Individuals with depressive symptoms typically show deficits in decision-making. However, most work has emphasized decision-making under gain-maximization conditions. A gainmaximization framework may undermine decision-making when depressive symptoms are present because depressives are generally more sensitive to losses than gains. The present study examined decision making in a non-clinical sa...

Depression is often characterized by attentional biases toward negative items and away from positive items, which likely affects reward and punishment processing. Recent work has reported that training attention away from negative stimuli reduced this bias and reduced depressive symptoms. However, the effect of attention training on subsequent learning has yet to be explored. In the present stu...

It is well established that stress is a risk factor for onset of mood disorders. Emerging evidence suggests that genetic vulnerability may also moderate individual responsiveness to stress. The most compelling evidence regards the polymorphism within the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (SERTPR), which has been reported to moderate the risk for depression, in conjunction with l...

A psychoticism questionnaire in Hindi consisting of 60 items was standardised by administering it to 100 psychotics (schizophrenics and manic-depressives), 100 neurotics, 100 psychiatrically normal relatives of psychotics and 100 normals. The mean psychoticism score (P-score) of psychotics, neurotics, relatives and normals were 30.69, 13.63, 13.85 and 8.83 respectively, were significantly diffe...

The finding that bright light can suppress melatonin production led to the study of two situations, indeed, models, of light deprivation: totally blind people and winter depressives. The leading hypothesis for winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, or SAD) is the phase shift hypothesis (PSH). The PSH was recently established in a study in which SAD patients were given low-dose melatoni...

168 patients attending hypertension clinic were randomly selected for the study. They were thoroughly investigated using E.C.G., X-ray chest, Urine analysis, Blood sugar, Blood urea, Serum cholesterol, Serum K, Serum Na, Scrum creatinine and Uric acid level. Detailed psychiatric case history and mental examination was carried out. Beck Rating Scale was used to measure the depression. 25% of hyp...

BACKGROUND Pakistan, among the other developing countries, has a higher prevalence rate of depression because of the current social adversities. There is, thus, a great need for systematic studies on prevalence of depression. The current study aims at exploring the prevalence of depression among households in three capital cities of Pakistan. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A sample of N =...

Endogenous depressives with abnormal dexamethasone suppression tests (DSTs) respond better to somatic antidepressant treatments than those with normal DSTs. Whether the DST also aids in the selection of specific antidepressants has not been determined. A pilot report suggested that patients with abnormal DSTs might be noradrenaline-deficient and respond preferentially to imipramine or desiprami...

Research suggests no difference in efficacy be tween tricyclic and related antidepressant drugs. The British National Formulary (1993) lists 21 different antidepressants. Reviews of antidepres sant treatment suggest that choice of antidepres sant should be made on the grounds of previous drug exposure and side effect profiles of different drugs. At present there are no clinical guidelines to in...

Depression is often characterized by attentional biases toward negative items and away from positive items, which likely affects reward and punishment processing. Recent work reported that training attention away from negative stimuli reduced this bias and reduced depressive symptoms. However, the effect of attention training on subsequent learning has yet to be explored. In the current study, ...