. This study was partially funded by the Spanish Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AEPNYA) by awarding the research team the 2015 AEPNYA research prize. The funding body had no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript.

Background Facial emotion recognition (FER) is essential to guide social functioning and behaviour for interpersonal communication. FER may be altered in severe mental illness such as in psychosis and in borderline personality disorder patients. However, it is unclear if these FER alterations are specifically related to psychosis. Awareness of FER alterations may be useful in clinical settings to improve treatment strategies. The aim of our study was to examine FER in patients with severe mental disorder and their relation with psychotic symptomatology. Materials and Methods Socio-demographic and clinical variables were collected. Alterations on emotion recognition were assessed in 3 groups: patients with first episode psychosis (FEP) (n = 64), borderline personality patients (BPD) (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 137), using the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, Structured Interview for Schizotypy Revised and Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences scales were used to assess positive psychotic symptoms. WAIS III subtests were used to assess IQ. Results Kruskal-Wallis analysis showed a significant difference between groups on the FER of neutral faces score between FEP, BPD patients and controls and between FEP patients and controls in angry face recognition. No significant differences were found between groups in the fear or happy conditions. There was a significant difference between groups in the attribution of negative emotion to happy faces. BPD and FEP groups had a much higher tendency to recognize happy faces as negatives. There was no association with the different symptom domains in either group. Conclusions FEP and BPD patients have problems in recognizing neutral faces more frequently than controls. Moreover, patients tend to over-report negative emotions in recognition of happy faces. Although no relation between psychotic symptoms and FER alterations was found, these deficits could contribute to a patient's misinterpretations in daily life.

Background This study aims to explore differences in personal narratives of the experience of illness and treatment in depressed oncologic patients who received either combined treatment for depression (psychotherapy plus antidepressants) or standard treatment (antidepressants alone). Methods We employed a qualitative research design based on grounded theory. Data were collected from eight videotaped focus groups and semi-structured interviews with a total of 28 participants. The research team reviewed interview transcripts and categorized the participants' responses using the ATLAS.ti (ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH Hardenbergstr. 7 D-10623, Berlin) software package. Results Compared with patients in the standard treatment group, patients in the combined treatment group were better able to relate their experiences of physical and emotional discomfort and find meaning in the experience of illness by viewing cancer as a transformative experience. In addition, patients in the combined treatment group tended to use more active coping strategies based on acceptance of their situation and emphasized that psychotherapy had been helpful. Conclusions Qualitative analysis is an efficient method of examining the meaning of quantitative results in depth, particularly patients' perspectives on quality of life. Patients undergoing combined treatment consider psychotherapy to be a helpful tool and exhibit more personal growth than do patients undergoing standard treatment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Networks of Evolutionary Processors (NEP) are a bio-inspired computational model able to solve NP complete problems in an efficient manner. Up to now, the only way to analyze and execute these devices is through hardware and software simulators able to encapsulate the inherent parallelism and the efficiency in their computations. Nowadays, simulators for these models only cover many software applications developed under sequential/parallel architectures over multicore desktop computers or clusters of computers. Most of them, are not able to handle the size of non trivial problems within a massively parallel environment. We consider that cloud computation offers an interesting and promising option to overcome the drawbacks of these solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel distributed architecture to simulate NEPs using on-demand cloud elastic computation. A flexible and extensible simulator is developed in order to demonstrate the suitability and scalability of our architecture with several variants of NEP.

This study aims to explore differences in personal narratives of the experience of illness and treatment in depressed oncologic patients who received either combined treatment for depression (psychotherapy plus antidepressants) or standard treatment (antidepressants alone).We employed a qualitative research design based on grounded theory. Data were collected from eight videotaped focus groups and semi-structured interviews with a total of 28 participants. The research team reviewed interview transcripts and categorized the participants' responses using the ATLAS.ti (ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH Hardenbergstr. 7 D-10623, Berlin) software package.Compared with patients in the standard treatment group, patients in the combined treatment group were better able to relate their experiences of physical and emotional discomfort and find meaning in the experience of illness by viewing cancer as a transformative experience. In addition, patients in the combined treatment group tended to use more active coping strategies based on acceptance of their situation and emphasized that psychotherapy had been helpful.Qualitative analysis is an efficient method of examining the meaning of quantitative results in depth, particularly patients' perspectives on quality of life. Patients undergoing combined treatment consider psychotherapy to be a helpful tool and exhibit more personal growth than do patients undergoing standard treatment.

Las variables psicológicas son las que más se han relacionado con el padecimiento de trastornos depresivos en pacientes oncológicos. El objetivo de este estudio es analizar la relación entre dimensiones de personalidad y mecanismos de afrontamiento en una muestra de pacientes oncológicos. Método: 40 pacientes diagnosticados de cáncer de mama, colon o pulmón en estadios no metastáticos y de un trastorno depresivo (DSM IV) se compararon con 39 pacientes con los mismos diagnósticos oncológicos pero que no presentaron ningún episodio depresivo. Para evaluar el afrontamiento se utilizó el MAC (Mental Adjustment Cancer Questionnaire) y para evaluar las dimensiones de personalidad se utilizó el TCI-R (Inventario de Temperamento y Carácter revisado de Clonninger). Resultados: Los pacientes deprimidos presentaron mecanismos de afrontamiento caracterizados por evitación ansiosa, desamparo y fatalismo y menor espíritu de lucha. Los pacientes deprimidos mostraron dimensiones de personalidad caracterizadas por altas puntuaciones en evitación del daño y bajas puntuaciones en dependencia de la recompensa. Las dimensiones de personalidad de persistencia y auto-dirección se correlacionaron con estilos de afrontamiento caracterizados por indefensión-desesperanza y fatalismo en la muestra de pacientes deprimidos, mientras que se correlacionaron con mayor espíritu de lucha en la muestra de pacientes no deprimidos. Entre los no deprimidos se encontró de nuevo que el espíritu de lucha era mayor cuanto meno tendencia a la evitación del daño presentaba el paciente. Conclusiones: Nuestros datos apoyan la importancia de la evaluación del estilo de afrontamiento y personalidad y apuntan a la importancia de otros factores como el mundo de creencias o asunciones básicas del sujeto como mediadora entre las variables de personalidad y de afrontamiento y el trastorno depresivo. Psychological variables are the most consistent findings which associate depressión and oncologic illness. Objective: To analyze the relationship between personality dimensions and coping style in a sample of oncologic patients. Method: 40 patients with diagnosis of breast, colon or lung cancer, no metastasic, and a depressive disorder (DSM IV) were compared with a 39 patients with the same oncologic diagnosis but without depression. We used the MAC (Mental Adjustment Cancer Questionnaire) and the TCI-R (Temperament and Character Inventory of Clonninger). Results: Depressed patients showed coping styles characterized by anxious avoidance, fatalism and less fighting spirit. Depressed patients had personality dimensions with high scores in harm avoidance and low scores in recompense reward. Personality dimensions of persistence and auto-direction correlated with coping styles of hopelessness and fatalism in the depressed sample, while the same dimensions correlated with fighting spirit in the non depressed sample. The non depressed patients showed more fighting spirit when the tendency to harm avoidance was inferior. Conclusions: Our data supports the importance of personality and coping style evaluation and suggests the importance of the patient’s assumptive world as a possible mediator between personality, coping and depression.