Do adjunctive art therapies reduce symptomatology in schizophrenia? A meta-analysis

©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.BACKGROUND: Art therapies are advocated by national bodies, such as the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, to alleviate the negative symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The last decade has however, seen several new larger well-controlled trials published suggesting an update is timely.AIM: To asses randomised controlled trials (RCT) of art therapies for reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia - particularly negative symptoms.METHODS: Searches of PubMed and Scopus were conducted until May 2019 for RCTs examining the impact of art therapies on psychosis (positive, negative and total) symptoms in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Study quality was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Random effects meta-analyses were used to derive overall effect sizes. Moderator analyses were conducted using both meta-regression and categorical comparisons.RESULTS: We identified 133 articles, of which 9 RCTs involving 948 participants (475 assigned to art therapies and 473 controls) met our inclusion criteria. Using random effects models, we calculated pooled effect sizes (Hedges g) for end-of-trial symptomatic outcomes. Effect sizes both for total symptoms [ g = -0.27, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.60 to 0.05, k = 6] and for positive symptoms ( g = -0.10, 95%CI -0.35 to 0.15, k = 6) were non-significant; however, we did find significant reduction of negative symptoms ( g = -0.42, 95%CI -0.70 to -0.14, k = 9). Meta-regression revealed that negative symptom reduction was larger in trials with a greater proportion of women and in trials with younger patients. Crucially, the negative symptom reduction following art therapies was limited to lower quality trials and did not emerge in trials that used blind assessment of outcomes. CONCLUSION: This review presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of art therapies in schizophrenia in terms of both studies included and participant numbers. We found that art therapies did not significantly reduce total or positive symptoms. A "small" therapeutic effect was found for negative symptoms, but we show that the effect is not present in blind trials and may be subject to publication bias.Peer reviewe

Reflections on an intervention to motivate student learning through in-semester online assessment

In my experience engineering degree programmes are relatively demanding in terms of class contact hours which are typically up to a factor of two greater than many equivalent arts based courses. The predominant teaching strategy involves lectures and tutorials which usually take on the form of problem solving sessions and laboratory work. This commitment of time taken together with the necessary study required to complete assignments and coursework means that a consistently, steady work pattern is generally a prerequisite of success. In my role as a lecturer in engineering I have found that increasingly academic ability needs to be supplemented by motivation, effort and a structured work ethic. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence suggests that many students cannot manage their learning without significant levels of support, guidance and direction, particularly at levels 0 and 1. This may in part be attributed to the teaching methods that students have been exposed to earlier in their education which appear to be increasingly prescriptive. However, difficulties are often exacerbated by financial pressures which require an increasing proportion of the student body to undertake part-time work with unsocial working hours often disrupting attendance at classes. A vicious circle can ensue whereby inability to manage learning serves to de-motivate and lack of motivation in turn further reduces the ability to manage study, possibly leading ultimately to failure and/or withdrawal

Marketing an Established Institutional Repository: Marquette Libraries’ Research Stewardship Survey

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of Marquette University Libraries’ survey measuring faculty knowledge and attitudes about the institution’s repository, for the purposes of creating a marketing plan for the institutional repository (IR). Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a quantitative approach through the use of a survey. Findings Like many other endeavors to measure faculty engagement with the IR, the investigators discovered that faculty knowledge of the IR is not universal. Moreover, the perceived values and motivators for faculty use of the IR were also not surprising, with faculty viewing online dissemination of their work to be the most valuable feature offered by the IR, and furthering their own careers was the prime motivator. The importance of continual and varied methods of marketing is reaffirmed. Originality/value Whereas many articles on faculty recruitment for IRs agree on the importance of marketing, very few suggest specific strategies. The investigators make suggestions for continual and varied marketing methods based on their findings

A domain specific deficit for foodstuffs in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Original article can be found at: http://journals.cambridge.org/--Copyright Cambridge University PressAlthough some studies have reported a category specific naming deficit in Alzheimer’s patients (invariably for living things), others have failed to replicate this finding (Laws et al., in press). Inconsistencies may partly stem from the fact that category effects are hidden in group analyses because individual Alzheimer’s patients show category deficits in opposing directions, namely, some living and some nonliving (Gonnerman et al., 1997). Additionally, category effects may depend upon the specific composition of living things, such as the ratio of animals to fruits and vegetables, though this has never been explicitly examined. To examine this, we conducted a more detailed fractionation of living and nonliving categories for individual patients.Peer reviewe

Name relearning in elderly patients with schizophrenia: episodic and temporary, not semantic and permanent

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713659088--Copyright Informa / Taylor and FrancisIntroduction . Recent reports of lexical-semantic deficits in patients with schizophrenia (Laws, Al-Uzri, & Mortimer, 2000; Laws, McKenna, & Kondel, 1998) suggest that younger patients have problems accessing intact memories and older patients show apparent “loss” of the lexical-semantic memory representations themselves. Methods . Picture naming for everyday items was examined in a unique series of elderly patients with schizophrenia ( n = 10) with a mean illness duration of 45.5 years; and compared with that in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease ( n = 18) and elderly healthy controls ( n = 27). Naming consistency across time was used as an indicator of whether the schizophrenic patients had difficulty accessing representations or a loss of the representations themselves. Finally, we examined the ability of the schizophrenic patients to relearn the names of unnamed items across four weekly retraining sessions and to retain them at a one month follow-up. Results . The elderly schizophrenic patients were as anomic as patients with probable Alzheimer's disease. Consistency analysis revealed that the patients had storage deficits. Analysis of patient error types was consistent with a semantic deficit. Finally, the schizophrenic patients showed significant improvement with relearning, but this was not maintained at follow-up. Conclusions . Elderly patients with schizophrenia show a profound and stable anomia. Although name relearning induced some significant gains in naming, these were short-term and reflect episodic rather than semantic reinstatement of representations. Implications for cognitive remediation are discussed.Peer reviewe

Category deficits and paradoxical dissociations in Alzheimer's disease and Herpes Simplex Hencephalitis

Most studies examining category specificity are single-case studies of patients with living or non living deficits. Nevertheless, no explicit or agreed criteria exist for establishing category-specific deficits in single-cases regarding the type of analyses, whether to compare with healthy controls, the number of tasks, or the type of tasks. We examined to groups of patients with neurological pathology frequently accompained with impaired semantic memory (19 patients with Alzheimer disease and 15 with Herpes Simplex Encephalitis). Category knowledge was examined using three tasks (picture naming, naming-to-description and features verification). Both patients groups were compared with aged- and education- matched healthy controls. The profile of each patients was examined for consistency across tasks and across different analyses; however both prove to be inconsistent. One striking findings was the presence of a paradoxical dissociation ( i.e., patients who were impaired on living things on one task and non living things on another task). The findings have significant implication for how we determine category effects and, more generall for the methods use to document double dissociation across individual cases in this literature