When “People Who Hoard Animals” was published in Psychiatric Times in 2000, we were just beginning our study of this poorly understood behavior.1 Since then, hoarding disorder (HD) has been a subject of considerable research and has become an official diagnosis in DSM-5. DSM-5 criteria for HD do not specify the types of possessions that are necessary for this diagnosis. Because animals are lega...

Financial crises are associated with reduced volumes and extreme levels of rates for term inter-bank loans, reflected in the one-month and three-month Libor. We explain such stress by modeling leveraged banks’ precautionary demand for liquidity. Asset shocks impair a bank’s ability to roll over debt because of agency problems associated with high leverage. In turn, banks hoard liquidity and dec...

Many animals regularly hoard food for future use, which appears to be an important adaptation to a seasonally and/or unpredictably changing environment. This food-hoarding paradigm is an excellent example of a natural system that has broadly influenced both theoretical and empirical work in the field of biology. The food-hoarding paradigm has played a major role in the conceptual framework of n...

OBJECTIVE Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a severe condition with varied symptom presentations. The behavioral treatment with the most empirical support is exposure and ritual prevention (EX/RP). This study examined the impact of symptom dimensions on EX/RP outcomes in OCD patients. METHOD The Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) was used to determine primary symptoms for eac...

Hoarding Disorder (HD) is associated with substantial distress, impairment, and individual and societal costs. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) tailored to HD is the best-studied form of treatment and can be led by mental health professionals or by non-professionals (peers) with specific training. No previous study has directly compared outcomes for therapist-led and peer-led groups, and none...

Disconnection is one of the popular techniques for operating in mobile environments and is here to stay, until long-range wireless connectivity becomes a reality. However, disconnection requires periodic hoarding and reintegration of data, which raises performance issues especially during weak connection. A common hoarding and reintegration mechanism involves complete transfer of contents. In o...

Compulsive hoarding is characterized by the acquisition of, and failure to discard, a large number of possessions and clutter that prevents the use of living spaces as intended. Current successful treatments such as individual and group cognitive-behavioral therapy are lengthy and costly, requiring a time commitment ranging from four to twelve months, trained clinicians to administer treatment,...

BACKGROUND The Clutter Image Rating (CIR) Scale though extensively used to assess hoarding behavior, has mainly been validated in Western populations. METHODS The current study sought to validate the CIR in a sample of psychiatric outpatients (n = 500) in Singapore. Convergent and divergent validity as well as inter-observer reliabilities between participant CIR and interviewer-rated CIR were...

In a context-aware environment, the system must be able to refresh the answers to all pending queries in reaction to perpetual changes in the user’s context. This added to the fact that mobile systems suffer from problems like scarce bandwidth, low quality communication and frequent disconnections, leads to high delays before giving up to date answers to the user. A solution to reduce latency i...