Self-relevant disgust and self-harm urges in patients with borderline personality disorder and depression: a pilot study with a newly designed psychological challenge.

BACKGROUND: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common psychiatric condition associated with self-harm. Self-harm is poorly understood and there is currently no treatment for acute presentations with self-harm urges. OBJECTIVES: By using a new task (Self-relevant Task; SRT), to explore emotions related to one's own person (PERSON task) and body (BODY task), to study the correlations of these emotions, specifically disgust, with self-harm urge level changes, and to test the task's potential to be developed into an experimental model of self-harming for treatment trials. METHODS: 17 BPD patients, 27 major depressive disorder (MDD) patients, and 25 healthy volunteers performed the SRT. Emotion labels were extracted from task narratives and disgust and self-harm urge level changes measured by visual analogue scales. We used validated rating scales to measure symptom severity. RESULTS: The SRT was effective at inducing negative emotions and self-harm urge changes. Self-harm urge changes correlated with borderline symptom severity. Post-task disgust levels on the visual analogue scales were higher in BPD patients than in healthy controls in the PERSON task, and higher than in both control groups in the BODY task. Changes in disgust levels during the task were significantly greater in the patient groups. Post-task disgust levels or changes in disgust were not associated with self-harm urge changes (except the latter in MDD in the PERSON task), but self-harm urge changes and disgust (but no other emotion) narrative labels were on a whole sample level. CONCLUSION: Although associations with the analogue scale measures were not significant, self-disgust reported in the narrative of patients may be associated with a higher probability of self-harm urges. Further research with larger sample sizes is needed to confirm this relationship and to examine whether reducing self-disgust could reduce self-harm urges. The SRT was effective and safe, and could be standardized for experimental studies.This work was partly funded by a Core Award from the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust to the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (MRC Ref G1000183; WT Ref 093875/Z/10/Z). Sawsan Abdul-Hamid received a grant from the Evelyn Trust to help to cover the costs of her research placement with the research group. The Talisman Trust also supported the study with a grant.This is the final published version, which can also be found on the PLoS website here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0099696#ac

Vascular anomalies in a case of situs inversus

Situs inversus is a developmental condition in which the thoracic and abdominal organs fail to negotiate their normal migration patterns and the result is a mirror-image arrangement of these viscera. The literature provides evidence that individuals with this condition have a higher incidence of other congenital malformations (e.g. heart anomalies). Here we describe the dissection of a 71 yearold female cadaver with situs inversus, in which we discovered multiple anomalous vessels associated with the coeliac trunk directed toward the liver. In addition, we identified the inferior vena cava on the left side and a persistent supracardinal vein on the right, constituting a double inferior vena cava. Finally, we identified multiple abnormal venous channels associated with the sub-renal inferior vena cava. These vascular patterns are indeed a rare finding and have surgical implications but may indicate a higher incidence of vascular anomalies in cases of situs inversus

Non-tachyonic Scherk-Schwarz compactifications, cosmology and moduli stabilization

It is well-known that Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in string theory have a tachyon in the closed string spectrum appearing for a critical value of a compact radius. The tachyon can be removed by an appropriate orientifold projection in type II strings, giving rise to tachyon-free compactifications. We present explicit examples of this type in various dimensions, including six and four-dimensional chiral examples, with softly broken supersymmetry in the closed sector and non-BPS configurations in the open sector. These vacua are interesting frameworks for studying various cosmological issues. We discuss four-dimensional cosmological solutions and moduli stabilization triggered by nonperturbative effects like gaugino condensation on D-branes and fluxes.Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX; added reference

Triviality and the (Supersymmetric) See-Saw

For the D=5 Majorana neutrino mass operator to have a see-saw ultraviolet completion that is viable up to the Planck scale, the see-saw scale is bounded above due to triviality limits on the see-saw couplings. For supersymmetric see-saw models, with realistic neutrino mass textures, we compare constraints on the see-saw scale from triviality bounds, with those arising from experimental limits on induced charged-lepton flavour violation, for both the CMSSM and for models with split supersymmetry.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, references adde

On cosmologically induced hierarchies in string theory

We propose, within a perturbative string theory example, a cosmological way to generate a large hierarchy between the observed Planck mass and the fundamental string scale. Time evolution results in three large space dimensions, one additional dimension transverse to our world and five small internal dimensions with a very slow time evolution. The evolution of the string coupling and internal space generate a large Planck mass. However due to an exact compensation between the time evolution of the internal space and that of the string coupling, the gauge and Yukawa couplings on our Universe are time independent.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, interpretation of the solution clarified, typos corrected, references adde

Non anomalous U(1)_H gauge model of flavor

A non anomalous horizontal $U(1)_H$ gauge symmetry can be responsible for the fermion mass hierarchies of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. Imposing the consistency conditions for the absence of gauge anomalies yields the following results: i) unification of leptons and down-type quarks Yukawa couplings is allowed at most for two generations. ii) The $\mu$ term is necessarily somewhat below the supersymmetry breaking scale. iii) The determinant of the quark mass matrix vanishes, and there is no strong $CP$ problem. iv) The superpotential has accidental $B$ and $L$ symmetries. The prediction $m_{\rm up}=0$ allows for an unambiguous test of the model at low energy.Comment: 5 pages, RevTex. Title changed, minor modifications. Final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Gaugino Condensation in M-theory on S^1/Z_2

In the low energy limit of for M-theory on S^1/Z_2, we calculate the gaugino condensate potential in four dimensions using the background solutions due to Horava. We show that this potential is free of delta-function singularities and has the same form as the potential in the weakly coupled heterotic string. A general flux quantization rule for the three-form field of M-theory on S^1/Z_2 is given and checked in certain limiting cases. This rule is used to fix the free parameter in the potential originating from a zero mode of the form field. Finally, we calculate soft supersymmetry breaking terms. We find that corrections to the Kahler potential and the gauge kinetic function, which can be large in the strongly coupled region, contribute significantly to certain soft terms. In particular, for supersymmetry breaking in the T-modulus direction, the small values of gaugino masses and trilinear couplings that occur in the weakly coupled, large radius regime are enhanced to order m_3/2 in M-theory. The scalar soft masses remain small even, in the strong coupling M-theory limit.Comment: 20 pages, LATE

Lifetime of Stringy de Sitter Vacua

In this note we perform a synopsis of the life-times from vacuum decay of several de Sitter vacuum constructions in string/M-theory which have a single dS minimum arising from lifting a pre-existing AdS extremum and no other local minima existent after lifting. For these vacua the decay proceeds via a Coleman--De Luccia instanton towards the universal Minkowski minimum at infinite volume. This can be calculated using the thin--wall approximation, provided the cosmological constant of the local dS minimum is tuned sufficiently small. We compare the estimates for the different model classes and find them all stable in the sense of exponentially long life times as long as they have a very small cosmological constant and a scale of supersymmetry breaking > TeV.Comment: 1+16 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX, uses JHEP3 class, v2: references added, inclusion of an additional subclass of de Sitter vacu

On the Stability of the Classical Vacua in a Minimal SU(5) 5-D Supergravity Model

We consider a five-dimensional supergravity model with SU(5) gauge symmetry and the minimal field content. Studying the arising scalar potential we find that the gauging of the $U(1)_R$ symmetry of the five-dimensional supergravity causes instabilities. Lifting the instabilities the vacua are of Anti-de-Sitter type and SU(5) is broken along with supersymmetry. Keeping the $U(1)_R$ ungauged the potential has flat directions along which supersymmetry is unbroken.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure